William Cronon

William Cronon
William Cronon, photographed in the Madison, Wisconsin Arboretum in 2007.
Born	(1954-09-11) September 11, 1954 (age 62) New Haven, Connecticut,
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	University of Wisconsin–Madison; Jesus College, Oxford; Yale University
Occupation	Historian
Known for	President of the American Historical Association; MacArthur Fellowship

William "Bill" Cronon (born September 11, 1954 in New Haven, Connecticut) is a noted environmental historian and the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was president of the American Historical Association (AHA) in 2012.

Born in Connecticut, Cronon earned his D.Phil from Jesus College, Oxford while a Rhodes Scholar from 1976 to 1978. He holds a B.A. (1976) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an M.A. (1979), M.Phil. (1980), and PhD (1990) from Yale University.

In July 1985 Cronon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

Cronon serves on the board of directors for The Trust for Public Land, a national land conservation group. He has been a member of the Wilderness Society since 1995, and as of 2014 he served as vice chair of the organization's governing council.

Cronon is best known for his first book Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983), based on a seminar paper he wrote for his Yale adviser Edmund Sears Morgan, in which he proposed that the way cultures conceptualize property and ownership is a major factor in economies and ecosystems, and that Native Americans actively intervened in and shaped the ecosystems in which they lived.

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991) "is credited with having radically widened many environmental historians' gaze beyond such things as forests and public lands to include cities and what Cronon calls the 'elaborate and intimate linkages' between city and country." Cronon says that Chicago and capitalism fundamentally transformed the midwestern countryside. In one chapter, he details how grain became a standardized commodity, going from something sold in sacks with the farm's family name stamped on it to a standardized good stored in silos according to grade. The book won the 1992 Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for History.