Professor Lynn-Sherow received her Ph.D. in American History from Northwestern University in 1998 (dissertation advisors Robert Weibe and Arthur McEvoy). She specializes in the environmental and agricultural history of North America. Her book, Red Earth (Univ. Press of Kansas, 2004), traces the different ways in which Euro-American, African American and Kiowa communities shaped the agricultural ecology of Oklahoma Territory in the decades before statehood. Her current book project, Indian in a Bottle, is a study of early-twentieth-century Americans’ fascination with the Indian “Medicine Man” and of how Indians’ symbolic relationship to “nature” was used to peddle patent medicines with the tacit approval of at least one faction of the Lakota nation at Pine Ridge. Future projects will focus on the history of agro-industry giant Cargill and the environmental and social consequences of industrial agriculture.

Professor Lynn-Sherow’s teaching interests include North American Environmental History, North American Agricultural History, North American Indian History, History of Canada, Public History, Historic Preservation and graduate seminars in several research fields. Lynn-Sherow teaches for and serves on the Board of the Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences Secondary Major at KSU and is founding faculty member of KSU’s Institute for Civil Discourse and Democracy.

Lynn-Sherow recently became an editor for H-West, the humanities and Social Science listserve in the History of the American West. She received a Canadian Consulate Professional Enhancement Grant in 2007 for travel to gather materials for her class in Canadian History — a central feature of the new Canadian Studies Program at KSU. Lynn-Sherow is active in several national societies, and serves on the board of the Kansas Association of Historians and as the city-appointed historian to Manhattan’s Historic Resources Board since 2001.

Select Publications & Presentations

Red Earth: Race and Agriculture in Oklahoma Territory (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas) 2004.

“Three visions for Agriculture,” Agricultural History Society Annual Meeting, Cambridge Massachusetts, June 2006.

“The Colours of Earth, Skin and Sky: Agro-Ecological Diversity in Oklahoma Territory” Race in the West Conference, The Huntington Library, sponsored by the William French Smith Endowment and the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, September 2005.

“Maggot Creek and Other Tales: Kiowas and Water in the Southwest” in Fluid Arguments, Char Miller, editor (University of Arizona Press, 2001), 65-77.

Courses

North American Environmental History (Hist 511)
North American Indian History (Hist 537)
History of Canada (Hist 533)
Preservation and Public History (586)
United States History to 1877 (Hist 251)
Graduate Topics and Seminars

Additional Information

Bonnie Lynn-Sherow's CV