James Rice earned his PhD at the University of Maryland in 1994. A professor of history at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh, he teaches courses on First Nations/Native America, colonial America, and historical methodology. His publications focus primarily on eastern North America in the sixteenth—eighteenth centuries. His Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson (an exploration of the connections between environmental change, culture, and politics over the course of more than a millennium) argued that pre-colonial trends amongst Native Americans profoundly shaped cultural and political formations in the colonial period and beyond. As a Carson Fellow, he was working on a synthesis of Native American environmental history in North America. Currently he holds a professorship at Tufts University, where he is teaching early American, Native American, and environmental history.
RCC Research Project: Native America: An Environmental History
Film Interview with James Rice
Selected Publications
- Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America. Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2012.
- “Into the Gap: Ethnohistorians, Environmental History, and the Native South.” Native South 4 (2011): 1–23.
- Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
- “Escape from Tsenacommacah: Chesapeake Algonquians and the Powhatan Menace.” In The Atlantic World and Virginia, Edited by Peter Mancall, 97–141. Williamsburg, VA: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
