Brown, Cynthia Stokes 1938- (Cynthia Brown)

PERSONAL:

Born March 20, 1938, in Madisonville, KY; daughter of Stanley Thomas and Louise Elizabeth Stokes; married James R. Brown, June 22, 1961 (divorced, 1986); married Jack B. Robbins, June 18, 1989; children: Erik, Ivor; (stepchildren) Deborah, Peter, Daniel. Education: Duke University, B.A., 1960; Johns Hopkins University, M.A.T., 1961, Ph.D., 1964. Hobbies and other interests: Travel, grandchildren, gardening, reading, yoga, and knitting.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Berkeley, CA. Office—Dominican University of California, History Department, 50 Acacia Ave., San Rafael, CA 94901. E-mail—cbcynthia@earthlink.net.

CAREER:

Educator, historian, and writer. Eastern High School, Baltimore, MD, 1961-63; University without Walls, Berkeley, CA, codirector of elementary credential program, 1972-75; Antioch College West, San Francisco, CA, faculty member, 1980-82; Dominican College, San Rafael, CA, director of secondary credential program, 1982-94, from associate to professor to professor emerita and adjunct professor in history program, 1994—.

MEMBER:

American Association of University Women (fellow, 1963-64), American Association of University Professors, National Council for Social Studies, California World History Association, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS:

American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, 1987, for Ready from Within; Woodrow Wilson Foundation, honorary fellow, 1963-64.

WRITINGS:

Literacy in 30 Hours: Paulo Freire's Process in North East Brazil, Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative (London, England), 1975.

Alexander Meiklejohn: Teacher of Freedom, Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute (Berkeley, CA), 1981.

(Editor and author of introduction) Septima Poinsette Clark, Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement, Wild Trees Press (Navarro, CA), 1986.

Like It Was: A Complete Guide to Writing Oral History, Teachers & Writers Collaborative (New York, NY), 1988.

(With Karen Jorgensen) New Faces in Our Schools: Student-Generated Solutions to Ethnic Conflict, Zellerbach Family Fund (San Francisco, CA), 1992.

Connecting with the Past: History Workshop in Middle and High Schools, Heinemann (Portsmouth, NH), 1994.

Refusing Racism: White Allies and the Struggle for Civil Rights, Teachers College Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present, New Press (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to books, including an essay for She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, by Herbert Kohl, New Press (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

A retired professor of education and history, Cynthia Stokes Brown is the author of several book focusing on education, history, and biography. Her 1981 book Alexander Meiklejohn: Teacher of Freedom is a biography of the philosopher and free-speech advocate who served as president of two prestigious universities. As the editor of Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement, which won the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award, the author presents Clark's first-person narrative of her life in the context of the civil rights movement. Clark was an African American educator who was dismissed from her public school teaching post in South Carolina in 1956 for refusing to disavow her membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She went on to help set up Citizenship Schools throughout the South. These schools helped teach African American adults to learn to read and write and to prepare them to vote.

After writing Like It Was: A Complete Guide to Writing Oral History, Brown wrote New Faces in Our Schools: Student-Generated Solutions to Ethnic Conflict with Karen Jorgensen. This curriculum guide for secondary-school teachers addresses various issues that cause interethnic tension and conflict and highlights them through dialogue. The authors' goal is to help teachers help students understand the origins of their attitudes toward other groups. The book addresses topics such as new immigrants and refugees and how refugees face difficulties in adjusting to life in a new community.

In her book Refusing Racism: White Allies and the Struggle for Civil Rights, Brown provides a biography of four prominent white activists in the area of civil rights: Virginia Foster Durr, J. Waties Waring, Anne McCarty Braden, and Herbert R. Kohl. An Alabamian from a privileged background, Durr worked on rescinding the poll tax in southern states. Waring was a federal judge who led the early judicial fight for desegregation. Braden focused on fairness for blacks concerning education and housing, while Kohl fought racism in public schools and served as editor for the autobiography of Myles Horton, the founder of the Highlander Folk School, a radical educational institute committed to civil rights.

"Given the zigzag nature of Horton's approach, I appreciated Refusing Racism's clear point of inquiry: what is it that has led some whites to be able and pivotal participants in the struggle against racism?" wrote Chris Green in the Radical Teacher. "As a frame for the book, Brown quickly and clearly lays out the connection between racism in the United States and its connection to the development of American capital and imperialism." Green went on to write: "Brown undertakes her work with humility—she carefully asks how whites can be part of the struggle rather than co-opt it."

In her 2007 book Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present, the author provides a look at the history of the earth from the time of the Big Bang through the development of the first life on Earth, the creation of civilization, and onward to the twenty-first century as the author examines a planet inhabited by 6.1 billion people. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the book "world history on a grand scale, in just over 300 pages." Covering everything from prehistoric geology, human evolution, and the agrarian age to the Black Death, the voyages of Columbus, and global warming, the author considers a wide range of topics as she tells the earth's history. For example, she discusses cell formation, population growth, and even illiteracy. In her book, the author describes major civilizations and peoples, such as the Mongols and Vikings in Asia and Europe and the Mayans and Aztecs in the Americas. She also provides a history of the Islamic Empire.

In addition, Brown's history of the earth examines topics that typically are not discussed in history books. For example, she writes about the gold rush that occurred after Columbus discovered America. She also delves into how everything from chocolate to chili peppers affected Europeans and provides a host of significant data concerning the earth, such as the fact that the earth's sun has burned half of its expected lifetime and that 99.9 percent of all species that lived throughout the earth's history have become extinct. "We are now able to think in scientific terms about the timescales of the universe we are part of—its beginning, middle, and end—and thus with current thinking we are able to put the story of our planet into its larger context," the author noted in an article on the Dominican College Web site.

In a review of Big History in Publishers Weekly, a contributor noted: "While much of the story is familiar, Brown's writing lucidly knits each topic into a vast historical mosaic." Another reviewer, writing in Reference & Research Books News, referred to the book as "a remarkable treatment of complexity" and also noted that the author accomplishes her goal "without a hint of smugness."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Book Report, November-December, 1995, Augie E. Beasley, review of Connecting with the Past: History Workshop in Middle and High Schools, p. 53.

History Magazine, December, 2007, review of Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present, p. 52.

Journal of Southern History, May, 1991, Stephanie Shaw, review of Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement, p. 358.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2007, review of Big History.

Library Journal, February 1, 1989, Donald W. Maxwell, review of Like It Was: A Complete Guide to Writing Oral History, p. 72.

Publishers Weekly, October 10, 1986, John Mutter, review of Ready from Within, p. 83; July 9, 2007, review of Big History, p. 43.

Radical Teacher, winter, 2004, Chris Green, "Educating for Activism in the Radical South," includes review of Refusing Racism: White Allies and the Struggle for Civil Rights, p. 19.

Reference & Research Book News, November, 2007, review of Big History.

School Library Journal, June, 1989, Keddy Outlaw, review of Like It Was, p. 134.

ONLINE

Dominican University,http://www.dominican.edu/ (October 19, 2007), "Dominican Professor Examines Big History"; (March 28, 2008), faculty profile of author.

Heinemann Books,http://books.heinemann.com/ (March 28, 2008), brief profile of author.

New Press,http://www.thenewpress.com/ (March 28, 2008), brief profile of author.