Occidental College and the Huntington Library co-founded the Ray Allen Billington Visiting Professorship in United States History. The Billington Visiting Professorship has brought some of the country's leading historians to Occidental.
With funding made possible by the estate of historian Ray Allen Billington and supplemented by a grant from the Times Mirror Foundation, the professorship honors the tradition of fine teacher/scholars at American liberal arts colleges.
This innovative professorship is a fitting legacy for Billington. A leader in the scholarly community, he served as president of the American Studies Association, the Western History Association, and the Organization of American Historians.
He was a superb historian whose scholarly books covered such varied fields as racism, ethnocentrism, biography, and western history. At the Huntington, where he was a senior research associate from 1963 until his death in 1981, he made highly effective use of the Frederick Jackson Turner papers to produce Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher, which won the coveted Bancroft Prize.
Billington also had strong ties to liberal arts colleges. He taught at Smith College from 1937-1944, and in the 1970s served as trustee at Occidental, which he described as “my favorite college of all the West, one that I have more or less adopted in my own mind as the institution here with which I would most like to be associated."
Damon Akins is the Lincoln Financial Professor of History at Guilford College, in Greensboro, North Carolina. His research, writing, and teaching focuses on the history of Indigenous People, settler colonialism, California, and the American West.
His current book project is a history of las Californias—Alta and Baja—during the Mexican period. The book disrupts settler narratives of inevitability by challenging the emphasis historians have often placed on the struggle between the coastal missions and the californios. Instead, it takes a place-based spatial history approach to attempt to capture the lived experiences of the diverse Indigenous peoples who constituted the vast majority of the people who lived across the region at the time.
He has held fellowships at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Prior to returning to graduate school, he was a high school social studies teacher in Los Angeles.
He is the co-author, with William J. Bauer, Jr., of We Are the Land: A History of Native California (California, 2021).
While at Oxy, he will teach “A History of Native California” in the fall semester, and “National Parks/Native Land” in the spring.