Carol L. McKibben

Dr. Carol Lynn McKibben is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. She has been teaching courses in California history, Urban history and Immigration history for the Department of History and Urban Studies at Stanford University since 2006 and for the bill Lane Center for the American West since 2020. She has also engaged in numerous community based research projects on the Monterey Peninsula for thirty years.  Her first book, Beyond Cannery Row: Sicilian Women, Immigration, and Community in Monterey, 1915-1999 placed women at the center of a transnational migration story that focused on the ways migration re-shaped Sicilian fishing families as they moved back and forth from villages in Sicily to Monterey, California and, at the same time, altered the character of the city over the course of the twentieth century.Dr. McKibben served as Director of the Seaside History Project from 2005-2012. Her second book, Racial Beachhead: Diversity and Democracy in a Military Town (Stanford University Press, 2012) showed how federal investment and diversity of personnel stationed at nearby Fort Ord transformed a small community, Seaside, into an important center of civil rights activism in California. As Director of The Salinas History Project Dr. McKibben is currently engaged in a community based research project that aims to re-examine the historical development of the city of Salinas in regional, state, and national context.