Richard White

Historian

• Born: May 28, 1947

Contribution: Richard White is an award-winning historian, educator, and author, best known for his work in the study of the American West, Native American history, railroads, and environmental history.

Early Life

Richard White was born on May 28, 1947. His mother, Sara Walsh, had moved to Chicago, Illinois, from County Kerry in Ireland in 1935; his father, Harry White, was from Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His mother’s background as an Irish Catholic immigrant affected White as a child, especially in her storytelling about her early experiences in Ireland and moving to America at the age of sixteen. This family history would play a significant role in White’s early life and, ultimately, his career.

White attended college at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he received his undergraduate degree in history in 1969. For his graduate studies, White attended the University of Washington in Seattle, earning his MA in 1972 and his PhD in 1975. His dissertation examined the history of Island County, Washington, up to the late twentieth century. White quickly established himself as a rising scholar of the American West and was poised to become one of the most renowned historians of the New Western History movement.

Life’s Work

As he continued his work with the New Western History movement, which emerged during the 1980s, White reinterpreted Western history to include all people of that region, including Native Americans and Spaniards, rather than just the northern European settlers. His first book, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington (1979), was based on his doctoral dissertation. In this expanded history of Island County, White explores the relationships between human-induced environmental changes and social changes and argues that the Native Americans significantly altered their environment before the arrival of European settlers. It won the Forest History Society Book Award in 1980.

By 1980, White was working as an associate professor of history at Michigan State University. In 1981 he won the Theodore C. Blegen Award for a scholarly article on forest and conservation history, “Poor Men on Poor Lands: The Back-to-the-Land Movement of the Early Twentieth Century; A Case Study,” which appeared in the February 1980 issue of Pacific Historical Review. White later moved to the University of Utah, where he taught the history of the environment and Indian history.

White became McClelland Professor of History at the University of Washington in 1990 and continued to write as he taught. In his 1991 book “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West, White examines the time period from the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest to the ascendancy of US president Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The book won the 1992 Western Heritage Award for nonfiction books.

Also in 1991, White published The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, in which he examines the area between Lake Erie and the Ohio River and how European settlers there were forced to adjust to the politics and culture of Native American societies. White argues that Native Americans were not always the victims and that they acted with independence when dictating the terms for their alliance with European fur traders. The Middle Ground won major history prizes, including the 1992 Albert J. Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association and the 1994 Society of Colonial Wars book award. It was also the recipient of the Francis Parkman Prize, the Albert B. Corey Prize, and the James A. Rawley Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1992.

In 1995, White was honored with the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The following year, he received a Washington State Governor’s Writers Award for his book The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (1995). He followed this work a few years later with Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family’s Past (1998). The work, which represented a departure from White’s usual work, is a combination of memoir and family history. In it, White tells his mother’s story and depicts the narrative of her life in Ireland and early years in the United States.

White left his position at the University of Washington in 1998, much to the disappointment of his alma mater. It took White months to decide between offers from Harvard University and Stanford University, but he ultimately chose the latter. As Stanford’s Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, White was the principal investigator for the Shaping the West project in the school’s Spatial History Lab, which he cofounded and directed. The project’s researchers use visual analysis and digital technology to identify patterns in their research. The project also examines the transcontinental railroad and historic ideas of space in the American West.

In his 2011 book Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, which took him twelve years to complete, White looks at how early corporations profited from the railroads and their construction, as well as how this introduced new fields for corruption. Using the private papers of railroad moguls, White demonstrates how bribes and false financial reports were utilized frequently in the competitive railroad industry. Railroaded won the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in history. White was himself the recipient of a 2013 Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Environmental History.

White's next book, Republic For Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (2017), reexamines the economic trajectory of the post–Civil War period, particularly exploring what politicians had desired in contrast with the results by the turn of the twentieth century. The book won the 2018 Ellis W. Hawley Prize.

In 2017, White became a Rogers Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library. By early 2018, he had retired, remaining a professor emeritus, but went on to publish a photo history of California sites, titled California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History (2020). In 2022, he published Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University. This work delves into what he concludes was a coverup of the killing of a founder of Stanford University in 1905.

White served on the boards of a number of professional organizations, including the Organization of American Historians (OAH), for which he also served as president in 2006. Additionally, White consulted as an expert witness for several Native American tribes over the decades.

Impact

White’s research and publications have helped change the way other historians approach studies of the American West, particularly the relationships between Native Americans and European settlers. Through his collaborative research at Stanford University, White shed new light on the railroad industry of the nineteenth century and how it reshaped American society. In recognition of his work, White was inducted into the American Philosophical Society in 2016.

Personal Life

White and his wife, Beverly Purrington, live in California.

Bibliography

Boscia, Ted. “Picture This: Spatial History Lab Opens New Window on the Past.” Stanford Magazine. Stanford U, Nov.–Dec. 2007. Web. 10 July 2013.

Dotigna, Randy. “Railroad Historian Says California Is on Wrong Track.” Christian Science Monitor. Christian Science Monitor, 13 Feb. 2012. Web. 10 July 2013.

"Richard White." Stanford University, 2022, history.stanford.edu/people/richard-white. Accessed 19 Sept. 2024.

White, Richard. “What History Tells Us about High-Speed Rail.” Interview by Rachel Stern. Palo Alto Patch. Patch, 10 May 2011. Web. 10 July 2013.

White, Richard. “Writing the Rails.” Interview by Matt Stevens. Huntington Frontiers. Huntington Library, 27 Feb. 2012. Web. 10 July 2013.