Bud's Bio

Clare V. McKanna, Jr. received an MA in history from San Diego State University in 1968, and a 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 Native American and U.S. history for over twenty-five years. Bud McKanna likes good wine, especially vintage Ficklin Port, and thinks of himself as a frustrated comedian; he will do almost anything for a laugh. 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, Renegade of Renegades (2009). He is currently working on a book manuscript “Reasonable Doubt: The Trial of Ramón Tapia.” His essays on ethnicity, violence, prisons, 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.