Prof. Napoli
Philip F. Napoli
A Brief Bio
(NB: This was written for the benefit of my MHC Sem 2 students last year and slightly updated this year.)
I was born in 1960 in London, Ontario, Canada. My father was an Italian immigrant and my mother’s family members were Puritan migration people, meaning they came to this country in the 1640s.
My father was a professor of medicine which meant that we moved around a little bit when I was young. We landed in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1966 when my father took a job at a teaching hospital attached to the University of Cincinnati. Four years later my mother began her teaching career as a professor of sociology and social work at the university. So it is pretty clear that I come from a family of academics.
After moving to Atlanta, Georgia for a short period, my parents split up in 1973 and my mother, my sister and I moved back to Cincinnati. I graduated from high school in 1978. The school I went to is similar to Stuyvesant or Bronx Science or one of the other specialized New York schools.
I attended McGill University in Montreal, graduating in 1982. My undergraduate degree was in history. I came to New York in the spring of 1983 and after initially having a tough time finding a job due to the Reagan recession, finally landed a job at a publishing company which paid very little. I was living with one of my best friends in a very small tenement apartment on West 54th street, not very far from where John lives now.
In 1985 or 1986, I can’t remember which just now, I decided I wanted to go to graduate school in history. I moved out of New York and back to my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio for in short time while I made my graduate school applications. I was accepted at Columbia University and started graduate school in the fall of 1986. It took me a long time to get my Ph.D., but I finally graduated in 1998. During those many years I had a variety of jobs, among them was as a New York City tour guide and a private school teacher. I spent a little more than a year teaching high school at Dalton on the Upper East Side.
In 1995 I got a very interesting, and ultimately important part time job. I was asked by a member of the law faculty at NYU to do oral history interviews with most of the Americans involved in the resolution to the 1979 – 1981 Iranian hostage crisis. That year was the fifteenth anniversary of the ending of the crisis and a number of lawyers involved in the process want to get together to talk about what happened to all the money. When the hostages were released, $12 billion changed hands in a matter of seconds. At the time it was the largest single financial transaction in the history of the world. So I got to talk to virtually everybody involved on the American side with the exception of Warren Christopher and Jimmy Carter. I talked to Cyrus Vance, Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, but sorry to say Mr. Vance was suffering from Alzheimer’s. He didn’t know why I was there and threw me out of his apartment! We collected about twenty oral histories from the participants and transcribed them.
Nothing very significant was ever done with them. But that would lead in 1998 to one of the most interesting summers of my life. Of course I had graduated by that summer, and I was looking for work. The world of the network anchor is relatively small. Alan Brinkley is the son of ABC’s David Brinkley whom most of you will probably not remember. But at one time he was one of the most important people on television. Anyway, Alan set me up with Tom Brokaw (another now-retired TV news anchor that you may not know, but he did step in to “Meet the Press” when Tim Russert died during this past election season, so he’s been on TV again a lot lately, especially last fall) who was at that time preparing to write his book The Greatest Generation. One of Tom’s research assistants was leaving to go to law school and Tom needed a replacement. So I got to step in and do about 1/3 of the interviews for that book. That meant that summer I interviewed, largely by telephone people such as chef Julia Child, former Secretary of state George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, former Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield, who was one of the first Americans into Hiroshima after the use of the atomic bomb, and a number of others. The most intense part of the whole experience came when they gave me 72 hours to fact check the 300 page manuscript. That was quite a moment. I managed to save Tom from a couple of whoppers, but I also missed a couple as well. We fixed the ones I missed when the book went back to press. It did that a lot. It stayed on the bestseller list as a hardcover book for three years. I sure wish I had a piece of the profit from that!
Once I had my Ph.D., of course I went on the job market. It was a miserable moment to be trying to find an academic job. So, my mentor and sponsor, Alan Brinkley, the former provost of Columbia University, helped me find a job at the Columbia University libraries. I spent eighteen months as a curator of manuscripts within the library taking care of a collection of papers from New York’s longest-serving governor, Herbert Lehmann. At the same time I was teaching as an adjunct here at Brooklyn College and other places. In 2001 a full time line came available at Brooklyn College and I was encouraged to apply for the position.
Frankly I was a little reluctant because a full time teaching job literally paid less than the library job I had the time. But I made the application and was offered and accepted the job.
In 2003 I was given $50,000 by an anonymous donor to begin an oral history project on New York City’s relationship to the Vietnam War. It took me a long time to gain traction within the veteran community. But over time I built up a number of good connections and my oral history work expanded. I have a contract for a book on the subject, and my editor is currently tapping his fingers anxiously awaiting the completed manuscript.
You guys know very well that it is difficult to juggle many classes at the same time. Faculty members do exactly the same thing. So my progress in writing has been slower than I would like. Additionally I have had other projects to complete. One of them is an exhibition of my oral histories at the Brooklyn Historical Society, entitled In Our Own Words: Portraits Of Brooklyn’s Vietnam Veterans. That exhibition took me a full year to organize, but I had great support from my graduate AND undergraduate students (one of whom, Nikki Lebenson, is in the Macaulay College), and they got course credit for doing work on the exhibition. (Stick with me and really cool things can happen. I’ve taken undergraduates and grad students on research trips before, and other interesting opportunities are always coming up!) I collected the oral histories and most of the artifacts on display and a designer was hired to literally put the exhibition together.
This semester I am teaching four courses, including this one, 2 sections of Core 2.2, and “The Public and the Past,” my public history introduction. I always enjoy teaching that one. I also run a writers workshop that meets every 2 weeks on Wednesday night. People post written work they want reviewed by others, and we meet and talk about it. I do this because I’m trying to get 3 grad students to graduate this term and this is a method by which I can push them to write. Anyone interested is welcome to join and submit papers they would like reviewed.
Really, there is no course I don’t like to teach. I’m here at BC because I have the opportunity to teach wonderful students like you, although, like most people I also enjoy complaining a lot about being over worked. I’m a “social and public” historian, and teach courses on immigration and ethnicity in the United States, social history, oral history, the history of the Vietnam war and other stuff.
I have been married for 21 years and have 2 girls, now aged 6 and 9. (I can hardly believe it!) We live in Washington Heights, in Manhattan, above the GWB. It is a rather long commute, but not as long as some of yours.
Questions? Just ask me!