Office: 151B Humanities

Ph.D., Notre Dame University
 
I specialize in the history of early America, with an emphasis on the borderlands of Indigenous North America and the colonial Atlantic World. My research examines the ways ecology and geography shaped the terms of cross-cultural interaction between Native peoples and European colonizers from first contact through the early republican era of the United States.

At Texas Tech, I teach a range of courses in United States history, Colonial America, the American West, Atlantic World, and Native American history.

I earned my B.A. at Gettysburg College and my Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame.

My recent book, Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent (2023), explores how a particular local landscape along Chicago's continental divide influenced colonial encounters from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Pushing beyond political and cultural explanations for Indigenous-European relations in the borderlands of North America, my book places environmental and geographic realities at the center of the history of Indigenous Chicago, offering a new explanation for how the United States gained control of the North American interior through a two-pronged subjugation of both the landscapes and peoples of the continent.

I have published work on the American West, the American Revolution in Indian Country, and the environmental histories of the Great Lakes region and the Llano Estacado. My article “The Ecology of Travel on the Great Lakes Frontier: Native Knowledge, European Dependence, and the Environmental Specifics of Contact” won the 2018 prize for best article in the Michigan Historical Review. My most recent article, “Sigenauk's War of Independence: Anishinaabe Resurgence and the Making of Indigenous Authority in the Borderlands of Revolution,” out with the William and Mary Quarterly in October 2021, was awarded the Dorothy Schwieder Prize for best article in Midwestern History from the Midwest History Association.

I have been fortunate to receive generous grants and fellowships through the Newberry Library, the Bentley Library, the American Philosophical Society, and the William Clements Library to help sponsor my research.

Those interested can read more about my teaching and writing—including my next book project—on my website, https://www.johnwilliamnelsonhistory.com/.