About

I am an American and European historian (PhD, Temple University, 1999) in intellectual, political, social, and cultural history of the late 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries that writes about urban history, architecture and urban planning, public history, transnational politics and history, historical memory, anthropological race theory, history of science, the social milieu intellectuals and war, and California and US Southwestern history. My work has been published in scholarly journals and publications such as the Journal of the American Planning Association, Reviews in American History, New Mexico Historical Review, Journal of San Diego History, and AHA Perspectives.

I am author of The San Diego World’s Fairs and Southwestern Memory, 1880-1940 (University of New Mexico Press, 2005), a finalist for the San Diego Book Award. My reviews have been published in American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Journal of Religion, Journal of American Ethnic History, Pacific Historical Review, Western American Literature, Western Historical Quarterly, New Mexico Historical Review, and People’s World. I have also consulted for the San Diego History Center and the National Building Museum in Washington DC for their exhibition Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), a 3-year traveling exhibition seen by 1.2 million people. I am currently working on a new book, entitled “A Revolutionary Age: America 1940-1991,” a multiethnic and multicultural historical synthesis of radical and social democratic movements for Civil Rights – and its imperiled demise by the rise of anticommunism, the global conservative and ultranationalist movement and the early years of neoliberal economic and political restructuring, and privatization. I am writing a novel entitled “Fishtown.”

My most recent book is The Lives of Immigrants and Refugees: Tales of Migration, Hope, Grief, Exile, and Home from Nebraska, edited by Matthew F. Bokovoy, Lisa Guill, Michelle Carr Hassler, Joy Castro, and Emira Ibrahimpašic (University of Nebraska Press, 2026), which offers 31 poignant essays of migration and resettlement stories by relocated immigrants and refugees to the city of Lincoln, Nebraska through the Lincoln-Lancaster County Welcoming and Belonging Strategic Plan.

I am also a senior acquiring editor in scholarly publishing in the fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies, Cultural Anthropology and Ethnography, History of Anthropology, Indigenous Linguistics, Global Borderlands History, Trade Nonfiction of the American West, and Literary Memoir of the American West. I conceived the major, social science documentary project, The Franz Boas Papers: Documentary Edition (25 vols.) with my colleagues at work, and University of Western Ontario and the American Philosophical Society, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I conceived the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation publishing initiative Recovering Languages and Literacies in the Americas. I am a member of the board of directors for International Publishers (New York, NY), first established in 1924.

I play lead guitar in Red Cities (Lincoln, NE), a garage punk band on Modern Peasant Records, whose records are in regular rotation on KALX (Berkeley), WKDU (Philadelphia), and WFMU (Jersey City) among others. The Big Takeover Magazine said of Red Cities: “On breakneck blasters like ‘Worker Song’ and ‘Come Now Baby,’ Red Cities’ unashamedly summon slashing ‘Search and Destroy’ simulating riffs – tension-building, jet engine-explosive punk that exhilarates.” I am also a producer for Modern Peasant Records, having sponsored The Sinners’ Drunk on the Lord’s Day (MPR-013) and John Wayne’s Bitches’ Bitched Out (MPR-011). I blog about the history of punk rock, hardcore, and indy rock at the music podcast Doc Rockavoy’s Indy Music Garage.