Douglas Cazaux Sackman

I am an historian who writes about the American West, environmental history, Native American History, and the Pacific. My new book, Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America, looks at the intertwined lives and landscapes of the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the Yahi Indian man named Ishi. It considers America's fascination with Ishi as a mirror of its ambivalence about modernity and the "winning of the west." You can read more about it on the blog. My first book, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden, is a cultural and environmental history of California focusing on its iconic export--the Sunkist orange. It received the Martin Ridge Award, given to books considered classics or future classics in California history, by the Historical Society of Southern California. I have also edited the Blackwell Companion to American Environmental History, a collection of 32 essays by leading historians designed as a state of the field report for the young sub-discipline of environmental history. I wrote the chapter on food and co-authored the one on gender for this book, which is due out in May of 2010. I am a Professor of History at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma Washington, and previously taught at Oberlin College, the University of California at Irvine, and Claremont Graduate University.