UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #548
CRONON, WILLIAM

CRONON, William (1954- )
UW Undergraduate Student (History); Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies
At UW: 1973-1976, 1992-Present

FIRST INTERVIEW

Interviewed: 	2000 (3 sessions)
Interviewer: 	Barry Teicher
Index by:	Barry Teicher (edited by Stephen A. Pierce)
Length: 	5 hours, 34 minutes
Series: 	Chadbourne Residential College

Abstract: In his 3 May/June interview with Barry Teicher, Bill Cronon discusses the ideas behind, inception, and first years of the Chadbourne Residential College (CRC) from 1996-2000.  Cronon relates how his own experiences at Oxford and Yale Universities influenced his ideas about learning in community and how his personal academic journey brought him back to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He then goes on to detail the challenges and rewards of articulating a vision for CRC, selling it to University Housing, choosing and changing the physical space of Chadbourne Hall, promoting the vision of community among students, and establishing CRC rituals.  This interview was conducted for inclusion in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Oral History project.

Key Words: Childhood; Undergraduate study; Oxford University; Yale University residential college system; Goals upon returning to UW; Honors program; Origins and early planning for Chadbourne Residential College (CRC); CRC governance; Diversity in CRC; Staff members; CRC opening activities; CRC activities; Richard Keeling and Mary Layoun.  

SECOND INTERVIEW

Interviewed: 	2008 (4 sessions)
Interviewer: 	Troy Reeves
Index by:	Troy Reeves
Length: 	6 hours, 56 minutes

Abstract: In his four March 2008 interviews with Troy Reeves, Bill Cronon talks about his stories and memories of his early years in Madison WI; his education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Oxford University and Yale University; important influences on his scholarship and personal life; and his work in environmental history, geography, and the Chadbourne Residential College, He includes facts about his family’s ancestry; his precociousness as a young man; his memories of high school and college; his mentors Dick Ringler, E. David Cronon and Howard Lamar; and the numerous awards and distinctions he has received.  He also details his research program, publications throughout his career, and his observations about colleagues and the departments with which he has been affiliated. This interview was conducted for inclusion into the UW—Madison Oral History Program general collection.

Keywords: Cronon family; Great Depression; Green Lake, WI; family vacations in U.S. West; Madison, WI; University of Wisconsin (pre-merger) and UW—Madison; Yale University; Cronon, E. David; Memorial High School (Madison, WI); Caving in Wisconsin; student newspapers; Nan Fey; Vietnam Conflict—U.S. homefront; student protest; Cronon’s 1960s political upbringing; E. David Cronon; Richard Ringler; 1970s Energy Crisis; Oxford University; Rhodes Scholarship; Danforth Fellowship; Coventry, England; Edmund Morgan; Changes in the Land; Howard Lamar; Nature’s Metropolis; MacArthur Fellowship; The American Experience; History department; History of Environmental History; UW—Madison—Environmental Studies Program; UW—Madison—Center for History & Environment (CHE) 

FIRST INTERVIEW

First Interview Session (May 31, 2000): Tapes 1-2
Time	Keywords

00:00:00	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction

00:00:16	Question: Talk about your childhood. Answer: WC described his childhood and his undergraduate experience at UW-Madison. He discussed making the mistake of living at home during his first year, and then his college housing experience. WC explained how he ended up studying history after trying to write a novel and being an English major.

00:05:13	[no question] In his senior year of college, WC won a Rhodes scholarship and studied in England, where he almost stayed to do a PhD. In 1978, he returned to Yale to do a PhD in American Western history. He discussed his graduate work at Yale University. 

00:07:23	Question: WC describes learning about the history of UW. Answer: He discusses his experiences with residential colleges at Oxford and Yale.  WC details the organization and functioning of the Yale system of residential colleges and how it influenced his ideas about Chadbourne Residential College (CRC).  He describes some of the differences between CRC and Yale.  WC speculates on why Yale has been able to successfully maintain the residential college system.

00:26:15	Question: Why did you leave Yale to come back to UW? Answer: He described why family was the most important reason to come back to Madison; his unease at the prospect of putting his children in private school; and his family’s deep roots in Wisconsin. He recalled it being an easier decision than he would have imagined, and the things UW did to recruit him.

00:31:21	Question: When you came, what were you thinking about in terms of teaching, research and service? Answer: Noting Yale’s commitment to undergraduate education, WC talked about caring a lot about being a good teacher and university citizen. He outlined his goals in these areas; he had three main goals: 1) rebuild the graduate program in US history, 2) rebuild the relationships with the Wisconsin State Historical Society, and 3) improve undergraduate education. He described what he thought was great about Yale’s undergraduate education and problems associated with the growing size of UW— weakness “on community” at a general university level. He described the growing scale of education as one of the bad legacies of the 1960s.

