APS Member History

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1	Name:	Dr. William J. Cronon
	Institution:	University of Wisconsin--Madison
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	3. Social Sciences
	Subdivision:	303. History Since 1715
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1954

	William Cronon studies American environmental history and the history of the American West. His research seeks to understand the history of human interactions with the natural world: how we depend on the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives, how we modify the landscapes in which we live and work, and how our ideas of nature shape our relationships with the world around us. His first book, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983), was a study of how the New England landscape changed as control of the region shifted from Indians to European colonists. In 1984, the work was awarded the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians. In 1991, Cronon completed a book entitled Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, which examines Chicago's relationship to its rural hinterland during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1991, Dr. Cronon was awarded the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for the best literary work of non-fiction published during the preceding year; in 1992, it won the Bancroft Prize for the best work of American history published during the previous year, and was also one of three nominees for the Pulitzer Prize in History; and in 1993, it received the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History and the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Award from the Forest History Society for the best book of environmental and conservation history published during the preceding two years. In 1992, he co-edited Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past, a collection of essays on the prospects of western and frontier history in American historiography. In 1995 he edited an influential collection of essays entitled Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, examining the implication of different cultural ideas of nature for modern environmental problems. He is currently at work on a history of Portage, Wisconsin, that will explore how people's sense of place is shaped by the stories they tell about their homes, their lives, and the landscapes they inhabit. He is also completing a book entitled Saving Nature in Time: The Past and the Future of Environmentalism (based on the Wiles Lectures which he delivered at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in May 2001) on the evolving relationship between environmental history and environmentalism, and what the two might learn from each other. In July 1992, Dr. Cronon became the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after having served for more than a decade as a member of the Yale University History Department. In 2003, he was also named Vilas Research Professor at UW-Madison, the university's most distinguished chaired professorship. He has been President of the American Society for Environmental History and serves as general editor of the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series for the University of Washington Press. During the spring of 1994, he organized and chaired a faculty research seminar on "Reinventing Nature" at the University of California's Humanities Research Institute in Irvine, California. In 1996, he became Director of the Honors Program for the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a post he held until 1998, and from 1997-2000 he served as the founding Faculty Director of the new Chadbourne Residential College at UW-Madison. He has served on the Governing Council of the Wilderness Society since 1995, and on the National Board of the Trust for Public Land since 2003. Cronon has been elected president of the American Historical Association for the year 2012. Born September 11, 1954, in New Haven, Connecticut, Dr. Cronon received his B.A. (1976) from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He holds M.A. (1979), M.Phil. (1980), and Ph.D. (1990) degrees from Yale and a D.Phil. (1981) from Oxford University. Dr. Cronon has been a Rhodes Scholar, Danforth Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and MacArthur Fellow; has won prizes for his teaching at both Yale and Wisconsin; and in 1999 was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.

2	Name:	Dr. William H. Goetzmann
	Institution:	University of Texas at Austin
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	3. Social Sciences
	Subdivision:	303. History Since 1715
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1930
	Death Date:	September 7, 2010

	William H. Goetzmann received a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1957. He served on the faculty of Yale University until 1964, then moved to the University of Texas, Austin where he was the Jack S. Blanton, Sr. Chair in History and American Studies. Pulitzer and Parkman prize winner, remarkable teacher (54 dissertations, 53 theses), writer of 18 books and some 145 reviews, designer of a major television show, Dr. Goetzmann, in the best Turner tradition, brought to the study of the West imagination, sophistication, and scholarship. He created an American Studies department at Texas and helped convert the university into a true multi-racial institution. He taught and lectured in a number of European institutions and helped make the American West a field not merely of regional antiquarianism but of study of the human condition in a remarkable setting. He is the author of many books, including Army Exploration in the American West 1803-63 (1959, 1991); Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (1966); When the Eagle Screamed: The Romantic Horizon in American Diplomacy 1800-1865 (1966); The Mountain Man: Exploring the American West (1978); New Lands, New Men: America and the Second Great Age of Discovery (1986); The West of the Imagination (1986); The First Americans (1991); The Atlas of North American Exploration (1992); and Sam Chamberlin's Mexican War: The San Jacinto Paintings (1993). He has also been the editor of many books, including The American Hegelians (1973). His most recent work is entitled Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism (2009). Dr. Goetzmann was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1999. He died on September 7, 2010, at the age of 80, in Austin, Texas.

3	Name:	Dr. Oscar Handlin
	Institution:	Harvard University
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	3. Social Sciences
	Subdivision:	303. History Since 1715
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1915
	Death Date:	September 20, 2011

	Oscar Handlin ranks as one of the most prolific and influential American historians of the twentieth century, with pioneering works in the fields of immigration history, ethnic history, and social history. He began his long career at Harvard University in 1939, becoming a full professor in 1954. At a time when most historians of the U.S. were wholly absorbed by the frontier thesis of Professor F. J. Turner, Dr. Handlin turned his attention to another movement westward: that of Eastern Europeans, many of them Jews, to the United States. Dr. Handlin's best known work, The Uprooted, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, is to some extent autobiographical. His many other books include The American People in the Twentieth Century; Race and Nationality in American Life; and Boston's Immigrants, 1790-1880. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Colonial Society of Massachusetts; and the American Jewish Historical Society. Oscar Handlin died on September 20, 2011, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at age 97.

4	Name:	Dr. Robert O. Paxton
	Institution:	Columbia University
	Year Elected:	1999
	Class:	3. Social Sciences
	Subdivision:	303. History Since 1715
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1932

	Robert O. Paxton taught modern European history at the University of California, Berkeley and at the State University of New York, Stony Brook in the 1960s and at Columbia University from 1969-97. He served as chairman of the History Department at Columbia from 1980-82, specializing in the study of France under the Nazi Occupation. His principal works in this area are Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (2nd edition, 2001) and, with Michael Marrus, Vichy France and the Jews (2nd edition, 1995). He published The Anatomy of Fascism, which has been translated into ten languages, in 2004. Dr. Paxton currently holds the title of Mellon Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Columbia University.