Professor Michael Karp (CSUSB, History) has published a new book that brings together a wide range of historical subfields. In Raising the Redwood Curtain: Labor Landscapes and Community Violence in a Pacific Littoral (University of Nebraska Press, 2025), Karp’s research ranges across 75 years in the history of Humboldt County, tying together violent episodes from 1860 to 1935. These incidents illuminate some of the ways in which violence shaped the settlement of northwestern California and the American West more broadly.

Professor Michael Karp has accrued extensive classroom experience as a history educator across different levels of instruction from middle to high school, community college, and now at CSUSB, where he teaches a range of courses on the Palm Desert Campus, and also serves as Co-Director of the Porter History-Social Science Resource Center. He has become well known to students as a knowledgeable advisor and an empowering mentor, guiding graduate theses and helping to prepare students for many careers. With Professor Michelle Lorimer, he has recently been especially active in helping those History students who are hoping to follow him into the field of history education.

In praise of Dr. Karp’s new book, Professor Stacey L. Smith of Oregon State University notes that Karp “expertly blends environmental history, labor history, and the history of race to reveal how diverse peoples’ working relationships with the landscapes of California’s northwestern redwood country transformed patterns of global economic exchange, migration, class conflict, and intergenerational racial violence. His extensive research and sharp analysis demonstrate that this little-known region, often dismissed as an isolated rural backwater, was essential to the construction of the U.S. settler colonial state and to the expansion of capitalism across the Pacific World.”

Professor Karp double-majored in history and religious studies at Cal Poly Humboldt, and then earned his MA and PhD in history at Saint Louis University. His newest research project seeks to explore how access to water has structured race and class inequalities in California's Colorado Desert.