00:42:46	Question: Talk about getting involved in the Honors Program. Answer: He discussed seeing the Honors Program as a “fertile space” to pilot ideas—with freedom of action— about improving undergraduate education as a whole, and later discovered it was a political space that spoke to values faculty held dear. WC described how he became the head of the Honors Program, some of the projects he implemented when he became program director to empower students, and some of the limitations in the Honors Program. 

00:50:57	[no question] His two goals were: 1) to open up the Honors Program to engage and empower more students; and 2) to make Honors “not just a curricular thing.” He discussed the racial implications of the Honors program as well as the difficulties faced by students trying to get into the Honors program. He speculated about how you can normalize and institutionalize a space without snuffing out its creative spark.

00:59:47	Question: You decided to start an Honors dorm? Answer: No, he outlined the history of the Detling Honors floor—which impressed him as a self-created and self-sustaining honors floor—and Chamberlin House and how it influenced (both positively and negatively) his ideas about CRC.  He describes some problems with his initial idea—to create an honors dorm [end tape 1, begin tape 2]—that not all honors students are engaged with community, rather than just individual interests; quick initial opposition to the idea of segmenting talented kids off from the general UW populace. At this point, he became interested in the Experimental College; from Meiklejohn’s experience, he decided the honors experiment should be about “high-engagement students, not high ability students.” He observed that it is difficult to determine at the beginning of students’ careers whether they will be high-engagement or not.

01:12:16	[no question] WC outlined the beginnings of CRC and his early contacts with the Division of Housing in Spring 1996. He describes the positive roles that Michael Hinden from Bradley Learning Community—introducing him to Marian Laines—Laines of Housing—navigating all the “landmines” and investing personal capital in the project—and Maree Elowson from the Honors Program played in creating CRC. 

01:21:33	[no question] He described a key meeting where he first pitched the idea of opening a residential college to the Dir of Housing Norman Sunstad and Dir. of Residence Life Kay Reuter-Krohn with only a year of planning. WC explains how Sunstad and Reuter-Krohn convinced him of the merits of Chadbourne Hall over Adams, Tripp, or Liz Waters Hall as the site of a college-as-community: community space all connected at the center of the building, dining hall (a crucial space for community), larger rooms, and location within close distance of all the major cultural and educational attractions at UW

01:33:36	[no question] WC discussed the initial fear that the honors college wouldn’t be able to fill all of Chadbourne Hall because of the extra fee. [end tape 2, side 1; begin side 2] He explained how he was able to convince Housing to provide an entire building for CRC, rather than just one or two floors. 

01:39:37	End of First Interview Session

Second Interview Session (June 1, 2000): Tapes 3-4
Time	Keywords
00:00:00	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction [begin tape 3]

00:00:10	Question: Talk about your contact with UW administration about CRC? Answer: He said he had minimal contact with administrative units other than Housing during the planning for CRC. He approached Phil Certain, Dean of L&S, to reassure him that CRC wasn’t going to be the responsibility of L&S, and would be self-funded. He discussed the advantages of starting with a substantial budget and the vision of David Ward.

00:04:45	[no question] He outlined the way CRC attempted to avoid the mistakes of the Experimental College—being an elitist honors dorm and being isolated.  WC discussed his negotiations with the Memorial Union, contextualizing the antagonistic relationship between the Union and Housing, and highlighted the role of Theodore Crabbe. WC described the functioning of the CRC Council which includes representatives of most of the major campus offices dealing with student services, and the social contract he made with them—only to meet 1 ½ hrs a semester, never to waste their time, and always to have students meet with them.

00:12:11	Question: How did you settle on $300? Answer: He explained how they calculated the extra sum to be paid by CRC residents.  WC discussed the worries and advantages of having a large residential pool like Chadbourne.  WC observed that as time went by they needed more direct support from UW administration—especially as he turned over the Honors directorship, but still needed the 2-course release to work on CRC.  He discussed the contributions of Janet Vandevender, the most important person outside of Housing for CRC and who continually came up with creative solutions.

00:18:26	Question: Talk about planning for CRC. Answer: He first noted that he didn’t want to be an administrator and so thought of Chadbourne as a an extension of his teaching. He then narrated the process of organizing the structure of CRC, including getting people to sign on, beginning a CRC planning committee—including among others Marian Laines, Sarah Schutt, Jacqueline Hitchon, Christine Golde and numbers of students--, building community among honors students, generating questions that became subcommittees— recruiting students, faculty/staff involvement, physical facilities, [end tape 3, side 1; begin side 2] community service side, diversity issues.

