The Baker-Nord Distinguished Faculty Lecture – Thirty Four Miles from Kent State: CWRU and the Vietnam War

2016 CLEVELAND HUMANITIES FESTIVAL: REMEMBERING WAR

Event Photo

While not Berkeley or Columbia, Case Western Reserve University became a visible part of American campus unrest in May 1970 when students blocked traffic on Euclid Avenue in the wake of the shootings at nearby Kent State University.  This incident and the student strike that followed serve as the center points of what some remember as a brief campus flirtation with radical protest.   Yet, the story of change and protest at CWRU is much deeper.   In this presentation John Grabowski, CWRU’s Krieger-Mueller Joint Professor in History and Historian and Senior Vice President for Research and Publications at the Western Reserve Historical Society, examines what happened at CWRU in the 1960s and early 1970s during the time of an unpopular war, a recent federation of two academic traditions, and unrest, violence, and poverty in the neighborhoods adjacent to the campus.

Free and open to the public.


About the Speaker:

John J. Grabowski

Professor John J. Grabowski’s interests and research span the fields of public and academic history. He specializes in the areas of immigration and ethnicity; local (Cleveland) urban history;and public history, particularly the fields of archives and museums. He holds a joint appointment with the Department of History at CWRU and the Western Reserve Historical Society, where he serves as Historian and Senior Vice President for Research and Publications. In addition to teaching at the department he also oversees the World Wide Web edition of The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History/Dictionary of Cleveland Biography, a joint project of Case Western Reserve University and the Western Reserve Historical Society.


Additional Information:

John Grabowski’s faculty page

Encyclopedia of Cleveland History’s Vietnam War page

Listen to an interview with John Grabowski


Event Co-Sponsor:

Cleveland History Center of the Western Reserve Historical Society