Forsyth Guest-Edits Special Issue of Journal

John P. Forsyth, a new member of the Department of Psychology faculty, is guest editor of a two-part anniversary issue of the journal Behavior Therapy due out this fall.

The special issue, titled “Thirty Years of Behavior Therapy: Promises Kept, Promises Unfulfilled,” includes over 40 target articles and commentaries written by the first-generation founding members of behavior therapy, including Joseph Wolpe, Albert Ellis, Arnold Lazarus, Cyril Franks, and W. Stuart Agras; second-generation behavior therapists, such as former University at Albany faculty member David Barlow, Ian Evans, Lizette Peterson, Rosemary Nelson-Gray, Neil Jacobson, Steven Hayes, Jackie Persons, Georg Eifert, Edna Foa, Robert Hawkins, and G. Terence Wilson; and third-generation behavior therapists, including Forsyth, Bruce Chorpita, Kelly Wilson, Joseph Plaud, and Gayle Iwamasa. The authors each contributed their views about the behavior therapy movement, and offered insight into promises kept and unfulfilled over the last 30 years. Cross-generational commentary on each article provides a perspective on the changing views of the field, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy (AABT).

“This is the first effort in the history of the journal and the AABT to bring together influential leaders in the field to evaluate the past and present direction and promises of the behavior therapy movement,” Forsyth said. He said he expects that the two-part issue will be of great interest to historians, academicians, and practioners in behavior therapy and cognitive-behavior therapy.

Dykstra Book Now in Paperback

History Professor Robert Dykstra’s prize-winning book about race relations on the Iowa frontier, originally published in hardcover in 1993, has now been brought out in paperback by the Iowa State University Press. The book, Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier, is described by the American Historical Review as “one of the most important books ever written about the politics of race in the United States.”

Bright Radical Star, winner of the Benjamin Shambaugh Award and the Myers Center Award for the outstanding book on intolerance, examines how Iowa transformed itself from perhaps the most racist free state in the antebellum Union to one of America’s most racially progressive states in the period after the Civil War.

John Lauritz Larson, writing for the Indiana Magazine of History, described the book as “extraordinary and sophisticated . . . Dykstra is one of the most meticulous historians in the business — a determined quantifier, patient researcher, articulate reporter, and graceful stylist — whose virtues combine to make Bright Radical Star at once a model of rigorous analysis and a pleasure to read.”

Dykstra, a native Iowan who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, is also the author of The Cattle Towns. He joined the University in 1981 as a professor of history and public policy.