Andrew Isenberg


Andrew Isenberg
  • Hall Distinguished Professor of American History
  • Environmental History; North American West; Borderlands; United States

Contact Info

Wescoe Hall, Room 3638
Office Hours: In Person
Mon. & Wed. | 10: 00 AM - 11:30 AM
& By Appointment

Education

Ph.D., Northwestern University, 1993
M.A., Northwestern University, 1990
B.A., St. Olaf College, 1986

Teaching

Prof. Isenberg teaches environmental history, the history of the North American West and its borderlands, and nineteenth-century U.S. history.  Over the past 25 years, Prof. Isenberg has advised 18 doctoral dissertations and served on an additional 22 dissertation committees. He is currently accepting graduate students.

Selected Publications

Books:

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.

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.