This page links to material that I've written and edited in the past. Click on the title of a section to go to the document or documents described. In 1998 Addison Wesley Longman published Student Protest:
The Sixties and After, a collection of essays edited by Gerard
DeGroot. I contributed the second chapter of the book, a background
piece on My grandfather, Bill Johnston, was a newspaperman. He got his start as a reporter and editor for the University of Idaho's student newspaper, the Argonaut, and then worked for the Associated Press for several years after graduation. In 1950 he was hired as the editor of the Lewiston Morning Tribune, northern Idaho's largest daily newspaper, a position he held for well over a decade. After leaving the Trib, he taught journalism at the University of Washington until his retirement. He died in 1990. Over the last few years, I've collected some of BJ's writings in several small volumes that have been distributed to his---our---family and friends. A few short pieces from those collections are presented here. A Brief History of NSA and USSA My two first efforts at historical writing---undertaken while I was an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Binghamton---were a biographical sketch of civil rights martyr Bill Moore, published in The Student Advocate, a campus newspaper I edited, and an essay on the history of the National Student Association and its successor, the United States Student Association, distributed to the delegates at USSA's annual conference. The Bill Moore piece eventually served as the impetus for my decision to pursue graduate study, and the biographical project that it catalyzed is still ongoing. The NSA-USSA project would become my dissertation topic. I have remained involved in USSA as an alumnus, and have revised that original history essay every few years in light of my continuing research into the organization's past. The essay is still distributed to USSA's delegates every summer, and can be read at the USSA website by clicking on the link above. (The version currently posted dates from the summer of 2000, and is overdue for a new round of revisions.) The National Student Association: Documents In 1997, the US National Student Association (known as the United States Student Association since 1978) celebrated its 50th anniversary with a conference and reunion at the site of its founding convention, the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I mounted an exhibit of documents from NSA's first three decades at that conference. Sometime in the future, I'll scan some of those documents in, and make them available---along with their original annotations---at the link above. |
American student organizing before
1960. The excerpt linked above consists of the introduction and
conclusion of the chapter.