Continental Reckoning: A Conversation with Elliott West and Megan Kate Nelson

Winner of the 2024 Bancroft Prize in American History, Elliott West’s book explores how expansion, migration, and modern technologies remade landscapes, politics, racial hierarchies, citizenship, and America’s place in the world.

About the Speakers
Elliott West, alumni distinguished professor of history emeritus at the University of Arkansas, is a specialist in the social and environmental history of the American West and in American Indian history. He is the author of eight books, including The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado; The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story; and Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion. Five of the books have received national awards, including the Francis Parkman and Bancroft prizes. In 2009, West was one of three finalists for the Robert Foster Cherry Award for the outstanding classroom teacher in the nation, and in 2017–18, he was the Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford. He lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with his wife, the Rev. Suzanne Stoner, and their granddaughter, London West.

Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is the author of Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner 2022; winner of the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Non-Fiction) and The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner 2020; finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in history). Nelson also writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Slate, and TIME. Nelson will be the 2024-2025 Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th-century American History at The Huntington.