Andrew Isenberg
- Hall Distinguished Professor of American History
- Environmental History; North American West; Borderlands; United States
Contact Info
Mon. | 2:00 PM -4:00pm
Education —
Teaching —
Prof. Isenberg teaches environmental history, the history of the North American West and its borderlands, and U.S. history. At KU, he has taught the following courses:
History 128: History of the United States through the Civil War
History 301: The Historian’s Craft
History/Environmental Studies 347: North American Environmental History
History 353: Indigenous Peoples of North America
History 357: History of the North American West
History/Indigenous Studies 400: Indigenous People of the Great Plains
History 801: Colloquium in Borderlands History (Graduate)
History 879: Colloquium in North American Environmental History (Graduate)
History 891: Colloquium in Nineteenth-Century American History (Graduate)
History 982: Colloquium in the History of the North American West (Graduate)
Selected Publications —
Books:
Isenberg, A.C. The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025).
Isenberg, A.C. The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 second, twentieth-anniversary edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
J.M. Turner and A.C. Isenberg. The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2018).
Isenberg, A.C., ed. The California Gold Rush: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2018).
Isenberg, A.C., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Isenberg, A.C. Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013).
Isenberg, A.C., ed. The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape, and Urban Space (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2006).
Isenberg, A.C. Mining California: An Ecological History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005).
Selected Articles and Chapters in Books
Isenberg, A.C., “The Environment, the United States, and the World in the Nineteenth Century,” in K. Hoganson and J. Sexton, eds., The Cambridge History of America and the World, Volume II: 1820-1900, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 361-383.
Turner, J.M., and A.C. Isenberg, “Earth Day at 50,” Science, 368 (April 17, 2020), 215.
Isenberg, A.C. "Rushing for Gold Redux," Pacific Historical Review, 88 (Spring 2019), 337-345.
Isenberg, A.C., K.G. Morrissey, and L.S. Warren, “Imperial Deserts,” Global Environment, new ser. v. 12 n. 1 (2019), 9-21.
Isenberg, A.C. "’A land of hardship and distress’: Camels, North American Deserts, and the Limits of Conquest," Global Environment, new ser. v. 12 n. 1 (2019) 84-101.
Isenberg, A.C., “The Real Wealth of the World: Hydraulic Mining and the Environment in the Circum-Pacific Goldfields,” in S. Tufnel and B. Mountford, eds., A Global History of Gold Rushes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 209-228.
Isenberg, A.C., “Industrial Empire: The American Conquest of the West, 1845-1900,” in J.D. Wells, ed., The Routledge History of Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Routledge, 2018), 333-345.
Isenberg, A.C. and L. Kessler. "Settler Colonialism and the Environmental History of the North American West," Journal of the West, 56 (Fall 2017), 57-66.
Isenberg, A.C., and T. Richards, Jr., “Alternative Wests: Rethinking Manifest Destiny,” Pacific Historical Review, 86 (February 2017), 4-17.
Isenberg, A.C. "An Empire of Remedy: Vaccination, Natives, and Narratives in the North American West," Pacific Historical Review, 86 (February 2017), 84-113.
Isenberg, A.C., “Mining, Memory, and History,” in G. Vrtis and J.R. McNeill, eds., Mining North America: An Environmental History since 1522 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 398-412.
Isenberg, A.C., “From the Periphery to the Center: North American Environmental History,” Global Environment, old ser. n. 12 (January 2014), 80-101.
Isenberg, A.C. "Between Mexico and the United States: From Indios to Vaqueros in the Pastoral Borderlands," in J. Tutino, ed., Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 85-109.
Isenberg, A.C. "The Code of the West: Sexuality, Homosociality, and Wyatt Earp," Western Historical Quarterly, 40 (Summer 2009), 139-157.
Isenberg, A.C. "Mercurial Nature: The California Gold Country and the Coal Fields of the Ruhr Basin, 1850-1900," in U. Lehmkuhl and H. Wellenreuther, eds., Historians and Nature: Comparative Approaches to Environmental History (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 125-145.
Isenberg, A.C. "‘To see inside of an Indian’: Missionaries and Dakotas in the Minnesota Borderlands," in K. Mills and A. Grafton, eds., Conversion: Old Worlds and New (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 218-240.
Isenberg, A.C. "The Moral Ecology of Wildlife," in N. Rothfels, ed., Representing Animals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 48-64.
Isenberg, A.C. "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.
Isenberg, A.C., "The Returns of the Bison: Nostalgia, Profit, and Preservation," Environmental History, 2 (April 1997), 179-196.