Faculty
Michael Cassella-Blackburn received a B.A in History from the University of Oregon, his M.A. in History from the University of Kansas, and his Ph.D. in History from Syracuse University. His specialty is Diplomatic History.
My interests are rather broad. For my M.A. and Ph.D., I was largely concerned with ideological problems, in particular, what Americans and Soviets encountered as they worked through their relationship during the early development of the Soviet Union. I teach Labor Movements one a year and it matches up quite well with my interests in ideologies, such as Liberalism, Socialism, and Anarchism, which were the driving ideological forces behind collectivism. I also taught about/and presented a couple of papers on Native Americans from the Olympic Peninsula as I find their travails and successes so influential in my teaching of Pacific Northwest History and American History as a whole.
I am working on Sino-Soviet-American relations from 1944-1960. After my first work, The Donkey, the Carrot, and the Club: William C. Bullitt and Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1948 (2004), I became infatuated with how fear and conspiracy operated, was used, or influenced the public and policy makers. In my second book, Radical Anti-Communism in American Politics after World War II: William C. Bullitt and the Campaign to Save China, 1945-1950 (2018), I looked at how William C. Bullitt, the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union, joined with the China Lobby and shifted his focus after World War II east to China and its turn toward Soviet Communism. The China Lobby became one of the most important advocates for McCarthyism’s anti-communism. My most recent work with the help of Darcie Langone Hodgkins, expanded on the concept of using fear and conspiracy to change foreign policies. We looked at the U.S., China, the Soviet Union, North and South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines) with a more interdisciplinary approach using psychology and sociology. We wanted to understand better political fear and how and why people turn to conspiracies. We published Diplomatic Blackhole: Conspiracy and Political Fear in Mid-20th Century America in August 2022.