Online Content Session – Era Seven: U.S. and the World

Elaine Tyler May is Regents Professor Emerita of American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota.  She is past president of the Organization of American Historians, and past president of the American Studies Association.  Her books include  Fortress America: How We Embraced Fear and Abandoned Democracy (2017);  America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (2010); Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988, newest edition 2017); Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (1997); Pushing the Limits: American Women, 1940-1961 (1996); and Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (1980). She has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Ms., Daily Beast, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, among others. She is a recent recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation. 

Hiromi Mizuno is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She teaches courses on Modern Japan, Global Politics of Hunger, Global History of WWII. She is an intellectual and cultural historian whose research interests include history of science and technology, the Japanese empire, Cold-War Asia, agricultural modernization, and environmental history. 

Jimmy Patiño is Associate Professor of Chicano and Latino Studies at the University of Minnesota. His work examines how marginalized communities imagine and enact democratic practices amid global capitalism, focusing on Mexican-origin and broader Latino/a/x communities at the U.S.–Mexico border and in major U.S. cities. His book Raza Sí, Migra No: Chicano Movement Struggles for Immigrant Rights in San Diego shows how generations of Mexican-origin activists confronted the crisis over the “illegal alien” by building community across differences in citizenship and national affiliation. Centering San Diego as both an urban and border space, his work highlights challenges to deportation-oriented policies from 1968 to 1986 through the lens of Chicano self-determination. He is currently developing new projects on solidarity across African American, Chicana/o/x, and Puerto Rican movements, exploring how regional contexts shaped Black-Brown/Afro-Latinx diasporic alliances and revolutionary thought across the Midwest, Texas, California, and New York. His broader research and teaching interests include Comparative Ethnic Studies, Chicano/a-Latino/a History, diaspora, transnationalism, borderlands, social movements, political mobilization, and Cultural Studies.