The Illinois and the Edge Effect: Native American Power in the Tallgrass Prairie Borderlands, 1600-1800

Bob Morrissey specializes in the history of early America and the Atlantic world, American frontier and borderlands history, ethnohistory, and environmental history.  His first book tells the story of French colonists and Native peoples of the Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes in the 17th and 18th centuries.  The book is entitled, “Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in the Colonial Illinois Country, and it appears in the Early American Studies Series from University of Pennsylvania Press. 

His next project is entitled “The Illinois and the Edge Effect: People and Animals in the Tallgrass Prairie Borderlands.”  It is a study of the relationship between people and non-human nature in one of North America’s most distinctive ecological and social frontiers from 1200 to 1850.  It will be supported by fellowships by the Illinois Center for Advanced Study and from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Before arriving at Illinois in 2011, he taught at University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and at Lake Forest College.