Professor of History

Daniel Herman is an Arizona native who was educated in California (mostly) and who has since lived in places as far away as New Zealand. Herman teaches courses on the American West; American Indian history; American cultural history; the American Revolution; and the Civil War. He has written four books, sixteen scholarly articles and book chapters, and some forty book reviews and encyclopedia articles.

Herman's most recent adventure in prose took the form of a novel, The Feudist (Texas Christian University Press, 2020), which Reader Views named the best Mountain-West novel of the year. In addition to introducing a flamboyant cast of characters based on actual historical figures, the novel explores the kindred nature of rustling and vigilantism; the persecution of Mormon polygamists; and the violent (and often racialized) contest for range and water in the 1880s Arizona. Herman built the novel from archival odds and ends he discovered while conducting research for an earlier monograph, Hell on the Range: A Story of Honor, Conscience, and the American West (Yale University Press, 2010), which the Pima County Library selected as one of its Southwestern Books of the Year. Both the novel and the monograph tell the story of what Arizonans called "The Pleasant Valley War."

The other book that Herman produced from his research on central Arizona is Rim Country Exodus: A Story of Conquest, Renewal, and Race in the Making (University of Arizona Press, 2012), which examines the bloody and contradictory history of Apaches, Yavapais, settlers, and BIA agents between 1864 and 1940. Rim Country Exodus won the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award and the Charles Redd Center/Phi Alpha Theta Book Award in Western History.

Prior to examining race and range wars in the West, Herman wrote Hunting and the American Imagination (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), a study of how Americans have thought about--and practiced--hunting since the arrival of English colonists in 1607. Hunting and the American Imagination won the 2002 American Historical Society/Pacific Coast Branch book prize and became a History Book Club selection.

Herman is a hiker; a rockhound (ever pursuing the fabled "Ellensburg blue"); and a fan of mystery novels, old jazz, and any sort of folk music featuring banjos or fiddles. 

Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award, 2012, award presentation

Daniel Herman reading and discussing The Feudist (event held by Peregrine Books, Prescott)

Education

• Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, 1995

• B.A. Honours, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, 1988

• M.S., Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, 1985

• A.B., Pitzer College, Claremont, California, 1983

Journal Articles and Book Chapters:

• "Searching the Shadows: Thoughts on the West's Political History," Western Historical Quarterly (forthcoming).

• "The Twining Paths of Mormons and 'Lamanites': From Arizona to Latin America," Journal of Arizona History Special Issue, Fall 2020 (vol. 60, no. 3), 395-428. (nominated for the Western History Association's Arrington-Prucha Prize).

• "The Rim Country War Reconsidered: On Honor Rustling, Vigilantism, and How History Got Remembered," Journal of Arizona History, Spring 2017 (vol. 58, no. 1), 11-50.

• "Calls to War, Calls to Peace: Mormons among New Mexicans in 1880s Arizona," in Jason Dormady and Jared Tamez, eds., Just South of Zion: Mormons in Mexico and Its Borderlands (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015), 139-58.

• "Hunting and American Identity: The Rise, Fall, Rise, and Fall of an American Pastime," in Mark Dyreson and Jaime Schultz, eds., American National Pastimes - A History (London: Routledge, 2015), 55-71. (Finalist for the International Journal of the History of Sport Routledge Prize).

• "Arizona's Secret History: When Powerful Mormons Went Separate Ways," Common-Place, 12, no. 3 (April 2012).

• "John Adams," 10,000 word chapter in Chronology of the American Presidents (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012), pp. 37-70.

• "Citizens of Nature: Farmers, Naturalists and Sportsmen in American History and Art," 20,000 word chapter in Turner Reuter, ed., Afield in America: 400 Years of Animal & Sporting Art (Middleburg, VA: National Sporting Library and Museum, 2011), pp. i-xxiv.

• "From Farmers to Hunters: Cultural Evolution in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.," in Kathleen Keet, ed., A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire, 1800-1920, vol. 5 (London and New York: Berg Press, 2007), 47-72.

• "Whose Knocking? Spiritualism as Therapy and Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco," American Nineteenth-Century History, 7, no. 3 (Fall 2006).

• "Hunting Democracy," Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 55, no. 3 (Autumn, 2005), 23-33.

• "The Hunter's Aim: The Cultural Politics of American Sport Hunters, 1880-1910," Journal of Leisure Research, 35, no. 4 (Fourth Quarter 2003), 455-75.

• "Hunting for Empire: Lewis and Clark Claim a Continent for Science," Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History, 17, no. 2 (Summer 2003), 24-30.

• "Romance on the Middle Ground" (essay on frontier historiography), Journal of the Early Republic, 19, no. 2 (Summer 1999), 279-92.

• "The Other Daniel Boone: The Nascence of a Middle-Class Hunter Hero, 1784-1860," Journal of the Early Republic, 18, no. 3 (Fall 1998), 429-58.

• "Science, Seance, and San Francisco," "Women Mediums and Women's Rights," and "Midnight Disclosures," The Californians: The Magazine of California History, 11 no. 2 (Spring 1994), 18-37.