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1939- 2009. Ronald TaKaKi. Ronald Takaki - Biography. Born in a low income area in Oahu, Hawai’i, he is the grandson of Japanese immigrants who worked on a sugar plantation. He attended the college of Wooster in Wooster ,Ohio after a teacher wrote him a recommendation to the college.
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1939- 2009 Ronald TaKaKi
Ronald Takaki - Biography • Born in a low income area in Oahu, Hawai’i, he is the grandson of Japanese immigrants who worked on a sugar plantation. • He attended the college of Wooster in Wooster ,Ohio after a teacher wrote him a recommendation to the college. • At Wooster he gained a sense of his ethnic identity as 1 of 2 Asian American Students at the college. He received his bachelors degree in history in 1961. • Takaki suffered from multiple sclerosis for twenty years until 2009 when he committed suicide according to his son.
Academics • Takaki attended graduate school at the University of California; where he earned his masters in 1962. • He received his PhD in American history from Berkeley in 1967. • His dissertation was on American slavery, and the rationale for slavery. • Which influenced his first published work A Pro-slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade in 1971.
Career • Takaki taught the first black history course at UCLA. • While at UCLA he helped found the UCLA Centers for African-American, Asian-American, Chicano, and Native-American Studies • In 1972, he accepted a teaching position at Berkeley where his general survey course, "Racial Inequality in America: a Comparative Perspective," led the development of an undergraduate ethnic studies major and an ethnic studies Ph.D. program. • He taught at Berkeley for thirty years until his death.
Career • He was often considered the father of multicultural studies. • Takaki was often a guest lecturer around the world and the most in demand professor. • In 1987, Takaki was invited to Armenia by the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union where he represented a paper comparing race and ethnicity in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. In 1990, he was invited to Moscow by the Soviet Academy of Sciences to give a paper on the impact of the Cold War on racial and ethnic conflicts.
Published Works • 1971 -- A Pro-slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade. • 1978 -- Iron cages: race and culture in nineteenth-century America. • 1984 -- Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835-1920. • 1989 -- Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. • 1993 -- Violence in the Black Imagination: Essays and Documents. • 1993 -- A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. • 1994 -- Issei and Nisei: The Settling of Japanese America, with Rebecca Steoff. • 1994 -- From the Land of Morning Calm: The Koreans in America. • 1994 -- From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America. • 1994 -- Ethnic Islands: The Emergence of Urban Chinese America. • 1995 -- Lives of Notable Asian Americans: Business, Politics, Science with Angelo Ragaza. • 1995 -- India in the West: South Asians in America. • 1995 -- Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb. • 2001 -- Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II. • 2002 -- Debating Diversity: Clashing Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America.
Honors • Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award, 2002. • Asia Pacific Council, Lifetime Achievement Award, 2002. • Society of American Historians (SAH), 1995. • Cornell University, Messenger Lecturer, 1993. • Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS), Lifetime Achievement Award, 2009.