00:34:56	[no question] WC outlined the relationship between the values of CRC and those of the Rhodes scholarships, so that after a 15-year drought, UW had won 3 Rhodes in the last 7 years. 

00:40:59	[no question] He continued to talk about the functioning of the Governance [sub]committee. One of the goals of Chadbourne was to radically challenge and alter the existing residential halls student organizations, the hall associations, because so few students got involved in it. WC describes the contributions of student David O’Brien, president of BACH (Barnard/Chadbourned hall association) to developing support within the BACH. He talked about listening meetings and recruiting meetings for a different kind of housefellow.

00:49:46	[no question] He outlined the governance model proposed by the committee. First, the hall association had to go because it disempowered most students. Then, it proposed the Community Forum, which he considered central to CRC—a town meeting dealing with budget control and policy questions that he believed was good education for citizenship. 

00:52:57	[no question] What he thought not such a great part of the plan was the Executive Board, a part-appointed, part-elected body. He discussed the results of the first Executive Board elections, which led to 8 white men and one white women on the Board. He talked about reasons why this result ensued, which led to a level of discontent about diversity issues, and how the board dealt with this “crisis of its own legitimacy.” [end tape 3; begin tape 4] It did this not by increasing the numbers of the Executive Board, but by forming Mission Groups, partially borrowed from Bradley’s “interest groups.” The original Mission Groups were Fac-Staff Involvement, Diversity, Community Service, Coffee House and Community Outreach [later change to Academic Mission group]. He said the “take away lesson” was that CRC wasn’t his creation, but the creation of “politics at its best.” 

01:12:19	Question: How did you determine the composition of mission groups? Answer: He discussed the early decision to have certain students be paid to make sure certain services were upheld—like a website and faculty/staff liasonship—but those students not have political power. Rather they were to serve student leaders. Mission group leaders applied, but were appointed in a consensual way by the Resident Life coordinator. He explained why he was dubious about elections in this context, because of difficulties of the Executive Board finding a purpose and mission for itself, while the mission groups just got down to work.

01:19:40	[no question] Talking about the Governance Task Force (a kind of ad hoc constitutional committee that met for CRC’s first 3 years), he outlined some structural problems of CRC government and explains the decision to eliminate the Executive Board. He opined about shifts in high school student council activities from actual leadership to leadership training which simply attracts big egos, which is contrary to the CRC values. After the elimination of the Executive Board, CRC governance was “naked democracy.”

01:32:15	[no question] WC discussed the issue of diversity within CRC. He described the first diversity mission group, noting his observation that first-semester freshmen were not yet ready to take on leadership positions. [end tape 4, side 1; begin side 2] He continued by discussing diversity issues—recruitment, retention, but also helping white kids appreciate how difficult the issue is—and described the first meeting of the diversity mission group, which he chaired and in which students were able to describe the kind of “othering” that they’d experienced. He then outlined some of the group’s activities, including an haphazard ethnic food bazaar that led to a “CRC moment.” CRC has had success attracting Jewish and lesbian and gay students.

01:48:27	End of First Interview Session

Third Interview Session (June 5, 2000): Tapes 5-6.
Time	Keywords

00:00:00	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction

00:00:15	Question: WC explains how they assembled the CRC staff, the two most important of whom were the Residence life staff of Housing. He discussed key staff members— complex coordinators Sarah Schutt and Scott Seyforth and on site residence life coordinators Jennifer Gilbride-Brown, Tim Burkholder and Abha Thakkar. WC stressed the importance of hiring good Residence Life Coordinators, describing the interactions and decision making process between staff members. He also stressed the intense interactions that go into residence hall life in the late evening.

00:13:46	Question: How do you prevent burnout? Answer: He said part of it was that those who did this job did it for love of the job, which helped to prevent burnout. He also met each week with them to bring up stressful issues and had minimally hierarchical roles. He discussed the predictable slumps (in October) and highs (in January) in the programs of CRC.

00:18:57	[no question] He discussed the role of academic advisor Mercedes Ramirez Fernandez and Cross College Advising Services (CCAS), which was resistant to having an advisor in a residence hall. His opinion was that it was important to have other adults than the high-turnover res. life position to sustain institutional memory. 

00:28:25	Question: Talk about the opening convocation and SOAR. Answer: He described CRC’s problematic relationship with Student Orientation Advising and Registration (SOAR). He explained the decision to close the Honors floors because they would compete with CRC and because the Detling floor had developed a level of elitism. [end tape 5, side 1; begin side 2] CRC actively recruited Honors students in 1997 but this led to problems when demand for rooms greatly exceeded availability, people got turned down from CRC randomly, and unhappy parents “descended” on University Housing complaining about the situation. WC outlined the remedies instituted to prevent similar problems in the future—including caveats in their brochures about living in CRC and earlier reporting of where students are living. 

