KEEPING UP WITH FORMER FACULTY

Former Cañada College professor, Patrick Manning, becomes President of the American Historical Association

by John Kirk, CSM Economics Professor Emeritus

We recently learned that former Cañada College professor, Patrick Manning, was the 2016-17 President of the American Historical Association.  Pat taught History and Economics at Cañada from 1969-1982. While at Cañada, Pat revitalized and successfully led AFT Local 1493 during his years in the District.  At the time Pat became the President of AFT 1493, the union had only a handful of members and the vast majority of the faculty belonged to the CTA.  In 1980, the upstart AFT, campaigning on the issue of local leadership vs the state-dominated CTA, was able to win a decertification election against the CTA and has remained the bargaining agent for the District’s faculty ever since.  (Fred Glass, the Communications Director of the CFT, produced an excellent film entitled, AFT 1493: The Movie, which traces the history of AFT Local 1493 during these early years. It is accessible on the AFT 1493 website at aft1493.org.)

The following summary of Pat’s academic career is taken directly from the website of the American Historical Association.

Patrick Manning is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History at the University of Pittsburgh; he is president of the American Historical Association, 2016-17. (Note: Pat retired last Fall.)  He served from 2005 to 2015 as founding director of the World History Center, located in the Department of History and affiliated with the Global Studies Program.  Manning now directs the Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA), for work on creating a world-historical data resource.  Trained as a specialist in the economic history of Africa, he has become a specialist in world history overall with a focus on migration and systems.  His current research centers on creating a global historical data resource, African populations and migration 1650-1950, global social movements 1989-92, African diaspora as a dimension of global history, and a history of the human system.

He was educated at the California Institute of Technology (BS in Chemistry, 1963) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (MS in History and Economics, PhD in History 1969).  He taught at 10 institutions, especially Cañada College 1969-82, Northeastern University 1984-2006 and University of Pittsburgh, 2006-16.

Dr. Manning has published the following books:  Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa 1880-1995 (1988, revised 1999); Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (1990); Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (2003); Slavery, Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640-1960 (2004); Migration and World History (1st ed. 2005, 2nd ed. 2012; The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture (2010); Big Data In History (2013).