Timeline – 2012 – Another AHA President

Following in the footsteps of UW historians Frederick Jackson Turner and Merle Curti, environmental historian William Cronon served as president of the American Historical Association in 2012.

Cronon did his BA (1976) at UW-Madison and his graduate degrees at Oxford and Yale. He joined our faculty as Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies in 1992. His best known work, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991), won the Bancroft Prize in American history.

Cronon describes his presidential address to the AHA, “Storytelling,” as “part manifesto, part state of the field, part autobiography, and most of all a meditation on teaching and storytelling as essential activities of our discipline.” Cronon wields his narrative skills both in print and in a variety of digital formats.