00:41:08	[no question] He listed the goals and events associated with CRC opening, which declared vision, articulated deeply held values, modeled community, and helped new students to meet older students. He emphasized the importance of preemptively understanding how to build committee, starting with returning students knowing what their role should be. He described reenvisioning Badger Buddies not just as skillful movers, but as modelers of community. 

00:49:31	[no question] He then talked about the role of returning students and house fellows. He noted that in training leaders, they emphasized that leaders job was to help other people step up to the plate, not just plan and carry out programs. He described Play 101, an activity on the first night of move-in including icebreakers that subtly model CRC values. On the second day of move-in, they had the CRC convocation, their biggest ritual event, at which they requested students to dress up. It involved a faculty speech, often about UW history, a speech by Herbert Blake, a skit, etc. He said that first convocation was the moment he realized CRC was actually going to work. [end of tape 5]

01:02:18	[no question] WC described two additional elements of CRC opening, including a small group discussion about the emotional experience of starting college and the interest group bazaar at which students try to recruit first-year students to groups around a common interest. He explains the purpose of the CRC rituals and the importance of Residence Life Coordinators just getting it that makes it work.

01:09:52	Question: Talk about integrating academics? Answer: He discussed integrating academics into CRC activities; by the second year, special CRC sections for large lecture courses had been instituted, due to the role of Mercedes Ramirez Fernandez. He explains other academic aspects of CRC, such as study groups, the “class connections book,” the course bazaar; and also informal educational aspects, such as the Writer-In-Residence program and “What Matters to Me and Why?” lecture series. He talked about the challenge of marketing events like this and having to shift his opinions about the advantages of small vs. large groups. 

01:20:30	[no question] Still talking about CRC’s educational engagement, WC discussed the CRC Olympics, in which pairs of floors compete in half-athletic and half-non-athletic events for a grand prize at the end of the two weeks of Olympics. The Scavenger Hunt also builds community by having pairs of halls assemble 400 tasks/items in the span of 3 hours. He emphasized the need for the Olympics to be managed carefully to downplay unhelpful competitiveness, explaining the value and risk of building community through play.

01:27:24	[no question] He observed his original intent for CRC, having an honors dorm that was also a community, and what he’d learned was its real purpose, “that before you can have intellectual community you have to have community.” He describes Fac-staff dinners, including the value of students being given responsibility as ‘hosts’ and the beauty of the normalization of the community (rather than him having to constantly advocate for it). Follow up: Is there an honors-student-only component to CRC? Answer: WC outlined the effects of CRC on the Honor Students Organization—though HSO was still housed in Chadbourne, CRC’s democratic tendencies tended to undermine HSO. [end tape 6, side 1; begin side 2] In many ways, CRC residents would have no way of knowing who was an honors student and who was not. 

01:35:06	Question: Have you gotten any requests for more segregated activity? Answer: No, the one area of tension was the resident selection process, in which honors students are not given priority. In order to distinguish between and weed out choice of dorm just for convenience, CRC had implemented a signed good-faith agreement to be involved in the community—a kind of self-sorting. Follow up: How do other dorms perceived Chadbourne? Answer: He thought it was complex—some still perceived it as an honors dorm, but there wasn’t the kind of negativity associated with the Experimental College.

01:40:28	Question: Other CRC innovations that have been more broadly applied? Answer: Class connections book, earlier dorm announcements before SOAR, etc. He observed that Univ. Housing had committed itself to moving away from the hall association system to more engagement, more halls were trying to move freshman courses into halls, websites were being created for each hall, Housing was contemplating implementing the CRC face-book for other places, and the financial element of program planning had changed. He complemented Paul Evans (the director of Univ. Housing) for being open about how CRC’s practices could be generalizable.

01:47:17	Question: Talk about what happened with Richard Keeling and Mary Layoun. Answer: He explained the difficulties of replacing the faculty advisor, when university protocol actually punishes such kind of activity. He talked about obtaining a 2-course release from L&S, and his efforts at reducing the work load from 30-40 hrs/wk to 10-12 hrs/wk as critical in attractive recruiting. He explained the controversial search process that led to the appointment of Richard Keeling, and relates the circumstances of Keeling’s sudden departure after he’d spend 9 months training Keeling. He related the ultimate selection of Mary Layoun after expressing that he wouldn’t “save” CRC and putting some distance between himself and the students.

01:58:45	Question: Talk about your farewell party. Answer: He described his farewell party at CRC—the putting of “10 qualities of a liberally-educated person” to music; the CRC Theatrical Company’s skit enacting memories of him; and a PowerPoint of pictures of activities and his interaction with students. He also related a story about what CRC means to him using the example of The Phantom Tollbooth.

