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 doing graduate work at Yale University (Ph.D., 1977). After fifteen years as a professor at Mount Holyoke College he returned to Yale as the Arthur Unobskey Professof of American History in 1993. 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); and Frontiers: A Short History of the American West (2007), with Robert V. Hine. He teaches the history of the American West and directs the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders.