A Bit About Me

I figured, what's a blog without a explanation of the person behind the words?  So here's a bit about me.

I began my work in history at Santa Barbara, in the Cold War Studies department around 2006.  Prior to my experiences at UCSB, I took a bulk of history courses at Santa Barbara's City College (SBCC) where I earned enough credits to qualify for California's transfer system into the UC.  My first period of historical study was not very heavily focused; the general basics of history:  Western Civilization, World Civilization, European History, American History.  It wasn't until I got into UCSB and focused myself on the Cold War and the 20th Century that I came to be what I considered at the time a historian of Communism.

Working with Dr. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and Dr. Harold Marcuse (yes, the one related to the famous Herbert Marcuse), I honed my focus on the political and social dimensions of world history within the framework of the Cold War and the post-WWII era.  For my final project, I was able to get out of the typical "senior thesis" by assisting Dr. Marcuse in collecting the oral history of the oldest-living descendant of a correspondent with Marx, a woman by the name of Vera Feldmann.  Feldmann's maiden name was Dietzgen, extending from her great-grandfather, Joseph Dietzgen.  Dietzgen, and his son Eugene, were dedicated Marxists with lots of literature collected by Feldmann over the years.  Eugene even started a corporation which is still in existence today, the Eugene Drafting Corporation.  By collecting Feldmann's documents and her life story through a series of oral history interviews, I set myself down the path of understanding the history of individuals through their own words and stories.

My first experience of graduate school was at CSU Pomona, where I got exposed to a much different atmosphere of history.  For one, the CSU History department was less dedicated to European and World history than they were to American and transnational histories.  As such, my adviser focused my work on Communist history into the United States.  This drew me into the stories and lives of American Communists, as well as the organizations that sprung life into the socialist movement in the United States.  Within just a few months of dedicating myself to the documents, testimonies, and romanticized stories of the past, I found the field of history that made me feel at home.  The History of American Communism was my calling.  I wrote my Master's Thesis during the Fall and Winter of 2009/2010 on the role of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) in transforming the agricultural industry during the Great Depression.  One of the principal pieces I found in my research was the CPUSA's work in hiring lawyers in California to fight against discrimination and anti-Union policies enacted by the state's largest cooperative of agricultural growers and distributors.  It was specifically the CPUSA that refused to give up in the face of a daunting and nearly impossible task; defeating a quasi-monopoly of banking and land-owning interest groups.  Using the oral testimonies of Dorothy Ray Healey and Emma Tenyuaca, the CPUSA's principal organizers for the Party's United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), I showed how these individuals fought for the rights and living standards of American workers in the midst of the Depression.

After my Master's I spent time working on a personal project which has since become dear to me.  Contacting individuals in the Southern California Communist Party, I was able to meet with organizers and leaders to propose my intent to collect as many oral histories of living Party members as possible.  The proposal was met with enthusiasm and praise, and ever since the CPUSA has been a willing and helpful participant in what I have begun calling the CPUSA Oral History Project.  The project's overall scope is simple:  Collect oral history testimonies of living CPUSA members, young and old.  The purpose is also simple:  To expand on the existing primary sources available on CPUSA and American Communist history.  The precise reason for engaging in the project, however, is more specific and subjective.  One of the biggest obstacles I faced while conducting my research for my Master's Thesis was the overwhelmingly limited amount of sourcework that focused on the aspect of the CPUSA I desired to understand:  The Party's rank-and-file; the everyday members; the everyday organizers; the people of the Party. 

To date, and you can see this in the first post made for the blog, nearly all CPUSA scholarship--and indeed scholarship on American Communism in general--focused on the upper tiers of the Party, and it's connections and reliance on Soviet doctrine, as the sole definition of the subject as a whole.  For too long the history of American Communism was told through the lens of the Party's elite; forcing scholars and everyday citizens to understand the complex and diverse nature of a movement through the actions and words of a small minority.  This drove me to expand the sources available, and it's a project I continue still to this day.

After working on the project personally--all financed by myself as well--I collected 11 oral histories, fully transcribed.  But I had nothing to do with them; no where to go; no where to publish.  So I did what was recommended to my by an off-campus adviser at UC Irvine (and current president of the American Historical Association), Dr. Vicki Ruiz, and I applied to PhD programs across the country.  After getting accepted to Wayne State, Dr. Ruiz felt it was the best choice for my field of scholarship and would put me right in the heart of the CPUSA's historical struggle.  I moved to Michigan in September of 2013, where I began to work and continue developing my research.

Today I am right where I left off, living in Michigan, working on my PhD, and hoping to utilize the oral histories (while collecting more) to complete my dissertation on the complete history of American Communism.