OAH Distinguished Lecturer Profile
Anne Hyde studies the history of the North American West, specializing in the nineteenth century, and is particularly interested in race and family history She is a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and the editor-in-chief of the Western Historical Quarterly. Prior to coming to Oklahoma, she taught at Colorado College for two decades, serving as the chair of the race and ethnic studies program and as the director of the Partnership for Civic Engagement, the Hulbert Center for Southwest Studies, and the Crown Faculty Development Center. She has published widely in the history of the American West, and has been elected to the boards of the Western History Association and the American Historical Association. Her most recent books are An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820–1920 (1991), The West in the History of the Nation (2 vols., 2000), and Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860 (2011), winner of the Bancroft Prize and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is writing a history of mixed-race families in nineteenth-century North America.
Bancroft-prize winning historian Anne Hyde details stories about racial mixing in the American West. Focusing on the fur trade, and that world of mixed race relationships she describes a peaceful, productive version of that world, not The Revenant. Tracing several generations of western families, she lays out a west filled with surprising families. From all classes and racial groups, these families were significant players in many parts of the West in the nineteenth century. Using specific family examples, she describes what happens to these mixed race families after the U.S. state becomes concerned about mixing blood in the 1880s.
