Elliott West

Elliot West is a historian and the Alumni Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Arkansas since 1979. He is a specialist in the social and environmental history of the American West and in American Indian history and is the author of eight books, four of which have received national awards. His most recent book, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion, won the 2024 Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for History.

In addition to his books, West has won accolades for his teaching. In 2009 he was one of three finalists for the Robert Foster Cherry Award for the most outstanding classroom teacher in the nation. In 2017-18 he was the Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford. He has received two Western Heritage Awards and is a past president of the Western History Association, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the study of the American West and western Canada.

Articles by this Author

Two Years That Made the West, Summer 2024 | Vol. 69, No. 3

In a momentous couple of years, the young United States added more than a million square miles of territory, including Texas and California.

The Youngest Pioneers, December 1985 | Vol. 37, No. 1

For many children who accompanied their parents west across the continent in the 1840s and '50s, the journey was a supreme adventure.

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