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Bill Robbins

Emeritus Distinguished Professor of History

William G. Robbins is a Connecticut native who has spent more than half his life living and working in Oregon. Following a four-year enlistment in the U. S. Navy, he earned a B.S. degree from Western Connecticut University (1962) and then migrated west to Oregon where he worked as a choker setter and then seasonally on forest fire crews while he was pursuing a graduate program in history at the University of Oregon. He earned the Ph.D. degree in 1969.

After a two-year stint at Western Oregon University, he joined the faculty at Oregon State University in 1971 where he taught courses in Pacific Northwest History, History of the American West, and Environmental History until his retirement in 2002.

He has authored and edited eleven books, most recently Landscapes of Conflict: The Oregon Story, 1940-2000 (2004) and Oregon, This Storied Land (2005). Robbins has won awards for the publication of best articles in the Journal of Forest History (1984) and Western Historical Quarterly (1985). In 1997 Oregon State University named him Distinguished Professor of History. Robbins served as editor of Environmental Review from 1986 to 1988 and has been elected to councils and appointed to the editorial boards of several professional organizations. He is presently working on a book on insurgent movements in the provinces and states along the western Canadian and United States borderland region.

BOOKS IN ORDER OF PUBLICATION DATE:

Lumberjacks and Legislators: Political Economy of the U.S. Lumber Industry, 1890-1941 (1982)

Co-editor, Regionalism and the Pacific Northwest (1983)

American Forestry: A History of National, State and Private Relations (1985)

Hard Times in Paradise: Coos Bay, Oregon, 1850-1986 (1988; Revised, second edition, 2006)

Norman Best, A Celebration of Work, introduction by William G. Robbins (1990)

Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (1994)

Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1800-1940 (1997)

Co-editor, Land in the American West (1999)

Editor, The Great Northwest: The Search for Regional Identity (2001)

Landscapes of Conflict: The Oregon Story, 1940-2000 (2004)

Oregon, Past to Present (2005)