William J. Cronon

Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies. Won the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize for Changes in the Land (1983) and several other awards, including the Bancroft Prize for Nature's Metropolis (1991).His most famous book, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, explained how New England landscape changed as control of the region shifted from Indians to European colonists. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, described Chicago 's relationship to its rural hinterland during the second half of the nineteenth century. 

Former Rhodes Scholar, Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow, and President of the American Historical Association and American Society for Environmental History. His research focuses on American environmental history and the history of the American West, seeking to understand the history of human interactions with the natural world. Cronon has also explored historical geography, the U.S. 19th and 20th century social and economic history, and the writing and rhetoric of history and geography.