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BACKGROUND

Teaching U.S. history in college proved to be everything that I hoped it would be when I first chose that career track as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. I was excited about the prospect of being a life-long student of history, and college students promised to be more stimulating intellectually than younger students. Also, I'd long known that I wanted to be a writer. So the requirement that I publish was an attractive feature of being a professor at a research university. While enrolled in the doctoral program at Columbia University, I soon found my main research focus in nineteenth-century U.S. history, and I’ve enjoyed coming at the 1812-1920 period from a variety of angles: political history, social history, borderlands history, and urban history. Since my retirement in 2008, I've turned to writing novels--three so far in the Buenaventura Series--that have a realistic historical setting in early eighteenth-century Spanish New Mexico, a place and period I first studied while teaching upper- and graduate-level courses on the Old West.

SPECIALIZATIONS

  • Modern United States

PUBLICATIONS

  • Mugwumps, Morals, and Politics, 1884-1920 (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975).
  • Editor, Moralists or Pragmatists? The Mugwumps, 1884-1900: An Anthology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975).
  • A Scattered People: An American Family Moves West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); paperback edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1987); Spanish-language edition (Mexico City: Edamex, 1987); second paperback edition (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991); third paperback edition (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000).
  • The "Counterfeit" Man: The True Story of the Boorn-Colvin Murder Case (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991); paperback edition (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); deluxe Notable American Trials edition, with an introduction by Alan M. Dershowitz (New York: Gryphon Editions, 2000).
  • Inside Greenwich Village: A New York City Neighborhood, 1898-1918 (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
  • The Brujo’s Way (Sunstone Press, 2013)
  • What the Owl Saw (Sunstone Press, 2014)
  • The Last of Our Kind (Sunstone Press, 2015)

AWARDS

  • Phi Beta Kappa, 1959
  • B.A. with Highest Honors in History, U.C. Berkeley, 1960
  • Woodrow Wilson Graduate Fellowship, 1960-1964
  • Meyre Padve Masters Essay Prize, Columbia University, 1962
  • Danforth Graduate Fellowship, 1960-1964
  • Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellow, 1964
  • Grant-in-Aid, American Council of Learned Societies, 1971-1972
  • John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, 1978-1979
  • Conti Research Fellowship, 1992-1993
  • American Philosophical Society Research Grant, 1995
  • College of Humanities & Fine Arts Outstanding Teacher Award, 2002