Research and Teaching Interests: Environmental history; the history of the American West; nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States; the encounter between Euroamericans and natives; memory.

Books:

ed., The Nature of Cities:  Culture, Landscape, and Urban Space (Rochester, New York:  University of Rochester Press, 2006).

Mining California:  An Ecological History (New York:  Hill and Wang, 2005).

• A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2006.

The Destruction of the Bison:  An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Selected Articles and Book Chapters:

"Mercurial Nature:  The California Gold Country and the Coal Fields of the Ruhr Basin, 1850-1900," in Ursula Lehmkuhl and Hermann Wellenreuther, eds., Historians and Nature:  Comparative Approaches to Environmental History (Oxford:  Berg, 2007), 125-145.

"The Industrial Alchemy of Hydraulic Mining:  Law, Technology, and Resource-Intensive Industrialization," in Jeffry M. Diefendorf and Kurk Dorsey, eds., City, Country, Empire:  Landscapes in Environmental History (Pittsburgh:  University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 122-137.

"Environment and the Nineteenth-Century West; or, Process Encounters Place," in William Deverell, ed., A Companion to the History of the American West (Malden, MA:  Blackwell, 2004), 77-92.

"‘To see inside of an Indian’:  Missionaries and Dakotas in the Minnesota Borderlands," in Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton, eds., Conversion:  Old Worlds and New (Rochester, New York:  University of Rochester Press, 2003), 218-240.

"The Moral Ecology of Wildlife," in Nigel Rothfels, ed., Representing Animals (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2002), 48-64.

"Historicizing Natural Environments:  The Deep Roots of Environmental History," in Lloyd Cutler and Sarah Maza, eds., A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Malden, MA:  Blackwell, 2002), 372-389.

"The Market Revolution in the Borderlands:  George Champlin Sibley in Missouri and New Mexico, 1808-1826." Journal of the Early Republic, 26 (Fall 2001), 445-465.

"The Returns of the Bison:  Nostalgia, Profit, and Preservation," Environmental History, 2 (April 1997), 179-196.