Bill Issel is an award winning historian who studies the role of religion, social class, race, and ethnicity in the politics of American cities, particularly the city of San Francisco. He is professor emeritus at San Francisco State University, and he was a long-term visiting professor of history at Mills College, and a Fulbright scholar in England, Hungary, and Romania.
A popular and influential teacher of undergraduate and graduate students, he has received numerous awards for excellence in teaching and advising. Colleagues reported that he was “a creative thinker” and a teacher of “clarity and elegance” whose classes often sparkled with “an electrical charge of mental excitement.” Grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the California Council of the Humanities supported his extensive public history work, including curating the history exhibition marking the 1996 opening of the new main public library in San Francisco. The San Francisco Historical Society honored him with its 2014 Award of Merit for his teaching, research, and writing on San Francisco history, and in 2017 he received the American Catholic Historical Association’s Lifetime of Distinguished Scholarship Award for his role in promoting research and writing on religion in American urban history.
His books, essays, and reviews on American social and political history have been published in the US, UK, and Europe. He contributed the chapter on the politics of public school reform in Michael B. Katz’s anthology Education in American History: Readings on the Social Issues (1973). His book Social Change in the United States, 1945-1983 (1985) was published in the US and UK and was named “one of the major reference works for this period.” His book San Francisco 1865-1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (1986), coauthored with Robert W. Cherny, was hailed as "a major achievement" that “set the historiographical agenda for studying San Francisco politics.” He also co-edited and contributed a chapter on Catholic social teaching and the labor movement to American Labor and the Cold War (2004), His books For Both Cross and Flag (2010) and Church and State in the City (2013) were praised as "fascinating", "illuminating", "path breaking", and "exemplary in scholarly integration of urban, political, and religious history." He also wrote a memoir, Baptized on the Fourth of July: A Catholic Boyhood in San Francisco, and three novels set in San Francisco during World War II: Coit Tower, Traitors, and Patriots. His most recent article, on Catholic Action and constitutional politics, was published in France, in: The Limits of Impartiality: Judges and Justice in the United States (2025).
Bill was born and grew up in the Panhandle and Ingleside neighborhoods in San Francisco. At thirteen he survived a severe case of bulbar polio serious enough to require the Catholic last rites. He graduated from Archbishop Riordan High School at seventeen, and he married and started a family at eighteen. After deciding to attend college in pursuit of a degree in electrical engineering, as he explained in a 2013 American Historical Association interview, he encountered “a series of brilliant teachers at Berkeley and San Francisco State, notably William Freehling, John Shover, Joel Silbey, Vartan Gregorian, and the late Carl Schorske who inspired me to leave behind the family tradition of working in the building and construction industry for the world of historical scholarship, college and university teaching, and public history.”
After earning B.A. and M.A. degrees in U.S. and European history, he drove across the country with his first wife Susan and their three young children to the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught U.S. history and studied American politics and labor history. When the University of Pennsylvania offered him a generous fellowship to study political sociology and cultural anthropology he moved to Philadelphia, where he earned another M.A. and a Ph.D. at Penn and taught at the Camden campus of Rutgers.
In 1967 and 1968, he coordinated the history teachers in Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor's Thirteen College Curriculum Program in historically Black colleges and universities in the South, and at San Francisco State he taught and advised students in the Veterans’ Special Admission Program and mentored students in the California Pre-doctoral Program. Faculty colleagues elected him to serve on the university’s Academic Freedom Committee and he was also elected the faculty union’s delegate to the San Francisco county labor council. After retiring as Emeritus Professor in 2005, he taught ten years at Mills College and then spent a year in Newport, RI, where he was the John E. McGinty Distinguished Chair at Salve Regina University.
Beginning in 1973, when he was part of a two-year American Historical Association project, he has been active in promoting the study and teaching of United States history in the UK and Europe. He lectured on American political history in Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany, Denmark, Hungary, and Romania. He spent ten years on the Advisory Board of the American Studies Resources Centre in London, where, with its director Christopher Brookeman, he organized exhibitions and symposia and commissioned and edited the Macmillan Press book series, The Contemporary USA. He was Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the University of Westminster in London (1978-1979) and the László Országh Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Pécs in Hungary (2008-2009). His third Fulbright professor position was at the West University of Timişoara in Romania (2018).
Bill is married to clinical psychologist and early childhood mental health specialist Dr. Mary Claire Heffron. They are the parents of five adult children and they have four adult grandchildren.