John Mack Faragher

John Mack Faragher was born in Phoenix, Arizona and raised in southern California, where he attended the University of California, Riverside (B.A., 1967), then spent several years a social worker for Los Angeles County before doing graduate work at Yale University (Ph.D., 1977). After fifteen years as a professor at Mount Holyoke College he joined the Yale faculty in 1993, teaching the history of the American West and directing the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders. He is now Howard R. Lamar Professor Emeritus of History and American Studies. His books include Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979); Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (1986); Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (1992); The American West: A New Interpretive History (2000), with Robert V. Hine and Jon T. Coleman; A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from their American Homeland (2005); Frontiers: A Short History of the American West (2007), with Robert V. Hine; Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles (2016.

Most recently, he published California: An American History (2022). For a discussion of this book between Faragher and Weshoyot Alvitre, its illustrator see: https://youtu.be/6bGz9mPim-A