02:05:49	End of Third Interview Session      

End of First Interview

SECOND INTERVIEW

First Interview Session (March 4, 2008): Digital File

Time	Keywords
00:00:00	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction

00:00:38	Question: Ancestry? Answer: On both sides of Cronon’s family, the U.S. Midwest roots run deep.  Cronon’s parents met at UW—Madison while each attended school there.  Cronon detailed his parents’ families’ roots, including his grandparents’ occupations and home bases.  Cronon focused on his mother’s mom and dad, because Cronon spent parts of most of his summers from pre-school through high school in Princeton, WI, and a cottage on Green Lake.  From these summers Cronon found examples of hard work and community involvement from his grandparents.  Follow-up: How Cronon parents were affected by the Great Depression? Answer: While Cronon’s parents did not experience the Depression’s extremes, they valued money.  As Cronon noted, his parents were “savers in the extreme.” They were mindful not to buy the most expensive items and to value experiences that did not involved spending money, such as playing board games, camping while traveling, and going for walks.

00:07:52	Question: How many summers in Green Lake?  Answer: Cronon stated that they spent part or all of the summer at Green Lake from pre-school through high school.  During his childhood they spent most of the summer at Green Lake; one noted exception was the summer before (after?) Cronon’s 5th grade year, when the family traveled throughout the U.S. West.  This trip and other trips to the U.S. West shaped Cronon’s interest and life work.  Follow-up: How did he spent his summer at the lake? Answer: Cronon did not fish much, but he did swim, water ski, canoe, and sail around the lake.  He recalled almost weekly beach fires and almost nightly board or card games, including Scrabble and “Cronon Hearts,” which was a family version of the card game Hearts.  They also read quite a bit while there.  Follow-up: How did he react to trip out West? Answer: He did not recall how he felt about going out West.  The Cronon family had travel/camped in Nebraska and Colorado during their brief life in Lincoln, NE.  He felt that these family trips were some of his best family memories.  He noted that his father would regale them with stories about the U.S. West while they traveled.  These stories sit strongly in Cronon’s mind, primarily because telling stories about the U.S. West and its changes over time has become part of his life work.

00:15:18	Question: How did the Cronon family end up in WI in 1962? Answer: Cronon was born in New Haven in 1954; his parents had been married for a couple of years by that time, and his first job was to teach at Yale University in its history department.  Due to Yale’s tenure structure, Cronon’s father would not earn tenure at Yale.  During the 1950s both Cronon’s mom and dad taught at Yale; his mother taught nursing.  While at Yale Cronon’s father worked with Howard Lamar, who would become Cronon’s mentor during his Yale graduate school/early teaching career.  Cronon’s first five years were spent in New Haven; his memories of that time are few.  Cronon offered his memories: pizza, the rock formation above his house in Westville, and wood panel room.  In 1959-1960 the family moved to Washington, DC, and the Cronon family lived in BC’s grandfather’s house.  His main memory of this period involved the Cold War “duck and cover” drills at school and its corollary memory of hearing sirens throughout the night from the room in his grandparents’ house, which would lead Cronon to believe that the bombs were coming.  These thoughts led Cronon to describe a recurring dream of trying to get his parents’ to prepare for nuclear holocaust and ending up alone after the bomb’s struck.

00:23:10	[no question] Cronon’s father earned a job in the history department at University of Nebraska, where the family moved and lived for a couple of years.  As with his early years in New Haven, Cronon did not hold strong memories about Lincoln except big snow drifts and the start of the family summer camping trips to the U.S. West.  In 1962 Cronon’s dad was offered a job in the history department at UW (now UW—Madison).  The family moved into a house on Madison’s Westside, which the family lived until 2006.  This fact led Cronon to discuss how living in the Westside and watching the suburbanization of the land next to and around his house fill in with suburbs shaped his intellectual work.  Cronon discussed a book, written by a colleague at Penn State, where the author’s thesis does run parallel to Cronon’s present thoughts about witnessing the changing West Madison landscape.

00:27:21	Question: When did Cronon know that his father working in academia? Answer: Cronon knew early on that his father taught and wrote about history.  This question led Cronon to discuss the father-son relation.  Cronon, like his father, created and edited a local newspaper during their youth; both of them distributed the paper to the neighbors.  Cronon edited his newspaper both in Lincoln and Madison and edited an underground newspaper at Madison’s Memorial High School for probably three of his high school years.  From at least 4th grade, Cronon knew that he would write as a profession.  Cronon’s father was a superb writer and editor; Cronon took probably all of his writing to his father.  His father would edit “the hell out of it.” He appreciated his father’s diligence in editing his writing; Cronon has tried to pay that forward by carefully editing the work of his children and his students.

