Sidney Brown oral history interview

1983-03-26

Brown, Sidney; Mayo, Marlene J.

Oral history interview with Sidney Brown conducted by Marlene Mayo on March 26, 1983. Sidney Brown (1925-2010) was a Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Oklahoma who specialized in Eastern Asian history. He attended Southwestern College, but his undergraduate education was put on hold due to World War II. At age 17, Brown joined the Navy and entered into the V-12 program, through which he continued his education. After moving around to different bases, Brown received his midshipman education at Notre Dame. Brown was recruited for the Japanese Language School at the University of Colorado by General Hindmarsh. From 1943 to 1946 he completed the 14-month intensive course in Japanese which sparked an interest in Eastern Asian studies. After the war, he continued his education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, achieving a PhD in 1952. From 1952 to 1956, Brown taught history at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, before moving to the University of Oklahoma, where he taught East Asian history until 1995. Each year he taught a yearlong course in Japanese History that was very popular among students along with many other courses in Chinese, Korean, and Southeast Asian History. Brown was an important figure in the study of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Kido Takayoshi, and Okubo Toshimichi. Brown received the Japan Cultural Translation Prize of the Japan Translators Association for his biography and translation of Kido Takayoshi in 1986. He was a foreign research fellow at Tokyo University on three occasions and served 1 long visiting professorships at many distinguished universities. In 1999, he received the Jackson and Caroline Bailey Public Service Award of the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs and in 2000, Brown was inducted into the Oklahoma Higher Education Hall of Fame. In 2010, Sidney Brown passed away after a long illness.

University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)

Oral histories

Japan--History--Allied occupation, 1945-1952

Japan; California; San Francisco

Postwar Japan

Special Collections and University Archives

English

Collection may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. To obtain permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the University of Maryland Libraries at http://www.lib.umd.edu/special/contact/home.

Recording: 01:21:00 (audiocassette; mp3); Transcript: 31 pages (PDF)

This oral history interview is part of the Marlene J. Mayo oral histories. A guide to the full collection of Marlene J. Mayo oral histories is available in our archival collections: http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/42478.
Accession 2009-209-GWP
An interview transcript is available.

Filename: prange-087514