The University of Oklahoma’s History Department has a long commitment to the study of the American West, its peoples, and its environment.  That commitment continues to this day with a first-rate faculty, exceptional graduate students, and unparalleled research resources.   Many faculty members publish in this field (as do some graduate students), and faculty and graduate students regularly present their findings at conferences throughout the nation.    

Faculty

Gary Anderson: (Ph.D., University of Toledo)
Professor Gary Anderson's recent books include The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1830-1875 and The Indian Southwest 1580-1830: Ethnogenesis and Cultural Reinvention. Other publications include Sitting Bull and the Paradox of Lakota Nationahood and Kinsmen of Another Kind: Dakota-White Relations in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1650-1862. He has also co-authored a new textbook on the history of the American West titled Power and Promise: The Changing American West. Professor Anderson is currently working on a biography of Will Rogers and a book on Indians and the Great Plains Wars, 1830-1890. He regularly teaches the U.S. Survey as well as courses on Native American history at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Matt DeSpain: (Ph.D., University of Oklahoma)
Doctor DeSpain is scholar of the American West and Native American history. His past research explores the imagined West and the varying meanings and political utility embedded in the West’s earliest mythic icon of the mountain man. His more recent research focuses on various institutions of violence in the West and how masculine ideals and identity among differing groups contributed greatly to creating a West of cultural collision. In particular, Dr. DeSpain is studying how practices of violence and masculine ideals familiar to the antebellum South were carried westward and became the foundations of individual identity and social standing among fur trade men during the Jacksonian period. He is also the editor of The Journal of Chickasaw History and Culture and co-editor of the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade Journal. Dr. Despain offers a wide variety of courses on American history, the American West, American Frontiers, and Native American history for both the history department and Native American Studies.

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.

R. Warren Metcalf: (Ph.D., Arizona State University)
Professor Warren Metcalf is the author of Termination's Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah and is a scholar of twentieth-century Native American history. Focusing on the mixed-blood Ute Indians of Utah, this book examines the motives of those who sponsored the termination policy and its complicated impact on the native population. He is now at work on two book-length projects: one focuses on the mixed-blood tradition in Oklahoma, and the other examines the relationship between Mormons and Native Americans. Professor Metcalf teaches a wide-range of courses, including the U.S. Survey, a variety of offerings in Native American history, the graduate "Methods" seminar, and a popular course titled "Twentieth-Century America in Film."

Donald J. Pisani: (Ph.D., University of California, Davis)
Professor Pisani holds the Merrick Chair of Western American History and has written extensively on the history of the American environment. He is the author of many books and articles and is considered a leading authority on the history of water policy in the United States. His most recent book, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902-1935, won the Abel Wolman Prize, and he is now finishing a new book on the history of land speculation, "squatting," civil order, and law in the nineteenth century. Along the way, he has published important articles in a variety of journals and, in recognition of his scholarship, has been elected the president of two professional organizations, the American Society for Environmental History and the Agricultural History Society. Professor Pisani offers courses on environmental history at both the graduate and undergraduate levels and has a large number of M.A. and Ph.D. students working under his direction.

Brad Raley: (Ph.D., University of Oklahoma)
Dr. Raley specializes in Western, Environmental, and Western Film history. His manuscript focuses on Grand Junction, Colorado, and the attempt to construct a profitable fruit industry based on access to plentiful irrigation water—a requirement in a high mountain desert climate. This study looks at the role those community boosters played in recruiting external financing to build the necessary diversions and canals. The process was too expensive for locals, but also proved unprofitable for outside financiers. Locals were quite aware of this fact and worked to convince external companies to pay for the canals, all the while confident that the control would remain in local hands. After completing small projects this way, the community looked first to a failed state effort (using prison labor) and finally to the newly formed Bureau of Reclamation. The study also examines the impact of irrigated fruit culture in the valley, from the quick profits and speculative deals, to the long-term environmental damage farmers inflicted on the valley. Using a variety of local sources, state agricultural experts, and traveler reports, the study concludes that local farmers both over-watered and over-used pesticides on their fruit trees. These factors gradually left many orchards unusable, and farmers slowly abandoned them to other land uses. Dr. Raley teaches US History from 1492 to 1865, US History 1865 to the Present, The History of the American West, Environmental History, and a course on Western Film entitled, America through Western Film.

Glen Roberson: (Ph.D., Oklahoma State University)
In addition to numerous book reviews and articles in various professional journals and encyclopedia articles in the Oklahoma Encyclopedia of History and Culture, Doctor Roberson has written City in the Osage Hills: A History of Tulsa. This work centers on the implications of cultural clashes between Native American Indians and the white settlers who arrived after the beginning of the Twentieth Century. It also addresses the question of how cultural norms and values impact the natural environment of Northeast Oklahoma. Coming soon is the book, Stay Warm: An Oral History of Oklahomans in the Korean War and a manuscript to be published by the National Park Service, Preservation Basics. He is currently working on two untitled article-length projects - the history of the Oklahoma City water system, a study to investigate the ecological and governmental issues revolving around the urban quest for water sources in an expanding city and the ecological impact of the construction of the Pensacola Dam (also known as the Grand River Dam), built in Northeast Oklahoma as a Works Progress Administration project under the New Deal. Doctor Roberson has taught U.S. History Since 1877 and has created two courses, The History of the Great Plains and The Urban Twentieth Century West that he now teaches. He also currently works as an administrator of the Certified Local Governments Program, Preserve America, and the Centennial Farm and Ranch Program at the Oklahoma Historical Society. He received his Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University.

William W. Savage, Jr.: (Ph.D., University of Oklahoma)
Professor Savage is a specialist in Western American history and Oklahoma history and has published, among others, a highly regarded book on the cattle industry--one of the first to discuss Native Americans as businessmen--and one on the mythic status of the cowboy in American culture, The Cowboy Hero. His current interests include an examination of how mainstream American popular culture has depicted the West.

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."