Even in death, the late Dr. Ronald Takaki continues to be a master teacher.
His best-selling books appear on syllabi across the country every semester.
And thanks to technology, many of his riveting lectures and interviews have been uploaded to YouTube, where a new generation of students is encountering Takaki for the first time.
“He was just a brilliant social historian who gave us some important concepts and ideas, such as his concept of the founding colonists viewing themselves as ‘virtuous republicans’ who had the right to exploit and oppress ‘unvirtuous’ peoples of color everywhere,” says Dr. Joe Feagin, the Ella C. McFadden Professor in Sociology at Texas A&M University. “He was a superstar scholar.”
Though Feagin did not personally know Takaki, for decades he’s enthusiastically embraced his work, which includes best-selling classics, such as Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America and Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II.
Dr. Marybeth Gasman, a professor of higher education and director of the Center for Minority Serving Institutions at the University of Pennsylvania, has also kept Takaki’s scholarship handy.
“For years, I have used Ronald Takaki’s research to inform my work and my teaching of historical and contemporary issues around race, ethnicity, diversity and multiculturalism,” says Gasman, an expert on historically Black colleges and universities. “His work was profound, far-reaching, inclusive, and stretched our understanding of racial and ethnic differences and helped us build on our commonalities.”
