Clare V. McKanna

Bud McKanna received his BA in 1966 and an MA in history in 1968 from San Diego State University. After teaching for many years he returned to graduate school and received his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1993. He is a lecturer in history at San Diego State University where he has taught history course on Native Americans, California, Latin America, and the U.S. for over twenty-five years. His research focuses on legal history and the treatment of ethnic defendants in the American West. McKanna is the author of Homicide, Race, and Justice in the American West, 1880-1920 (1997), Race and Homicide in Nineteenth-Century California (2002), The Trial of “Indian Joe”: Race and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century West (2003), White Justice in Arizona: Apache Murder Trials in the Nineteenth Century (2005), and Court-Martial of Apache Kid, The Renegade of Renegades (2009). He is currently working on a book manuscript “Reasonable Doubt: The Trial of Ramón Tapia.” His essays on ethnicity, violence, San Quentin prison, and homicide have appeared in Western Historical Quarterly, Pacific Historical Review, Journal of Social History, Western Legal History, Great Plains Quarterly, American Indian Quarterly, and Journal of American Ethnic History.