WILLIAM (BILL) ISSEL
BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE

Bill Issel is Professor of History Emeritus at San Francisco State University and a Visiting Professor of History at Mills College.  He attended public and parochial schools in San Francisco and began his history work as a student in the honors program of the University of California, Berkeley, History Department before transferring to San Francisco State College, where he earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in American History.  After beginning doctoral studies in American labor history and political history at University of Pittsburgh, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in American Civilization.  He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

A specialist in American culture, society, and politics since the Civil War, Issel taught in the History, Humanities, and Urban Studies departments at San Francisco State from 1968 to 2006 and served as Coordinator of the American Studies Program and Associate Chair of the History Department.  He received numerous awards for excellence in teaching and advising at San Francisco State, and he received grants in support of his research and public history projects from the National Endowment of Humanities, the California Council for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation.  From 1963 until 1968, he taught at the University of Pittsburgh, the Camden campus of Rutgers-the State University of New Jersey, and directed the history section of the Thirteen College Program at historically black colleges in the South.  In 1978-1979, he was a Fulbright Professor at the University of Westminster (formerly the Polytechnic of Central London), and during the 2008-2009 academic year, he served as the László Országh Chair in American Studies, a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturing Award, at the University of Pécs in Hungary.  

Issel is particularly interested in the social, cultural, and political  history of the United States in the twentieth century.  He is co-editor of the nine-book series "The Contemporary USA" (Palgrave Macmillan) and the author of one of the books in the series Social Change in the United States (1985).  He is also editor (with Robert Cherny and Kieran Taylor) and contributor to American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2004). His current research and writing focuses on American urban history, and he has written several books and many articles that address the role of labor, ethnicity, religion and politics in twentieth century San Francisco.  He is the author (with Robert W. Cherny) of two books on San Francisco history:  San Francisco, Presidio, Port, and Pacific Metropolis (Boyd and Fraser, 1981) and San Francisco, 1865-1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (University of California Press, 1986). His essay on Catholic Action in San Francisco won the Webb-Smith essay competition in 2004, and was published in Catholicism in the American West: A Rosary of Hidden Voices (Texas A & M Press, 2007).  He has a chapter on Catholic and Jewish cooperation in the civil rights movement in California Jews (Brandeis University Press, 2003).  His book on the ordeal of Sylvester Andriano, a San Francisco Catholic Action leader falsely accused of Fascism in 1942 will be published in December, 2009.

In addition to extensive lecturing to academic and general audiences in the U.S. and in England and Europe, he  has done considerable public history consulting work, including serving as the guest curator for the San Francisco history and culture exhibit that marked the 1996 opening of the New Main Public Library in the San Francisco Civic Center.  He was a consultant for Christopher Chadbourne and Associates, the Boston firm designing the proposed San Francisco History Museum and co-authored the museum master plan.  He currently serves on the coordinating committee of the Bay Area Labor History Workshop and the boards of directors of the Fund for Labor Culture and History, the Urban History Association, and the Northern California Labor Archives and Research Center. 

Issel is married, the father of five adult children, and he has four grandchildren.  He lives in Berkeley.