writings

Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America 

(Oxford University Press)

“""Wild Men now leads my ‘top ten’ list of books that every person who cares about the American West should read.”

~Patricia Limerick

"Considering Ishi and his anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber, together is a beautiful stroke of genius and justice; this book interrogates the two men's lives together and finds in their differences and their resemblances much that has never been said before about the times, the places, and the characters of each. It's a timely reconsideration of who each man was and what his circumstances were, in an era that is not quite bygone enough, since we are still wrestling with its meaning and legacies. It is a graceful work of meta-anthropology to subject Kroeber to the same scrutiny."

~ Rebecca Solnit,

A Companion to American Environmental History 

(Blackwell)

“A model compilation … It not only takes the analytical measure of the field of American environmental history, it forthrightly blazes trails for the field in the future.”

William Deverell, Director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West

"A fantastic guide to environmental history that will change how you think about the past."

Ted Steinberg, Case Western Reserve University

“This superb volume, a collaboration of established scholars and rising stars, is now the essential guide to the expanding field of environmental history.”

Elliott West, University of Arkansas

Articles and Op-eds

Articles and book chapters in environmental history and California and the West; also, pieces in popular media connecting past to present—articles on Mad Men and its Sunkist subtext, on the environmental justice and history context of the tense encounter between a birder and dog walker in Central Park; eugenics and Jedediah Smith's legacy on the American River, Trump's first last stand at Alamo; the life and tragic death of Tyre Nichols, along the Sacramento and Mississippi rivers...