With five scholars specializing in Native American history and a sixth who focuses on the Yaquis of northern Mexico, the History Department offers unparalleled opportunities to students who want to study the indigenous populations  of North America and Mexico.  In addition, colleagues in several other disciplines focus their studies on the history and culture of the native populations of North America, and their expertise is at the disposal of our students as well.  The Department offers a wide variety of courses in Native American History at the undergraduate level and outstanding mentoring at the M.A. and Ph.D. levels.  In addition, the University of Oklahoma is home to the Western History Collections, one of the finest archives in the nation for the study of the American West and its peoples. 

Faculty

Gary Anderson: (Ph.D., University of Toledo)
Professor Anderson is a specialist in Native American history who has published several important books, including a recent biography of Sitting Bull, and has just written The Indian southwest, 1580-1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention. Anderson is one of the nation's leading ethno-historians. He is now at work on a study that continues his exploration of the history of the Indians of the Southwest.

Raphael Folsom: (Ph.D., Yale University)
Professor Folsom will spend academic year 2008-2009 on a post-doctoral fellowship at the Clements Center at Southern Methodist University where he will be working on a book exploring the complex relationship between Yaqui Indians and invading Spanish imperial forces in colonial Mexico. In the face of Spanish conquest, his monograph examines how Yaquis managed to establish a sphere of cultural autonomy in the colonial northwest via a mix of political shrewdness and violence. He has an article under review and has presented his research at several conferences. Professor Folsom's course offerings include Spain in America and surveys of colonial Latin America.

Albert Hurtado: (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara)
Professor Hurtado is the new, and first, Paul H. And Doris Eaton Travis Chair in Modern American History. He has received numerous prizes including the Billington Prize granted by the American Historical Association for his book, Indian Survival on the California Frontier. He is one of the nation's leading scholars of Western and Native American History, and he has just published a new book, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender and Culture in Old California. He is currently working on two major projects, a study of John Sutter and a biography of Herbert Eugene Bolton, the dean of "borderlands" studies.

Warren Metcalf: (Ph.D., Arizona State University)
Professor Metcalf is a recent addition to the faculty and is a specialist in Native American History in the twentieth century, one of the field's newest and most vital areas of research. His recently finished dissertation on Indian termination policy in the 1950s is a pathbreaking study now being revised for publication as a book, and he has already written one prize-winning essay, "Lambs of Sacrifice: Termination, the Mixed-blood Utes, and the Problem of Indian Identity."

Joshua Piker: (Ph.D., Cornell University)
In addition to a number of articles and essays, Professor Piker is the author of Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America, a study exploring the peculiar connection between Okfuskee, a Creek village, and the North American British colonies. Integrating Native American history into the broader story of the history of North America, Piker examines both the evolving relationship between Okfuskee and Charleston as well as economic development within Okfuskee as Euro-American traders altered pre-existing agricultural practices and exchange networks. He is now at work on a book tentatively titled The Deaths of Acorn Whistler, an examination of the 1752 murder of an Indian headman. To pursue this research, he received a year-long fellowship from the Huntington Library. Professor Piker teaches a wide variety of courses on colonial America and early Native American history. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University.

Fay Yarbrough: (Ph.D., Emory University)
Professor Yarbrough is the author of several articles as well as a new book, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century. The book uses innovative data to pose big questions, specifically the complex relationship between the construction of sexual boundaries and the formation of tribal and racial identities. The study analyzes how Cherokee lawmakers used marriage laws to construct conceptions of race and gender in the face of Jackson's Indian policies and how the Civil War and Reconstruction reconfigured the thinking of Cherokee legislators. Informed by a sophisticated analysis of marriage records, district clerk records, legal statutes, contemporary newspapers, and personal papers, the book guides the readers into the complex world of Cherokee communities, how marriage laws functioned in the life of everyday people in the Cherokee Nation, and how Cherokee and African-American conceptions of sexuality and interracial sex differed. Professor Yarbrough is also co-editing a collection of essays, tentatively titled Gender and Sexuality in the Indigenous Americas, 1400-1850, and has embarked on a new study of marriage, sex, race, and identity, this time among the Choctaws with the focus primarily on one family, specifically that of William Beams, a white man who married a Choctaw woman and had several children with both her and, later, with a slave woman of African descent. Her other new project is an examination of the impact of the American Civil War on the Choctaw Nation. Professor Yarbrough teaches courses on nineteenth-century American history, including a new offering titled the " Nineteenth-Century Black Experience."