Donald J. Pisani
Merrick Chair of Western American HistoryI was born and raised in Sacramento, California. After a thoroughly uneventful and inauspicious childhood, I received my B.A. degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964. There followed a two-year stint in the United States Army and another two years as a public school teacher. Those two experiences convinced me to pursue a Ph.D. degree in American history at the University of California, Davis, where I worked with Professor W. Turrentine Jackson. After a one-year appointment at San Diego State University, I spent 13 years at Texas A&M University before accepting my present position as Merrick Professor of Western American History at the University of Oklahoma in 1990.
My major research and teaching fields are the American West and American Environmental History, and I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in those specialties. I am the author of From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California and the West, 1850-1931 (1984); To Reclaim a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public Policy, 1848-1902 (1992); and Water, Land, & Law in the West: The Limits of Public Policy, 1850-1920 (1996). My current project is a book on national water policy in the early decades of the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the early history of the Bureau of Reclamation and its vision for the West.Although my research focuses on natural resources and the environment, my graduate students choose thesis and dissertation topics in all areas of the history of the American West. I am a past president of the American Society for Environmental History.
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