William Cronon's Current Projects

  • Currently working on a book entitled The Making of the American Landscape (the title is an homage to the classic 1955 book by W. G. Hoskins on The Making of the English Landscape), based on a lecture course I taught twice at UW-Madison, starting in 2016, before I retired in 2020. (You can learn more about the organization and content of that course here.) One of its chief goals is to narrate major processes of landscape change in North America from pre-colonial times to the present; its other goal is to teach readers the art of “reading the landscape" for evidence of past change.
  • Working on a local history of Portage, Wisconsin (Frederick Jackson Turner's home town), to explore ways of integrating environmental and social historical methods with non-traditional narrative literary forms. Throughout, it will seek to understand the ways in which human beings create places through storytelling. The Portage and The Making of the North American Landscape will serve as micro- and macro- bookends for each other, approaching the tasks of narrating landscape change and "reading the landscape" on radically different scales.