A Historian Who Has
Changed Our Thinking:

A Roundtable on the
Work of Richard White

Introduction

Clyde A. Milner II

Four panelists from a special session at the 2001 conference of the Organization of American Historians in Los Angeles, California, reprise their assessments of Richard White's work. White's response to their statements also is included along with a selected list of his publications.

Understanding of the past—and of history itself—constantly changes. Historians play a role in this process, but some historians alter our conceptions more than others. For its April 2001 national conference in Los Angeles, the Organization of American Historians created two sessions, each of which considered the scholarship of an individual who, by the charge of the program committee, has changed our thinking. This duo consisted of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard University and Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University. I had the responsibility of organizing the panel of four scholars who considered Richard White’s work.	1
Members of the Western History Association know Richard White and his importance to our field of work. President of our association in 1996, he received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995. His books and articles have garnered numerous awards. One of his monographs, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), amassed five prizes and was a jury selection finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Twice he has been the recipient ofthe Governor’s Award in the state of Washington„once in 1996 for his study of the Columbia River, The Organic Machine (New York, 1995), and again in 1999 for his examination of his own family’s use of memory and history, Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family’s Past (New York, 1998). His new history of the American West, "Its Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American West (Norman, 1991) garnered the Western Heritage Wrangler Award in 1992 from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. As a faculty member at Michigan State University and later at the University of Utah, White won undergraduate teaching awards, and he has been an inspiring mentor to doctoral students at those two universities, as well as at the University of Washington and at Stanford.	2
Despite the significant honor implied by the creation of this panel for the Organization of American Historians’ conference, Richard White only reluctantly consented to the event. He is greatly respected for his own sharp, critical insights, and I sensed that he did not want this session to dissolve into a series of soft-focus tributes. I knew that he need not fear such results. For several months in advance of our session, the four panelists exchanged e-mail messages. They each wanted to examine, carefully, distinct aspects of WhiteÍs scholarship and to avoid unnecessary repetition and over- lap. Their spoken, and now published, words show their intellectual commitment to our endeavor.	. . .