Eric Hinderaker | Chair
Distinguished Professor
Eric Hinderaker
Chair
Distinguished Professor
CTIHB 310
About
Eric Hinderaker is a historian of early North America and the western hemisphere, with a particular interest in European-Indigenous relations, the dynamics of early modern empires, comparative colonization, the western hemisphere as a unit of historical analysis, environmental constraints and transformations in colonial settings, and the problem of authority in early America. His books include a study of intercultural relations in the Ohio Valley, a dual biography of two Mohawks who played leading roles in relations between the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and Great Britain, a deeply contextualized account of the Boston Massacre, and a survey of the backcountry of British North America. His research has taken him to the National Archives of Great Britain and Canada, the John Carter Brown Library in Rhode Island, the Huntington Library in California, the Boston Public Library, and state historical society repositories in Ohio, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts, among other places. He is also co-author, with Rebecca Edwards and Robert Self, of a US History textbook that is widely used in college, university, and AP US History classrooms. He has taught at the University of Utah for 35 years and has served three times as department chair, from 2002-2008, 2016-2018, and 2025-2027
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PhD, History, Harvard University
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MA, History, University of Colorado-Boulder
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BA, History and Philosophy, Augustana College (SD)
Hinderaker’s research interests center in the eighteenth century but also range widely across American landscapes between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has just completed a book, co-authored with his University of Utah colleague Rebecca Horn, that offers a substantial reinterpretation of the processes of colonization that reshaped the western hemisphere between 1492 and 1850. Looking ahead, he has two projects currently in view. First is a book, co-authored with François Furstenberg of Johns Hopkins University, on the work of Frederick Jackson Turner. Though Turner may seem far removed from early American history, his scholarly interests anticipated many developments in the field of early American history, and his intellectual world is ripe for rediscovery. Second is a project exploring the death of Sir Danvers Osborn, a royal governor sent to New York in 1753 and discovered dead two days after his arrival. There was a suicide note, but contemporary rumors suggested that he may have been murdered. The current plan for the book is to explore both possibilities.
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(In production) The Americas After 1492: A New Interpretive History, co-authored with Rebecca Horn, University of Pennsylvania Press.
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(2025) America’s History, 10th ed., co-authored with Rebecca Edwards and Robert Self, Macmillan Press.
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(2024) “War in North America,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Seven Years’ War, ed. Trevor Burnard, Emma Hart, and Marie Houllemare.
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(2022) “The ‘Peripheral Lands’: Bernard Bailyn and the North American Backcountry,” The New England Quarterly, 95.
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(2017) Boston’s Massacre, Harvard University Press.
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(2010) “Territorial Crossings: Histories and Historiographies of the Early Americas,” co-authored with Rebecca Horn, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 67.
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(2010) The Two Hendricks: Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery, Harvard University Press.
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(2003) At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America, co-authored with Peter C. Mancall, Johns Hopkins University Press.
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(1997) Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800, Cambridge University Press.
HIST 1700 American History
HIST 3700 Colonial America
HIST 3710 American Revolution
HIST 4290 The Americas After Columbus
HIST 4720 The Worlds of Benjamin Franklin
HIST 7500 Proseminar: US History to 1877
Cox Book Prize, Society of the Cincinnati, for Boston’s Massacre
Finalist, George Washington Prize, for Boston’s Massacre
Herbert H. Lehman Prize, for The Two Hendricks
Dixon Ryan Fox Prize, for The Two Hendricks
Elected member, American Antiquarian Society
Elected member, Colonial Society of Massachusetts