Professor
Office: AL 529
Email: [email protected]
Website

Education

Ph.D., United States History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2010)

M.A., United States History and Public History, University of Massachusetts at Amherst (2004)

B.A., African Studies, Macalester College (1991) 

David P. Cline is a Professor of History, the Founding Director of the SDSU Center for Public and Oral History, the Director of the Lipinsky Institute for Jewish Life and Public Engagement, and the Fred J. Hansen Peace Chair. He specializes in 20th and 21st century U.S. social movements, religion, sports history, oral history, and public history, and oversees the SDSU Graduate Certificate in Public History. From 2013-2020 he was a Lead Interviewer and Research Scholar for the Civil Rights History Project of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. He previously taught at Virginia Tech and at Duke University. Dr. Cline is a founding member of the SDSU Surf/Skate Studies Collaborative, and as the Hansen Chair, David created the Boarder Crossings initiative with his colleague Andrea Buchetti, that has hosted a series of binational exhibitions of skateboard art interpreting contemporary border issues. He has been Principal Investigator or Co-PI on grant projects of over $3.2 million, most of them dealing with oral history and digital history. He is currently working on multi-year projects with the Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency and with the California Oral History Project for the California State Archives. In 2022, he was a recipient of a Public Scholar Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for work on the book The Last Great Trip to Nowhere: A True Story of the Brazilian Jungle and the Final Gasps of the Victorian Age of Exploration.

Dr. Cline is co-editor, with Kristin Lawlor and Michael Roberts, of Roll and Flow: The Cultural Politics of Skateboarding and Surfing (SDSU Press, 2023), and, with Andrea Buchetti, the forthcoming DIY Democracy (SDSU Press, 2027.) He is the author of three historical monographs; the most recent is Twice Forgotten: African Americans in the Korean War, An Oral History (UNC Press, 2022), nominated for the Oral History Association Book Award and the Museum of African American History Stone Book Award. Twice Forgotten explores African American military service and the desegregation of the US military in the Korean War as a crucial step in the Civil Rights Movement. Library Journal, in a starred review, called “this exceptionally researched volume … an essential, insightful read,” and Publisher’s Weekly called it “a treasure chest of insight into the Black military experience.” David is also the author of From Reconciliation to Revolution: The Student Interracial Ministry, Liberal Christianity, and the Civil Rights Movement (UNC Press, 2016) of which CHOICE said: “Every academic and church library should acquire this timely, important book.” Nominated for the 2017 Oral History Association Book Prize, it examines the story of the Student Interracial Ministry, founded at the same time and place as its better-known ally the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, but whose seminarian members wanted to not only dismantle Jim Crow but change the mainline Protestant churches' approach to racial issues. David is also the author of Creating Choice: A Community Responds to the Need for Abortion and Birth Control, 1961-1973 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), which explored community reproductive rights networks in Massachusetts prior to the Roe V. Wade decision. Creating Choice was honored with a Margaret Sanger Award in 2006 and an Editor’s Choice Award from the Historical Journal of Massachusetts in 2019.