Book talk at USC, Wednesday, Dec. 10

My next book event is Wednesday, December 10, at the University of Southern California Law School, from 12:00 noon to 1:20 p.m. in the Faculty Lounge (rm 433). Directions are here. Here's the announcement:

Exporting American Dreams tells the story of Thurgood Marshall's journey to Africa, a journey which began in 1960 when Kenyan independence leaders asked him to help write their constitution. In Kenya, Marshall could become something he could not be in his own country: a black man helping to found a nation. He became friends with Kenyan leaders Tom Mboya and Jomo Kenyatta, serving as advisor to the Kenyans, who needed to demonstrate to Great Britain and to the world that they would treat minority races (whites and Asians) fairly once Africans took power. He crafted a bill of rights, aiding constitutional negotiations that helped enable peaceful regime change, rather than violent resistance. Exporting American Dreams traces the movement of Kenyan history from the boundless possibility and hope of independence to the rise to power of the repressive regime of Daniel arap Moi, and connects that story to the movement American path from civil rights reform to the national institutional and cultural rejection of racial transformation. The stories parallel each other in their tragic arcs, particularly in the assassinations of movement visionaries Martin Luther King, Jr. on the balcony of a Memphis hotel in 1968 and Tom Mboya on the streets of Nairobi in 1969. Professor Dudziak puts the stories into dialogue with each other through the person of Thurgood Marshall, who bridged historic events in both nations through his own struggles to facilitate the triumph of the rule of law and the ideal of democratic governance with guarantees for full participation and protection of minority rights.

Mary Dudziak is the Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science at USC. She received her A.B. from the University of California, Berkeley, and her J.D., M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Prior to joining USC Law School in 1998, she was a law clerk for Judge Sam J. Ervin, III, of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and a professor of law and history at the University of Iowa. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Society for Legal History and the Law and Society Association’s program committee. She also serves as a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, and has been a member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

In addition to Exporting American Dreams, Professor Dudziak is the author of Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2000); editor of September 11 in History: A Watershed Moment? (Duke University Press, 2003); and co-editor (with Leti Volpp) of Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders, a special issue of American Quarterly (September 2005), reissued by Johns Hopkins University Press in March 2006. Her articles on civil rights history and 20th-century constitutional history have appeared in numerous law reviews and other journals. Her current projects include How War Made America: A 20th Century History, under contract with Oxford University Press. She founded the Legal History Blog and contributes to Balkinization.