1 Published BooksJohn William Nelson
John Nelson is a historian and professor, teaching at Texas Tech University. He specializes in the history of early America, with an emphasis on the borderlands of Indigenous North America and the colonial Atlantic World. His research examines the ways ecology and geography shaped the terms of cross-cultural interaction between Native peoples and European colonizers from first contact through the early republican era of the United States. Nelson earned his B.A. at Gettysburg College and his Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame.
Nelson has published work on the American West, Indigenous America, the American Revolution, and the environmental history of the Great Lakes region. His first book, Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent, explores how a particular local landscape along Chicago's continental divide influenced colonial encounters from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.
