Office: 407 Humanities

Ph.D., University of Oklahoma

Catharine R. Franklin specializes in the history of the nineteenth-century American West, with an emphasis on indigenous peoples.  Her research and teaching interests lie in the history of the United States Army, Native communities in the Great Plains, and the borderlands of Canada and Mexico.

Her book manuscript, “The Army Stands Between”: Soldiers and Indians in the West, upends the story of the so-called “Indian Wars.”  Federal authority, indigenous resistance, and borderlands and transnational themes inform her work. 

A native New Yorker, Dr. Franklin earned a B.A. in English Literature and American Studies from The City College of New York, and the M.A. and Ph.D in History at the University of Oklahoma.  She has received short-term fellowships from the United States Army Center of Military History, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and the Newberry Library in Chicago, as well as long-term fellowships from the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, and the Library of Congress.  Dr. Franklin has written award-winning journal articles for Montana: The Magazine of Western History and the Southwestern Historical Quarterly.  She serves on the editorial board of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly as well.

In addition to her work in the American West, Dr. Franklin also maintains an active interest in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, with a focus on the police state.  Her course offerings include United States Military Affairs to 1900, the "Indian Wars," the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, Native American ethnohistory, and the first half of the survey in American history.  She is developing new courses on the 1918 influenza epidemic and the role of the horse in American history.