Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: At the close of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century there was a major clash of ideas about how to improve the status of black Americans between the Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois. Booker T. represented plans that called for pursuing that equality based upon white acceptance. W.E.B. DuBois in his Souls Of Black Folk challenged Booker T's leadership by calling for agitation and Protest. As the 20th Century closed and the 21st century begins, we find similar set of oppositional ideas between a black right wing agenda that supports dismantling a longstanding civil rights agenda and progressive forces that seek to enhance the civil rights of blacks. This presentation provides an analysis to the similarities and differences in these two periods.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In 1976 the provincial parliament in Québec ratified the Charter of the French Language, or La Loi 101. The Charter is a collection of linguistic laws meant to promote the French language in Québec, and limit the development of other languages, primarily English. Since its ratification, supporters of the Charter have called it a protection of “French-Canadian identity.” The Charter has also come under scrutiny from Anglophones (English speakers) and Allophones (non-native English or French speakers) in Québec. The following analyzes one group of Allophones, Chinese-Canadians, in Québec’s largest city, Montréal. In particular, this analysis examines how the Chinese-Canadian community in Montréal perceives their self-identity as threatened by the Charter of the French Language.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: The psychologist Kenneth Bancroft Clark (1914-2005) is known to historians as an activist-intellectual at the heart of the postwar liberal establishment. Remembered principally for his expert testimony cited by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954—that school segregation generated feelings of inferiority and personality damage in black children—Clark is described by Taylor Branch as the “reigning academic” of the civil rights movement. Clark was the first African-American to receive a doctorate in psychology from Columbia University in 1942; became a tenured professor at the City College of New York; gave testimony to courts, White House Conferences and government commissions; received federal grants for community projects; and befriended men and women of power. His election to the presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1971 underlines, for historians, Clark’s status as a pillar of the liberal establishment. This paper, however, will offer an alternative narrative of Clark’s activism and thought in the 1960s that uncovers his incremental radicalisation: his formulation of community psychiatry according to a highly politicised conception of mental health; the many points of overlap between his own blueprint for social change in Harlem and the demands of the black power movement; and, finally, the controversy which arose in 1971 concerning his presidency of the American Psychological Association.

Publication Type: Paper (prepared oral presentation)
Abstract: Fred Greenstein, in The Presidential Difference (2004), writes that of all the evaluative criteria that he applies to U.S. presidents, the most important is that of emotional intelligence. This refers to the president's psychological health. Presidents who suffer from severe psychological perturbations inevitably see their presidencies negatively impacted and perhaps even turn to ashes.

This paper proposal centers on the emotional intelligence of three U.S. presidents: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Calvin Coolidge. The evidence suggests strongly that all three were psychologically handicapped and that their presidencies suffered greatly as a result. Both Johnson and Nixon exhibited behavioral characteristics that conform to the American Psychological Association's description of a paranoid personality disorder. Their suspiciousness, siege mentality, overpersonalization of issues and mistrust were pervasive and debilitating. As a result, both of their presidencies were damaged - and one even ended by resignation.

The case of Calvin Coolidge is quite different but just as dramatic. As will be discussed here, Coolidge demonstrated after July, 1924 all the symptoms of clinical depression as specified by the American Psychological Association after the sudden death of his 16 year-old son. He withdrew from politics and from his own Administration and lost himself in unending grief. The result for both the president and the country was severe.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: "Large Ideas Which Never Got Down to Earth or Finance": W.E. B. Du Bois, carter G. Woodson & the Encyclopedia Africana, 1909-1963