Kenneth J. Bindas

historian

Being born and raised into a working-class family in Youngstown, Ohio, and witness to the steel era decline in the seventies and eighties encouraged Kenneth J. Bindas to study the negotiation of power between government, business and the people. Using culture (political, social, and popular) as the lens to view primarily the Depression era, his research and teaching has focused on how the people redefined themselves, their government, and business in this era of swirling change. Bindas' current research intersects the construction of memory and society: on one hand he is working on Oral history methodology and its role in the construction of history (both personal and social); and on the other, researching the multivariate means by which modernity became not just a term to help define the Depression era, but signaled a change of consciousness, a secular reformation.