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.

Sterling Evans: (Ph.D., University of Kansas)
Dr. Evans came in January 2009 as the newly endowed Welsh Chair.  He has research and teaching interests in the history of the trans-national Great Plains, the U.S-Mexican and U.S.-Canadian borderlands, agricultural history, and environmental history.  These interests meet in his book Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, which won the Theodore Saloutos Best Book Prize from the Agricultural History Society in 2008.  He also edited the books The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests: Essays on Regional History of the 49th Parallel and American Indians in American History, 1870-2001: A Companion Reader, and is the author of a number of articles in a variety of journals.  He is active in such organizations as the Western History Association, the Agricultural History Society, the American Society for Environmental History, and the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Environmental History.  His interest in the environmental history of Latin America prompted him to write The Green Republic: A Conservation History of Costa Rica, and to work on his current project, Damming Sonora: Water, Agriculture, and Environmental Change in Northwest Mexico.  Evans received his doctorate in history from the University of Kansas.

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."

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.

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.

David Wrobel (Ph.D., Ohio University)

David Wrobel teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the American West, Modern American Thought and Culture, the Progressive Era, Historical Methods, and the U.S. Survey: 1865-Present.  He is the author of Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory and the Creation of the American West (2002); The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (1993); and numerous articles and essays, including “Exceptionalism and Globalism: Travel Writers and the Nineteenth-Century American West, reprinted in David Roediger, ed., The Best American History Essays 2008 (2008). He is the co-editor of Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West (2001); and Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity (1997).  His current book projects are "Global West, American Frontier: 19th and 20th-Century Travelers’ Accounts" (for the University of New Mexico Press’s Calvin Horn Series); and “The West and America, 1900-2000: A Regional History” (for Cambridge University Press).  He co-edits two book series: The Modern American West (University of Arizona Press) and The Urban West (University of Nevada Press).

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."