To give you a little background about me, I'm originally from Portland, Oregon and earned my bachelor's degree from Lewis and Clark College. I earned my Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I specialized in studying early American history, American Indian history, the history of the American West, and the history of American religious movements. After completing my doctoral studies, I taught for three years at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey and then spent one year as a post-doctoral scholar at Harvard University. I have also served as the Nikolai V. Sivachev Distinguished Professor of American History and Culture at the Lomonosov Moscow State University in the Russian Federation. I joined the faculty at the University of Texas—Pan American in 1985.  My publications include Prophetic Worlds; Indians and Whites on the Columbia Plateau (1985), The Gülen Hizmet Movement: Circumspect Activism in Faith Based Reform (2012), Blue and Gray on the Border: The Rio Grande Valley Civil War Trail (2018), The Civil War on the Rio Grande, 1846-1876 (2019), and a considerable number of articles and professional reviews on American history and culture. I am also the co-author of Making America: A History of the United States, now in its seventh edition (2015).