The Center for the Southwest announces the 2016 C. Ruth and Calvin P. Horn Lecture in Western History and Culture. Dr. John Mack Faragher, Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, present the 2016 Horn Lecture, “Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles,” on Thursday, April 14, at 5:30 p.m. at the Student Union Building Lobo A&B.

This event is free and open to the public. A book signing and reception will follow the lecture.

This lecture will feature a discussion about 19th-century Los Angeles, which was fashioned not once, but twice by violent conquest and occupation: conceived in an assault of native homelands by men marching under the banner of heaven, then torn asunder by invaders pursuing their “manifest destiny to overspread the continent.” With its diverse mix of peoples linked in relations of dominance and subordination, with structures of order so weak and ineffective that even the most enlightened men came to rely on mob rule and lynch law. Faragher, in this discussion, will ask what were the possibilities for order and justice in such a place?

John Mack Faragher was born in Phoenix, Arizona and raised in southern California, where he attended the University of California, Riverside (B.A., 1967), and did social work, before coming to Yale (Ph.D., 1977). After fifteen years as a professor at Mount Holyoke College he returned to Yale in 1993. His fields of interest include: United States frontier and western history, Native American borderlands, and Native American history.

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; 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; and Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles (2016). He teaches the history of the American West at Yale and directs the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders.

For more information on the 2016 C. Ruth and Calvin P. Horn Lecture or other events sponsored by the Center for the Southwest, call (505) 277-4344 or email us at cntrsw@unm.edu