Dr. Christopher J Levesque

The Star Trek franchise’s premise, in which explorers “boldly go where no one has gone before” while keeping the peace among disparate peoples, speaks to a Kennedy-era idealism about the future. The United Federation of Planets is modeled on the United Nations, with governing bodies like the Supreme Assembly and the Federation Council; its charter defines its goal as the universal pursuit of peace.

Most of the focus on activism among American college students during the 1960s focuses on either the Civil Rights Movement, or anti-war activism at large universities in the west, mid-west, or north. More recent scholarship has shed light on the more limited activism of students at colleges and universities in the South, who often faced more immediate concerns of the consequences of protest. However, with the exceptions of student activities at Florida State University and the University of Florida, the activism of students at other Florida institutions of higher education are still understudied. Across the state, Florida students engaged in their own protests focused on dress codes, integration, dormitory visitation, free speech, the Vietnam War, culminating with marches and sit-ins after the Kent State Massacre. Students at small institutions like Florida Presbyterian often formed a vanguard of Florida student activism, a trend which eventually included protests at Miami-Dade Community College focused on the Iran-Hostage Crisis of 1979.

Library staff developed a project to reclassify the Curriculum Materials Collection of a specialty library on the campus of a regional comprehensive university from its custom classification system derived from those developed during the 1960s and 1970s to Dewey Decimal Classification. While this system had the advantage of browsability for patrons who were familiar with previous use, its unusual nature made training patrons and staff challenging. The transition to Dewey is expected to ease training and use, enhance resource sharing, and allow student teachers to transfer their library skills to their new schools.

Excerpt - The old U.S. Army aphorism “If the army wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one” is a common refrain in the chapters of this edited collection, but the contributors do not limit themselves to this traditional understanding of how the military regulated the sexual relations of service members. Managing Sex analyzes how the U.S. military regulates the sexual lives of service members and their families, from attempts to control venereal disease to women's service in the military and relaxation of prohibitions on service by members of the LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer plus) community. Chapters on sexual violence highlight the challenges of integrating women into the armed forces and managing relations with local communities.

In my United States and World History survey courses, many students come at the topic of colonization during the 19th and 20th with the assumption that Europeans and Americans sought to bring the advantages of “civilization” to people in African and Asia. Even if students acknowledge Western powers sought to dominate colonized peoples to gain new markets or sources of raw materials, they often argue that colonizers brought “benefits” like roads, railroads, finished goods, education systems, and Christian missionaries. To counter this learned narrative, I approach imperialism and colonialism in multiple modules to show the continuity of the concepts involved as Europeans built these systems and how colonized people resisted their oppressors. This paper will demonstrate how instructors can use primary sources created by colonizers and colonized understood imperial projects in asynchronous online courses to help students develop a more nuanced understanding of colonization and decolonization through instructor and student-led discussions. It will also discuss ways in which educational technology can create more dynamic student interactions with the materials and each other as they explore European justifications for imperialism, the development of nationalist movements in Africa and Asia, and the methods of anti-colonial movements between 1914-1939. Connecting these ideas with the outbreak of the World Wars during the 20th century and the ways in which the United States and Soviet Union used, and were used by, peoples involved in anti-colonial struggles demonstrate how these concepts affected even those not living in colonial settings.