Robert Cottrell

Research

During the fall of 2018, Professor Robert C. Cottrell will begin his thirty-sixth year of teaching at California State University, Chico, where he is a Professor of History and American Studies. Dr. Cottrell has offered over twenty different courses at CSUC, and additional ones in London; Puebla, Mexico; and Moscow, Russia. In London, he provided courses on Western Humanities since 1500 and the History of London; in Puebla, he delivered a class on Latin American Popular Culture; and in Moscow, while serving as the Nikolay V. Sivachev Distinguished Chair in American History and American Studies for the Fulbright Program, he presented a class on Twentieth Century American Radicalism. His areas of specialization include American intellectual, political, and cultural history, with a particular focus on reform and radicalism, and on popular culture, including sports. In addition, he regularly teaches a class on world history, covering the span of time from the British Revolution of the 1680s to the present. Dr. Cottrell is the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from the American Philosophical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Moscow State University, the Outstanding Professor Award at CSUC, the California State system-wide Wang Award for Social & Behavioral Sciences and Public Services, and initiation into the CSUC chapter of the Phi Eta Sigma National Honor Society.

Publications

Dr. Cottrell has written over twenty books covering an array of such subjects, including several biographies, a twentieth-century world history textbook, and smaller volumes on Vietnam, Palestine, Northern Ireland, the Czech Republic, South Africa, and London. His most recent works are Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Rise of America’s 1960s Counterculture and 1968: The Rise and Fall of the New American Revolution. His earlier works include The Best Pitcher in Baseball: The Life of Rube Foster, Negro League Giant (New York University Press, 2001), Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union (Columbia University Press, 2000), and Izzy: A Biography of I. F. Stone (Rutgers University Press, 1992). His articles have appeared in the Historian, Reviews in American History, the South Atlantic Quarterly, Mid-America, Journalism History, and the History Teacher. In addition to dozens of encyclopedia entries, he has published hundreds of book reviews for such journals as Choice, Library Journal, the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History, Journalism Quarterly, the History Teacher, the Journal of Sport History, History, and Chronicles of Oklahoma. Dr. Cottrell is presently completing a new book, The American Left: From the Wobblies to Black Lives Matter.