I study nineteenth and twentieth-century North American History. I teach a seminar in Canadian history [HST 183S], a comparative lecture course on the North American Wests [HST 108D], and a lecture course the relationships among Canada, Mexico and the United States [HST 108F]. In Spring 2008, I'll teach a lecture course on 'Baseball in Global Perspective.' My almost-completed research project is a book entitled "Family, Farm and Community: The Rural Northern Plains, 1860-1970," a comprehensive comparative rural history of the region to the post World War II "great disjuncture," examining how institutions, "culture," and historical contingency shaped a geographically homogeneous region into the six very different U.S. states of North and South Dakota, Montana, and the Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. My next (and my last) project, just underway, is a book about Enos Slaughter [1916-2002], a Hall of Fame ballplayer from Person County, NC. The project is not a biography of Slaughter, but an attempt to use his life in baseball to explore larger questions about gender, race, class, and celebrity in America.