00:33:02	[no question] Cronon recalled helping his father proofread his father’s manuscripts as early as 2nd grade.  Cronon and his father would cross read his father’s text, and Cronon would help check his father’s work.  Cronon could not speak strongly enough about the positive benefits this task had on him.  These thoughts led Cronon to speak of his father’s exercise for his students about checking the sources on any 10 pages of a scholarly work.  The practice of checking against the sources has always been an important one for Cronon and one he learned early, thanks to his father.  Follow-up: In Cronon’s father’s later years, did BC give him material to edit because of his father’s acumen or because it helped continue the father-son connection.  Answer: Cronon noted that it was not an either-or; it was both.  Cronon noted that he and his father lived through difficult times, particularly during the Vietnam War.  Sharing work and talking about work helped BC and his father build their adult father-son relationship.  Reeves stated that having someone who you could trust to edit your work who also happened to be your father must have been a win-win; Cronon agreed.

00:38:18	Question: Cronon’s mother, particularly did she work outside the home. Answer: Cronon’s mother was mainly at home during Cronon and his brother’s childhood.  He thought she had part-time nursing jobs, but she always saw them off to school and greeted them when they came home.  Her work did not stand a strong memory of Cronon’s childhood.  Cronon elaborated on his parents’ relationship, particularly their complementary differences.  Cronon’s father’s death has ruptured a long, strong relationship.  Cronon focused on her mother’s strengths and how those helped “opened up” his father’s world.  Cronon spoke of his mother’s penchant for activities, which Cronon benefited from greatly.  Cronon’s mom “fed” his hobbies, such as collecting, and perhaps even stimulated most of them.  His mother’s best saying was “that smart people are no better than anybody else.”  Cronon took from this saying to treat everyone with respect and to excel at good works because they are good works.  This saying has led to Cronon to fight internally when he has received an award between high achievement and humility.

00:46:13	Follow-up: Did mother drive the cross-country trips? Answer: No, Cronon’s father was the decider, when it came to travel.  His mother loved those trips, but Cronon felt that she would have preferred to spend all the summer at Green Lake. Follow-up: Did collecting feed Cronon’s introversion? Answer: Perhaps.  Cronon discussed the few friendships he fostered growing up, and most of his relationships involved girls.  Cronon despised athletics, and since most boys liked sports, he probably avoided friendships with other males.  Cronon discussed his love of reading, focusing on the Tolkien Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, his interactions with close family members at Green Lake, and his closest friend (Michael Zarnsdorf?) growing up, whom he found in 8th grade.  He and MZ had very similar interests; Cronon considered him his first peer.  Cronon noted that throughout his life he has assumed that what he does find interesting would bore others.  So, he will listen to people to find out what does fascinate others.  Cronon then talked about his passion for science, which became one of the three strands in his life, along with writing and trying to make sense of the world.  From his interest in science, he found friends, such as MZ, who felt and thought about things as Cronon did.

00:55:21	Question: How did Cronon’s brother Bob fit into the family dynamics? Answer: Cronon’s brother had the misfortune of following Bill; “he [Bill] was a hard act to follow.” Bill would not wish being his younger brother on anyone, and he felt that Bob accepted his lot with great grace.  Bill did note that Bob found difficulties in carving out his own niche.  Bob’s interests fell into the “normal boy things,” such as athletics.  Bob grades were better, primarily because Bill’s achievements were “eccentric” ones, such as the underground newspaper and his work with the Madison School District to create educational slide shows.  Bill noted that Bob used the modular system at Memorial High School to work through all of the math department classes in a year and a half.  Having said all this, Bill thought that his family got along really well through adolescence, until Vietnam War became a focal point.

01:00:33	Question: How did Cronon become interested in caving? Answer: Cronon noted how important his interest in caving was to his pre-adolescent years.  His interest in caving arose from the U.S. West roadtrip; on the return trip, the Cronons stopped in the Black Hills to explore Wind and Jewel Caves.  Cronon focused on Jewel Cave and detailed the family’s exploration of it.  From this discussion Cronon talked about the importance of reading the literature of C.S. Lewis or Tolkien, particularly the underground spaces in that literature.  This literature “pre-primed” to think of caves as a secret world, and Cronon loved that idea.  After Cronon’s family finished the tour, they went into the gift shop.  Cronon found the book, Exploring American Caves.  After Cronon “consumed” the book, he found contact information for the Wisconsin Speleological Society.  Cronon called Mike Wopat and talked to him about his interest in caving.  Wopat talked to Cronon in detail and invited Cronon to either a meeting or a field trip; Cronon could not recall what came first.

