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Nicholas Evan Sarantakes is an assistant professor in the department
of history at Texas A&M University—Commerce. He is spending the
current school year as a visiting professor of history at the University
of Southern Mississippi.
Sarantakes is an award-winning writer and historian with a broad, eclectic
background. His main areas of interests are American political, diplomatic,
and military history. He has done first rate academic writing, having
his work appear in publications like the Journal of Sport History and Presidential
Studies Quarterly. He received the H. Bailey Carroll Award from the
Texas State Historical Association for a provocative article on Lyndon
Johnson’s presidential campaign in 1960. He wrote Keystone: The
American Occupation of Okinawa and U.S.-Japanese Relations (2000) and
edited Seven Stars: The Okinawa Battle Diaries of Simon Bolivar Buckner,
Jr. and Joseph Stilwell (2004).
He has also proven to be adaptable in his prose. "I like to think
of myself as a writer with an academic degree rather than as an academic
who writes," he remarked. "Writing is a lot like running. Different
distances require different abilities. A book is like a marathon
and that requires skills of endurance, while writing for a newspaper is
lot like a 100 meter dash, which demands speed and focus." He has
published for professional military audiences in publications like Infantry
magazine, the Royal United Service Institute Journal and Joint
Forces Quarterly magazine. He has written guest editorials for
newspapers like The Montgomery Advertiser, Austin American-Statesman,
and the Arizona Daily Star. |
His magazine feature work has appeared on ESPN.com and in Texas Alcalde
magazine. He was a reporter and an editor on the staff of The
Daily Texan—at the time the largest and best college paper in the country,
and the seventh largest daily in the state of Texas. He was also
a Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress in its newspapers and periodicals
division. He has also done grip work for the Houston bureau of Fox
Sports Southwest. His next book is on the boycott of the 1980 Olympics,
which is tentatively titled Political Games: How the Battle Between
Jimmy Carter and Lord Killanin Over the 1980 Olympics Restarted the Cold
War.
Sarantakes created the well-regarded U.S. Diplomatic
History Resources Index, a major clearing of material on the world
wide web of use to individuals with an interest in U.S. foreign policy,
which has drawn praise from observers as diverse as Fox News and The Washington
Post. In 2004 he was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Historical
Society and is also a member of the National Football League Alumni Association.
He received his B.A. from the University of Texas where he studied under
Robert A. Divine and Walt W. Rostow. He earned his M.A. from the
University of Kentucky, and wrote his thesis under the direction of George
C. Herring, Jr.. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Southern
California after working with Roger Dingman. He has taught at Austin Community
College, Texas A&M University—Commerce, the University of Salford in
England, the U.S. Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama,
and the University of Southern Mississippi.
His main hobbies are snow skiing and backpacking. In addition
to hitting the slopes at a number of different resorts in the United States,
he has skied in New Zealand and Scotland. An Eagle Scout, he is also
a Vigil Honor member of the Order of the Arrow, the official honor organization
in Scouting. He spent several summers in the 1980s, working as a
backpacking guide as a member of the Ranger Department at the Philmont
Scout Ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico.
Visit his personal web
page, which includes an electronic version of his resume,
or send him e-mail at Nicholas.Sarantakes@usm.edu.
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