About John Caughey Books
John Walton Caughey was born in 1902 in Wichita, Kansas. He attended the University of Texas and gained his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1928. A few years later he joined the staff at UCLA, where he taught classes on the Pacific Coast and the American West and Spanish borderlands and specialized in California history. He also edited the Pacific Historical Review and sat on the editorial boards of various Western historical journals. He authored, coauthored, or edited over twenty-six books throughout his career. History was Caughey's passion, and he was very active in several different organizations. He was on the board of the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. He was also the chairman of the UCLA Department of History. He was a dignified, gentlemanly, and gifted teacher at UCLA for more than forty years. He was a mentor for two generations of historians of California and the West and supervised three dozen doctoral dissertations. He was also a social activist and civil libertarian who cared deeply about education and wrote one of the first textbooks that took into account the role of women and minorities in American history. Caughey championed desegregation of the Los Angeles Unified School District; opposed capital punishment, blacklisting, and quotas; and fought for the preservation of the wilderness and ecology. In 1950 he fought McCarthy, as he and thirty other members of the University of California faculty were fired for refusing to sign a
