American · 1939–2009
Ronald Takaki (1939-2009) was an American historian and a founder of ethnic studies. Born in Honolulu to a Japanese American family whose grandparents had worked on Hawaii's sugar plantations, he earned his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught at UCLA before joining the Berkeley faculty in 1972. There he helped build one of the first ethnic studies departments in the United States. His books include Iron Cages, on race and culture in nineteenth-century America, Strangers from a Different Shore, a history of Asian Americans, and A Different Mirror, a history of multicultural America. He drew on letters, oral histories and legal records to tell the stories of ordinary people. He argued that the history of the United States cannot be understood without the experience of its minorities, and he challenged the model-minority stereotype. His work is widely assigned in university courses, and he received the American Book Award for Strangers from a Different Shore.