Becoming America

About the Author

David M. Henkin

Since David Henkin joined the history faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997, he has taught and written about the sorts of subjects that rarely make it into traditional textbooks. He has offered entire courses on baseball, Broadway, immigration, time, leisure, the road, family life, news, and urban literature while publishing books and essays about street signs, paper money, junk mail, intimate correspondence, calendars, and temporal rhythms in the nineteenth century. The task of integrating that kind of material into the traditional narrative of the American past has been the singular challenge of his professional life. David holds a BA from Yale University and a PhD from U.C. Berkeley, and he was awarded Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award in the Social Sciences. Beyond the Berkeley campus, David teaches classes on the Talmud, plays cards, eats lots of fish and berries, and roots passionately for the St. Louis Cardinals. Raised in New York, where his family still lives, he makes his home with friends and community in San Francisco.

Rebecca M. McLennan

Rebecca M. McLennan is Preston Hotchkis Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Passionately dedicated to making U.S. history exciting and relevant for today’s students, she has taught courses on American and global food history, consumer culture, the New Deal, and the history of American crime and punishment. She also regularly teaches her department’s gateway U.S. history survey course. Rebecca’s publications include The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776–1941 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), which won several major book awards, and she is currently completing a history of the origin and legacies of the Bering Sea crisis at the turn of the twentieth century. In her spare time, conditions permitting, she swims in San Francisco Bay, cooks for family and friends, and listens to John Coltrane.