Richard White

Professor Richard White is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History and has experience teaching at Michigan State University, University of Washington, and University of Utah. Also, Professor White is a faculty co-director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, former President of the Organization of American Historians, and the principal investigator for the "Shaping the West", a project in the Spatial History Lab at Stanford University, which explores the construction of space by transcontinental railroads during the late nineteenth century. He received a MacArthur fellowship and was awarded a Mellon Distinguished Professor grant in 2007. He is an historian of the United State specializing in the American West, the history of capitalism, environmental history, history and memory, and Native American history. His work has occasionally spilled into Mexico, Canada, France, Australia, and Ireland. He has authored Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family’s Past, The Organic Machine, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own:” A New History of the American West, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees and Navajos, and Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington, 1790-1940. He has been awarded the Rawley Prize, Francis Parkman Prize, Gomroy Prize, Governor’s Award, Los Angeles Times Book Award, and many more for his books.