Environmental Historian, Author, and Professor
Honors Convocation
"The Portage: History and Memory in the Making
of an American Place"
Tuesday, May 25, 2004, 11:10 a.m.
William Cronon is a historian who studies American environmental history and the history of the American West. Cronon’s research seeks to understand the history of human interactions with the natural world: how we depend on the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives, how we modify the landscapes in which we live and work, and how our ideas of nature shape our relationships with the world around us. His books include Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England and Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. He is currently at work on a history of Portage, Wisconsin, that will explore how people’s sense of place is shaped by the stories they tell about their homes, their lives, and the landscapes they inhabit. In 1992, Cronon became the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after having served for more than a decade as a member of the Yale University history department. Cronon has been a Rhodes Scholar, Danforth Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and MacArthur Fellow; has won prizes for his teaching at both Yale and Wisconsin; and in 1999 was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.