Bill (Wilbur) Miller retired from the history department at Stony Brook University just before Covid struck, so he missed Zoom teaching without regrets. He has taught courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the history New York City and the history of Crime and Criminal Justice. This last is his specialization, focusing on the history of policing. He has published Cops and Bobbies (Chicago 1977), a comparison of New York and London Police in the mid 19th century. He also published a study of pre-prohibition moonshiners and federal revenuers in the mountain South (Revenuers and Moonshiners (North Carolina, 1991). Most recent is A History of Private Policing in the United States (Bloomsbury, 2019). He also edited a five volume encyclopedia, The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America (Sage, 2012). He was an undergraduate at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement and graduate student at Columbia during the 1968 strike. Both experiences made him very aware of policing and how the student movement changed within four years.
