Louis Warren

During his year as CASBS fellow, Louis Warren will be writing a book that combines histories of capitalism and conquest to explore the financing of California’s wars against Native American peoples in the nineteenth century.  

Warren is W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches the history of the American West, California history, environmental history, and U.S. history.  His most recent book, God’s Red Son:  The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America (Basic Books, 2017) received the Bancroft Prize in American History.  He is also the author of The Hunter’s Game:  Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (Yale University Press, 1997) and Buffalo Bill’s America:  William Cody and the Wild West Show (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), and editor of a textbook, American Environmental History (John Wiley, 2022).  Warren was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011-12.  His books have received the Albert Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association, the Caughey Western History Association Prize, Western Writers of America Spur Award, the Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, the National Cowboy Hall of Fame Wrangler Award for Best Non-Fiction Book. 

From 2009 to 2013, he was founding co-editor and first editor-in-chief of Boom: A Journal of California, which was honored with a Best New Magazine award in 2011.