MICHAEL EDWARD WELSH
University of Northern Colorado
History Department
Campus Box 116
501 20th Street
Greeley, CO 80639
(970) 351-2223
mewelsh@bentley.unco.edu

Brief Biography:
Michael Welsh received his Ph.D. in the History of the West and the Southwest in 1983 from the University of New Mexico. He has taught full-time at Oregon State University, Cameron University (Oklahoma), the University of New Mexico, and the University of Dayton (Ohio) prior to his appointment in 1990 to the History faculty at the University of Northern Colorado. He has published three books and 15 scholarly articles on the history of the region, with a focus on topics of environment, higher education, natural resource policy, the military-industrial complex, and western film.

Public Lecture Topics:

• "The US Army Corps of Engineers, and the Rivers of Empire," (role of the South Pacific Division, US Army Corps of Engineers, in California/West Coast/Great Basin water development), Reno, NV, Western History Association conference, 1990
• "A History of the South Pacific Division, US Army Corps of Engineers," (survey of Engineer activities in water resource development/military construction on the West Coast and in the Pacific Rim), San Francisco, 1990

Publications:

• US Army Corps of Engineers: The Albuquerque District, 1935-1985, University of New Mexico Press, 1987
• A History of the San Francisco District, US Army Corps of Engineers, 1980-2000, forthcoming
• "The Legacy of Containment: The Military-Industrial Complex and the New American West," in Kevin J. Fernlund, ed. The Cold War American West, 1849-1989, University of New Mexico Press, 1998

Recommendations:

Books

• Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West, Pantheon Books, 1985
• Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 20s, Oxford University Press, 1990
• Starr, Americans and the California Dream: 1850-1910, Oxford, 1973
• Malcolm Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The Gold Rush and the American Imagination, Berkeley, 1998
• Albert Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier, Yale Press, 1989
• Mario T. Garcia, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity: 1930-1960, Yale Press, 1989
• George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles: 1900-1940, Oxford, 1993
• Mike Davis, City of Quartz, Berkeley, 1990

Michael Welsh has been listed in the Directory of California Thinkers since 19-Nov-1999.