Gerald McFarland

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.

• 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)