Bill Billingsley

B.A. University of North Carolina at Wilmington
M.A., Ph.D. University of California, Irvine


Research Interests
-Post-1945 U.S. Culture and Politics
-U.S. Race Relations: "Jim Crow" to Civil Rights
-American Anticommunism
-Cold War Culture and Higher Education


Courses Taught
Hst 4: World History to 1500
Hst 5: World History since 1500
Hst 16: U.S. to 1865
Hst 17: U.S. since 1865
Hst 19: U.S. 1945 to present
Hst 22: Basic U.S. History

Affiliations
Organization of American Historians
American Historical Association
Southern Historical Association
World History Association
Community College Association of California
Faculty Association of California Community Colleges

Selected Publications and Presentations
Communists on Campus: Race, Politics, and the Public University in Sixties North Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press)

"End Poverty in California" in Robert S. McElvaine, ed. The Encyclopedia of the Great Depression (New York: MacMillan)

"Freeing the University: New Left Activism in a New South Community, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1961-1970" at the Interdisciplinary Conference "Toward a History of the 1960s," University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin

"From Red to Black: Two Episodes in the Anti-Communist Career of Jesse Helms" at the International Conference on the History of Anti-Communism and the U.S., Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

"The New Left in the New South: SDS, SSOC, and the Vision of a Democratic South" at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Atlanta, Georgia

Personal
My formal training and work as a practicing historian has been centered at the confluences of class, race, and culture in American history, especially the post-World War II period. It involves an array of ideas and interests--class dynamics, race relations, political culture, Cold War--framed both by my personal background and developments within the larger society. I was born into a working class family and grew up in a social setting defined sharply by class and racial hierarchies. These experiences often intersected and were instrumental in shaping my worldview intellectually, socially, and politically. I came of age in the American South and, following college and a brief teaching stint in the public schools, relocated to Southern California to undertake graduate study in history. The result of that study was a Ph.D. dissertation that was revised into my first book, Communists on Campus: Race, Politics, and the Public University in Sixties North Carolina. My future research agenda includes an examination of the class dimensions of the politics attending racial desegregation, particularly in the public schools; and the impact of cold war ideology and politics upon education in California from 1947 to 1965.

Please see the website for sample syllabi and additional information about the content, style, and goals of the courses that I offer at Saddleback.