David Vaught is Professor of History and Melvyn G. Glasscock Professor of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence at Texas A&M University. He is the proud recipient of several teaching honors, including the Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award in Teaching in 2006. He specializes in American rural history, labor, and the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He enjoys teaching upper-division, honors, and graduate courses in those fields, as well as both halves of the U.S. history survey. He is the author of Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875-1920 (1999) and After The Gold Rush: Tarnished Dreams in the Sacramento Valley (2007). His current book project examines baseball in rural America since 1839.