01:07:20	[no question] Cronon discussed his first field trip to two caves in Southwestern Wisconsin.  From these meeting Cronon met and hung out with Norm Freighter.  Freighter led the Wisconsin Cave Survey for a year or two, and Cronon became his sidekick.  Cronon felt these college cavers loved Cronon, because he could explore with them on short notice.  From 7-9 grades, caving became Cronon’s chief recreation.  Cronon’s caving, particularly searching for new caves, gave him a passion for reading landscapes.  Cronon detailed the ways the landscape would show him possible new caves.  His caving also led to hours and hours of historical research at the Wisconsin Historical Society; he would read the county histories and other old books, magazines, and documents to look for references of caves.  Cronon’s fondness for the WI Historical Society came from these research efforts.  And, along with historical research and reading landscape, Cronon found a group of older friends in caving.  Cronon’s first historic/scientific publication was an issue of Wisconsin Speleologist, entitled “The Sandstone Caves of Wisconsin.” 

01:14:54 	[no question] Cronon felt scared when caving, particularly doing vertical rope work in a cave.  Cronon asked the question, “Why would someone parents let their child become involved in caving?” Cronon focused on his father’s feeling about caving; BC’s dad saw Cronon’s interest as an opportunity for his son to embrace this adventure.  Cronon does know that he does owe this importance of caving to his father’s willingness to let BC try it; BC noted that his dad saw this as an opportunity for Cronon to make his own choice and to move into adulthood.  These thoughts about his father led Cronon to discuss the courtship of his parents, including the fact that his father had asked her five times to marry before she consented.  During their early marriage, while Cronon’s dad worked on a Fulbright in Europe, Cronon’s parents biked throughout Europe.  They told their stories to Cronon; BC during his teenage years then biked around Lake Superior with a high school friend (Scott Hancock).  Cronon’s dad, over his wife’s objections, allowed Cronon to take this trip with Hancock.  Again, Cronon saw this experience as an example of his father letting him grow up and take risks.

01:22:35	Question: Story about rappelling? Answer: Cronon noted how rappelling could be a part of caving.  He discussed the rappelling contraption created by UW students to help the cavers.  Norm Freighter took Cronon to Gibraltar Rock to teach him how to rappel.  After Cronon explained how one would rappel the Rock and how Freighter set up the gear to rappel.  After Freighter repelled once, Cronon then tried.  He could not overcome his fear and left without rappelling.  This “failure” deeply affected him during the ride home.  Cronon’s dad saw Cronon’s dejection and took him right back to Gibraltar Rock to try again.  Cronon then explained the way his dad got him to rappel the Rock. [Brief pause for phone call around 01:27:00.] Specifically, Cronon’s dad picked him up and eased him over the cliff.  Cronon was suspended in mid-air and then repelled down the Rock.  Cronon recalled then rappelling down at least a half-dozen times before they went back home.  The thrill became one of the best feelings he has experienced in his life.

01:29:00	Reeves and Cronon discussed the possible topics for the next interview, including Cronon’s high school and undergraduate experiences.  Cronon felt that ending with caving would make a good stopping point for this session.

01:31:15	End of First Interview Session

Second Interview Session (March 10, 2008): Digital File

Time	Keywords
00:00:00	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction

00:00:24	Question: Memorial High School? Answer: Cronon and his cohorts “opened” Memorial High School, going there from 7th to 12th grades.  When he entered high school, his interest in caving did subside.  Cronon discussed the modular learning program at Memorial and the way it benefited certain types of students, such as Cronon, who worked better outside a more structured system.  Cronon gave an example in his own education, creating slide shows about caving and Madison.  Those slide shows were done for a component of Madison schools and were distributed to school both inside Madison and throughout Wisconsin.  Cronon then discussed Leroy Lee, a biology teacher at Memorial, who taught science through the research aspects of it.  Cronon and others who took his classes did field work, including a senior class which required original research.  Cronon did his senior work on a “massive project,” reconstructing the vegetation of Sauk County before European settlement.  Cronon spent time at the WI Historical Society looking at the land surveys of the time.  

00:07:59	[no question] Lee also created a Biology Honors Society, a club for students interested in the life sciences.  This group, for several reasons, drew a remarkable group of students and ended up discussing/working on ecology/environmental studies.  Cronon noted that many students from that program went onto jobs that touch on ecology/environment.  This Society would take spring field trip to places throughout the U.S.  Cronon said that one field trip to the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona affected his life, leading to multiple trips to the Mountains and to a summer at the host site, [add specific name].  Personally, Cronon met his wife, Nan Fey, on the first field trip to the Mountains.  Cronon briefly described the initial romance with Fey and the timeline that led to their marriage.

