Roger Dingman's Pages



Who I am.


One way of answer that question is to tell you what I told my 35th Stanford class reunion about what has happened to me since graduation in 1960:
Thirty-five years ago, when I left Stanford, I didn't have a clue as to what might lie ahead. Looking back, I can see three things that would shape much of my future happened to me while I was an undergraduate. I learned how to appreciate and get along with different sorts of people by living with a bunch of Phi Psi's in a big old house on the hill. Good training for alife that was to be lived mostly in Los Angeles.

I also discovered in the History Department the model scholar-teachers for what I was to become professionally. That sparked the intellectual curiosity that later sent me on to Harvard for a Phd. and a career teaching history at USC.

The third thing that was to shape my life was what I then liked the least - Navy ROTC. The united commander decided that Japan would be a good place to send me for two years duty. There I began learning the language; decided I wanted an academic, not a naval, career; and discoverred a world different beyond anything I ever imagined. That experience set me on course for what has been a lifetime of teaching and writing about trans-Pacific interactions - cultural and personal as well as political and military. I've been lucky enough to do so all over Pacific Asia and at the US Air Force Academy and Naval War College as well as at USC.

No, I didn't find my wife of thirty-five yeras, Linda, at Stanford. She's a UCLA graduate. We've raised four children who are now scattered from Seattle to Honolulu. Our daughter, whom we adopted from Korea, is a nurse; and the eldest son is in the heating and air conditioning business. The younger sons are still working their way through undergraduate careers that bear little resembland to what I experienced at Stanford so many years ago.

Life is full of new beginnings, and mine at the moment is building a vacation/retirement home on a 7000-foot mesa overlooking the western slope of the Rockies near Grand Junction, Colorado. Yes, there is life outside the big city!

What I have done (Research and HISTORY 365

  • History 342g War and the American Experience
  • History 465 America in the Cold War World


    • The first picture below shows History 465 students Jena Krause and Courtney Perrone visiting the "Gifts of Diplomacy" exhibit at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on November 21, 1995. To their right is an ink brush painting presented by Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro presented by Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro to President Reagan on his birthday, February 6, 1988

    The picture below shows History 465 students in front of the Berlin Wall fragment at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
    The picture below shows History 465 students with me in front of the Berlin Wall fragment at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on November 21, 1995
    One of the highlights of the Reagan Library visit was getting to see the huge archive of visual materials. What follows are images of the Reagan-Gorbachov summit meetings that marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War.


    Reagan and Gorbachov meet for the first time at Geneva Switzerland November 19, 1985

    A sad farewell. Reagan and Gorbachov leave the unsucessful summit at Reykjavik, Iceland, October 12, 1986


    The Washington, D.C. summit, December 8, 1987. The two leaders sign the treaty on elimination of Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces


    The last Reagan-Gorbachov summit. Meeting in New York City, December 7, 1988


    The photo above shows History 365 students visiting the SS LANE Victory, the official World War II Merchant Marine Memorial, in Los Angeles Harbor.
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    How to get ahold of me:


      PHONE AREA 213 740-1667 or 740-1657
    • FAX AREA 213 740-6999
    • e-mail: dingman@mizar.usc.edu