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Donald J. Pisani, Merrick Professor of Western American History at the University of Oklahoma, will speak on “A Rhetorical Trap: The Family Farm and Government in the 20th Century American West” 8 p.m. Wednesday in the Kirby Hall of Civil Rights auditorium.
Sponsored by the history department, the talk is the 2003-04 Richard E. Welch, Jr. Memorial Lecture.
Pisani’s major research and teaching fields are the American West and American environmental history. He is the author of From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California and the West, 1850-1931 (1984); To Reclaim a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public Policy, 1848-1902 (1992); and Water, Land, & Law in the West: The Limits of Public Policy, 1850-1920 (1996). He is writing a book manuscript on national water policy in the early decades of the 20th century, with particular emphasis on the early history of the Bureau of Reclamation and its vision for the West.
Pisani is a past president of the American Society for Environmental History. He received a Ph.D. in American history from University of California, Davis, and a B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley. He served two years in the United States Army and spent 13 years teaching at Texas A&M.