新澳彩开奖 and the Huntington Library co-founded the Ray Allen Billington Visiting Professorship in United States History.聽The Billington Visiting Professorship has brought some of the country's leading historians to 新澳彩开奖.
With funding made possible by the estate of historian Ray Allen Billington and supplemented by a grant from the Times Mirror Foundation, the professorship honors the tradition of fine teacher/scholars at American liberal arts colleges.
This innovative professorship is a fitting legacy for Billington. A leader in the scholarly community, he served as president of the American Studies Association, the Western History Association, and the Organization of American Historians.
He was a superb historian whose scholarly books covered such varied fields as racism, ethnocentrism, biography, and western history. At the Huntington, where he was a senior research associate from 1963 until his death in 1981, he made highly effective use of the Frederick Jackson Turner papers to produce Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher, which won the coveted Bancroft Prize.
Billington also had strong ties to liberal arts colleges. He taught at Smith College from 1937-1944, and in the 1970s served as trustee at 新澳彩开奖, which he described as 鈥渕y favorite college of all the West, one that I have more or less adopted in my own mind as the institution here with which I would most like to be associated."
2024-2025 Ray Allen Billington Visiting Professor: Damon Akins, Guilford College
![Damon Akins headshot](/sites/default/files/styles/wysiwyg_300w/public/Damon-Akins.jpg)
Damon Akins is the Lincoln Financial Professor of History at Guilford College, in Greensboro, North Carolina. His research, writing, and teaching focuses on the history of Indigenous People, settler colonialism, California, and the American West.
His current book project is a history of las Californias鈥擜lta and Baja鈥攄uring the Mexican period. The book disrupts settler narratives of inevitability by challenging the emphasis historians have often placed on the struggle between the coastal missions and the californios. Instead, it takes a place-based spatial history approach to attempt to capture the lived experiences of the diverse Indigenous peoples who constituted the vast majority of the people who lived across the region at the time.
He has held fellowships at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Prior to returning to graduate school, he was a high school social studies teacher in Los Angeles.
He is the co-author, with William J. Bauer, Jr., of We Are the Land: A History of Native California (California, 2021).
While at Oxy, he will teach 鈥淎 History of Native California鈥 in the fall semester, and 鈥淣ational Parks/Native Land鈥 in the spring.
Past Billington Awardees
2022-2023 | Thomas J. Balcerski, Eastern Connecticut State University聽
2020-2021听触 Leslie Butler, Dartmouth College
2018-2019 |聽Michael Vorenberg, Brown University
2016-2017 |聽Bethel Saler, Haverford College
2014-2015 |聽Frank Guridy, The University of Texas at Austin
2012-2013 |聽Casey Blake, Columbia University
2010-2011 |聽Daniel Horowitz, Smith College
2008-2009 |聽Jared Orsi, Colorado State University聽 聽 聽
2006-2007 |聽Jonathan Earle, University of Kansas
2004-2005 |聽Douglas Monroy, Colorado College
2002-2003 |聽Matt Gallman, University of Florida听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听 聽
2001-2002 |聽Sharon Ullman, Bryn Mawr College听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听
2000-2001 |聽Victoria Bissell Brown, Grinnell College听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听 聽
1999-2000 |聽Richard Buel, Wesleyan University听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听 聽
For more information call (323) 259-2751听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听 聽
聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