The Global Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. Simon's work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
About Simon
Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) United States History
Exchange Co-ordinator, School of Society and Culture
Teaching
My teaching concentrates on the United States. I teach the first year core module entitled America from Settlement to Empire (HIS4002) which examines American history from the arrival of Columbus to the end of the Spanish-American War. This module introduces students to the key themes in the first two hundred years of European settlement in what would become the United States and demonstrates how the country has been shaped by settlement, revolution, slavery, civil war, westward expansion and imperialism.
My second year module, America Since 1900 continues from where HIST406 left off, examining the key moments in the United States’ rise to superpower status, analysing the Progressive Era, the New Deal, two world wars, the Cold War, Vietnam, Watergate and America's role in the post-Cold War World.
I also periodically offer American Popular Culture since 1945, a second year module using various forms of mass culture to understand the United States. Thus, for example, we look at McCarthyism through film, the impact of television on the democratic process, black history via music and employ sources as diverse as comic books and political satire as well as more traditional historical texts, to show how culture operates in its political and historical context.
In the third year I ordinarily offer two modules on the civil rights movement. The first deals with the period from 1890 to 1954 and the second from 1954 to 1970, examining the roots of the modern civil rights struggle, through key figures such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey and Walter White, and key events such as Scottsboro, the Great Depression, the anti-lynching campaign, WWI and WWII and the Cold War.
The second module, The Civil Rights Movement, deals with the more familiar territory beginning with the Brown decision of 1954 and concluding in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King in 1968. In this module we examine the roles of ordinary people, leaders such as King and Malcolm X, important lesser known figures, notably women such as Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, and those who opposed civil rights such as governors Faubus, Barnett and Wallace.
