ASU history class to air nationally on C-SPAN

A television crew from C-SPAN stepped onto ASU’s Tempe campus last month to film ASU historian and professor Don Critchlow teach his class, “History of Postwar U.S. Conservatism.”

An avid teacher and expert in modern American politics and policy history, Critchlow caught the national media’s attention with one of his top lectures: Republican Revival in the 1970s.

C-SPAN3’s Lectures in History series is designed to bring select professors, such as Critchlow, from across the country to viewers on C-SPAN3’s American History TV each weekend.

One of the questions that Critchlow explores in his class is how Republicans made a political comeback after Watergate and Nixon's resignation from the presidency.

“After these events, less than 20 percent of voters identified themselves as Republicans,” Critchlow explains. “Republican insiders feared that their party was going the way of the Whig Party, a party that had collapsed before the Civil War."  

So how was Ronald Reagan elected to the White House just five years after the Nixon disaster? Critchlow offers his own take on what happened and fields challenging questions from students.

The C-SPAN segment will air at 8 p.m. (ET), Saturday, Nov. 16, on C-SPAN3’s American History TV (Cox channel 126).

Critchlow is the director of the Political Thought and Leadership program, the founding editor of the Journal of Policy History, and author or editor of 22 books, including most recently, "When Hollywood Was Right: How Movie Stars, Studio Moguls, and Big Business Remade American Politics."

The School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies is an academic unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University.

By Beatriz Kravetz