I am a Professor of Library Services and History at William Rainey Harper College in Palatine, Illinois. I received three degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: an MA in American History (1990), an MS in Library and Information Science (1984), and an AB in European History (1983). Born in Des Plaines and raised in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, I come from a long line of educators dating back to the early 19th century. I currently live in Wheeling, Illinois.
Over the course of my career I have worked at a variety of different libraries around the state of Illinois, including the La Salle Public Library (1984-1986); the Urbana Free Library (1986-1988); the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1988-1989); the Illinois Newspaper Project (Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Illinois, 1989-1995); the Illinois State Library (Springfield, Illinois, 1995-1996); and the William Rainey Harper College Library (1996-present).
Research Interests: Illinois history (especially the territorial and early statehood periods), newspaper history, the history of organized labor in both Britain and the United States, African-American history, and late 19th and early 20th-century American literature, especially Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Ring Lardner, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters.