OAH Distinguished Lecturer Profile
Thomas G. Andrews, an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder, specializes in the social and environmental history of the American West. His first book, Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War (2008), won six awards, including the Bancroft Prize. His second book, Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies (2015), examines the environmental history of the Colorado headwaters region of Rocky Mountain National Park from the Pleistocene through the Anthropocene. He is now working on a book on human-animal relationships in U.S. history—a project supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. He teaches a wide range of courses in environmental history, the history of the U.S. West, and other subjects, and is passionate about educating current and future history teachers.
Drawing upon his book, *Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies* (Harvard University Press, 2015), Thomas Andrews places the 2016 centennial of the National Park Service within a broad environmental and historical context. A perplexing riddle looms at the center of this lecture: Why did the ecosystems of the Colorado River headwaters experience more dramatic and consequential changes under a century of federal management than during twelve previous millennia of inhabitation and use by native peoples and American settlers?