People

John Perry

Assistant Professor of Instruction

Contact Information and CV

Office: SOC 215
Email: jperry10@usf.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Education

Ph.D., University of Kentucky, 2021

Teaching

My classes focus on the history of the United States, the history of the United States and the world, the history of the United States in the Middle East, and Global Cold War history.  I offer several courses on these subjects, including, “U.S. history II,” “War and Society: The Cold War in the Third World,” “History of U.S. Foreign Relations,” and “United States in the Middle East, 1945 – Present.  I have also taught “America’s Secret Wars,” “U.S. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” “War and Society: World War I and II,” “U.S. History to 1877,” “History of Western Civilization I,” and History of Western Civilization II.”  Furthermore, I have instructed political science courses, including, “U.S. National Government,” “U.S. State and Local Government,” and the sociology course, “Contemporary Social Problems.”  In my classes, I emphasize local, non-state actors from the Developing World and minority populations within the United States.  I focus on historical critical thought and developing students’ ability to craft academic arguments.  I often utilize cross-disciplinary models.  In my classes, issues and developments are examined not only historically but also through lenses from the fields of political science, sociology, anthropology, and/or international relations.

Research

Traditionally, historians have looked at the Cold War through the lens of state-to-state relations.  My research challenges state centric models.  My current book manuscript, From Empire to Nation-State: The United States, Minority Nationalism, and the Early Cold War in the Middle East, examines three local, non-state groups – Palestinian Refugees, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Syrian Armenians and Syrian Kurds – and how they confounded U.S. Cold War strategy in the Middle East in the 1940s and 1950s.  I argue these local actors challenged and manipulated American policy in the region.  In so doing, they transformed how the Cold War unfolded.  Far from passive agents, these non-state groups played a major, yet greatly understudied role in the Cold War.  They were primary agents of change.  However, unlike American officials, the Cold War was not what motivated and drove the local actors of my study.  Their principal objective was regaining sovereignty over their homelands, not the creation of a communist, nor capitalist, state.

The local actors of From Empire to Nation-State were the periphery of the periphery, the illegitimate movement for freedom, or minority nationalists.  Each was part of a wider push to remove colonial authority from the region.  However, once liberation was attained, these actors were left outside the new modes of power.  The dominant forms of anti-colonial nationalism failed to address their needs.  During the early Cold War, these groups challenged the United States, the United Nations, and the Western international order because these institutions protected the new system that denied them sovereignty over their homelands.  Although groups such as the Armenians and Kurds sometimes worked with the Soviet Union, their chief aim was not the creation of a communist state.  They desired a great power patron to assist them in regaining control of their former countries.  The Soviet Union, while having its own motives, was the only power to entertain such action.  Actors like the Armenians and Kurds flirted with communist ideas in return for Soviet assistance.  Supporting communism was simply a means to an end, not the end in and of itself. While these groups challenged and confounded U.S. Cold War strategy, they ultimately cared little about the superpower rivalry – only how it could be manipulated to help them regain their homelands.

For this project, I conducted research in Lebanon at the archives of the American University of Beirut and at the Moshe Dayan Center of Tel Aviv University in Israel. While there, I investigated Arabic media such as newspapers, magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, and other similar documents.  I have also conducted research at the National Archives and Records Administration, the United Nations archives, the Truman library, the Eisenhower library, and the Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified records.