Western, Native American, & Environmental History

The Department of History at the University of Oklahoma has one of the premier programs in the history of the American West, Native Americans and the Environment. This web page introduces the reader to some of the reasons why. The department has a long tradition in these areas of study, a first rate faculty, exceptional graduate students, and unparalleled research resources. The department is committed to expanding on this base; it offers special fellowships, innovative lecture series, and a dynamic sense of purpose devoted to seeking new ways to enhance the understanding of these key areas of the American experience.

The University of Oklahoma

Many of the faculty in the University of Oklahoma's Department of History specialize in Native American, Western and/or environmental history, and they take pride in their commitment to the close, one-to-one mentoring that is the hallmark of our program. They are all engaged in exciting research and publish books and articles that help define their respective fields.

Gary C. 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 that continues his exploration of the history of the Indians of the Southwest.

Albert L. Hurtado (Ph.D., 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.

Clara Sue Kidwell (Ph.D., University of Oklahoma)
Professor Kidwell is a scholar of Native American history who recently published an important book in the field titled Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818-1918. Other publications include articles on Native American religion, education, sovereignty, medicine, and science as well as studies on Indian women and their role as cultural mediators. She teaches courses in Native American philosophy, directs the Native American Studies Program, and is currently continuing her research on Native American religion.

R. 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)
Prof. Piker specializes in the history of Native Americans in the colonial period. His award-winning first book, Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America, uses community history to re-frame standard narratives of both Native and American experiences. His next book, “The Deaths of Acorn Whistler,” will use a controversy stemming from a 1752 murder to investigate an early American conversation about power and meaning. This book will demonstrate the inter-penetration of imperial, colonial, national, and communal politics; it will argue for the importance of listening to stories that emerge from Native villages and colonial capitals.

Donald J. Pisani (Ph.D., University of California, Davis)
Professor Pisani, the Merrick Professor of History, is one of the nation's leading environmental historians and is a past president of the American Society for Environmental History. He is recognized as the foremost expert in the United States on the history of natural resources, the environmental, law, and public policy in the West. His book, To Reclaim a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public Policy, 1848-1902, was a co-winner of the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Award for its contribution to the history of the environmental and natural resources. His most recent book, Water, Land, and Law in the West, continues his exploration of important environmental issues, as does his current research on water and public policy in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Lindsay Robertson (Ph.D., University of Virginia)
Professor Robertson is a member of the law faculty and an adjunct member of the History Department who works closely with our graduate students. He is a specialist in Native American law, directs the Center for the Study of American Indian Law and Policy, and is currently working on a book on a nineteenth-century Supreme Court decision, Johnson v. M'Intosh, that has decisively shaped federal Indian law for well over a century.

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 interest include an examination of how mainstream American popular culture has depicted the West.

Research Facilities

The University of Oklahoma Library has over 2.5 million books, more than 1.6 million government publications, over three million pieces of microform, and subscribes to 16,000 journals. The University is also home to the Western History Collection, one of the most important facilities in the world for the study of Native American, Western American, and environmental history. It contains 65,000 books, 10,000 cubic feet of manuscripts, and 160,000 photographs. The manuscript collection of the Carl Albert Center houses the papers of many public figures important to the American West, and the new state-of-the-art Oklahoma Natural History Museum, one of the nation's largest connected to either a public or private university, offers rich research opportunities for those interested in studying Native American, Western American, and environmental history. Finally, the Oklahoma Historical Society, only a short drive away in Oklahoma City, offers the researcher access to thousands of documents.

Other links....

The Department of Anthropology
Native American Studies Program

All photographs are from the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma. The Department of History thanks the Western History Collections for the use of these images.