Bill was born and grew up in San Francisco and was an honors student at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State College, where he earned a B.A. and an M.A. in U.S. and European history. Then he studied labor history at the University of Pittsburgh, and political sociology and cultural anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, earning another M.A. and a Ph.D. in American Civilization. He taught at Rutgers University, Camden and then was coordinator of the history instructors in Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor's Thirteen College Curriculum Program in historically Black colleges and universities in the South. He returned to the Bay Area to be professor of History and Urban Studies, and director of the American Studies Program at San Francisco State. He retired as Emeritus Professor in 2006, moving to Mills College as visiting professor of American History. He left Mills in 2015 to become the John E. McGinty Distinguished Chair in History at Salve Regina University in Newport, RI. He received numerous awards for teaching and advising at San Francisco State, and his writing and public history work received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the California Council of the Humanities, the San Francisco Historical Society, the American Catholic Historical Association, and the Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada.
Since the early 1970s, Bill has been active in many projects to expand the teaching and research of United States history in the UK and Europe. He served ten years on the Advisory Board of the American Studies Resources Centre in London and, with Christopher Brookeman, he commissioned and edited the Macmillan Press book series The Contemporary USA. He also served as Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the University of Westminster, London, and at the West University of Timişoara, Romania, and he was the Laszlo Orszach Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Pécs, Hungary. He has lectured on American political history in Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany, Denmark, Hungary, and Romania.
His books, articles, and reviews have been published in the US, UK, and Europe. Social Change in the United States, 1945-1983 was named “one of the major reference works for this period.” San Francisco 1865 – 1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development, coauthored with Robert W. Cherny, was hailed as "a major achievement" that “set the historiographical agenda for studying San Francisco politics.” For Both Cross and Flag and Church and State in the City were praised as "fascinating," and "illuminating," as well as "path breaking," and "exemplary in scholarly integration of urban, political, and religious history." His most recent article, on Catholic Action and constitutional politics in the twentieth century, appears in a French anthology The Limits of Impartiality: Judges and Justice in the United States (2025). He is also at work on a historical fiction series, "The War at Home", set in San Francisco during World War II and the Cold War.
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.