00:11:40	Question: Right place, right time for Biology Honor Society? Answer: Cronon noted the “creative ferment” at Memorial High School for this group, the importance of Earth Day as a cultural event for Cronon and millions of other Americans.  He noted that the Biology group was not a political group but environmental/political themes did run through the students’ thoughts and actions.  Cronon listed all the key ingredients that led the students in Memorial’s Biology Honor Society to do what they did and to become what they did, including the importance of being close to the UW/UW—Madison campus.

00:15:06	Question: How did Cronon’s relationship with his father begin to fracture? Answer: Cronon noted that Vietnam was the epicenter of the rift in the father-son relationship, but he noted other reasons, such as adolescence angst.  Cronon offered a sketch of the three sources that fed into the father-son disagreement: civil rights, Vietnam, and student protest at UW/UW—Madison.  Cronon then offered context about his father to assist in his narrative about their conflicts in the 1960s/1970s. Cronon described how the 1960s, particularly the mid to late 1960s, affected his father, particularly separatists in the civil rights movement or confrontational encounters on campus between students and administration/police.  As Cronon moved into an administrative role, he argued against the destructiveness of separatism and radicalized student protest.  Cronon postulated what his father saw in student protests equated to proto-fascism.

00:22:13 	[no question] Cronon then offered his political upbringing of the 1960s.  He briefly mentioned the 1963 JFK assassination and the 1964 presidential campaign, particularly the “Daisy” ad run by LBJ. Cronon recalled the 1968 Eugene McCarthy campaign and the work he did for McCarthy.  Cronon debated whether his father moved to the right politically during this time or his father might have argued that he stood still and the country shifted to the left.  The 1968 Democratic Convention for his father focused on the protests in the streets.  Cronon then shifted to the dinner table conversations between Cronon and his father, during the height of the Vietnam period. Both Cronon and his father debated in high school, and both were good at debating tactics. Cronon detailed where these conversation gravitated towards, how heated they became, and how the other family members reacted to them.  Cronon scored points during these discussions when he noted that his father had betrayed his core values.  Cronon then talked about where Cronon and his father could meet on issues during this time, including their research and writing and environmental issues.  Cronon noted that they spent the 1970s/1980s rebuilding the father-son relationship.

00:30:49	Question: Again right place, right time for the father-son rift? Answer: Cronon answered by focusing on the Memorial student newspapers, particularly CONglomerate, which was Cronon’s paper.  He talked about how CONglomerate was a “radical moderate” newspaper.  Cronon labeled his political as radical moderate politics.  He argued how being in the center has helped him as a scholar, historian, writer, and citizen.  Moderation has forced him to understand the poles, and CONglomerate’s purpose became bringing together different political persuasions to write and interact.  Fostering dialogue has been an important of Cronon’s life from high school to today.  Cronon noted that his values are his father’s values, which made Cronon believe that Cronon’s father respected BC’s work on CONglomerate.

00:37:15	[no question] Cronon mentioned the importance of the draft as a motivator, for white males, for student protest.  Cronon argued that it was not coincidental that anti-war protests died down with the draft’s end.  Cronon then noted his interesting situation of being one of the few that received a lottery number but then never having his number come up because of the draft’s end.  Because of this fact, as well as other aspects of his life, Cronon does “get” the left.  But he does understand the rise of the conservative movement, particularly as it does pertain to liberty, state/individual rights, and libertarian.  Cronon cannot go to other political extreme, which he has helped him understand things and act on them as well using moderation as a prism.

00:42:55	Question: Cronon’s memories of Sterling Hall Bombing? Answer: Even though Cronon was out of town in August 1970, he does understand Sterling Hall’s primacy in the student protests events.  He explained how people in administration, such as his father, reacted and how people more moderate protesters reacted.  It, along with the draft’s end, took the wind from the student protest’s sails.  Cronon realized that his interpretation of Sterling Hall does come from his centrist perspective.  Cronon, himself, became less enthusiastic about student protest from this point forward because not only of Sterling Hall but also his intense focus on environmental issues, such as the energy crisis.  He noted that he gave his Honor’s Convocation Address in 1976, his senior year, on the energy crisis.

00:47:43	Question: Why UW? Answer: Cronon said that he did not think much about it.  In the late 1960s/early 1970s, there was not the push for high-achieving kids to get into top-notch schools.  Also, Cronon noted that most of his friends at Memorial were going to UW and that he applied only to Madison.  He offered the reasons why he felt comfortable only applying to UW and going there. Cronon talked again about his father’s role and influence in shaping Cronon’s decision to stay home to go to school.  Cronon then shifted to explaining how his college education affected him, specifically during his time as a Rhodes Scholar in England.  He concluded that he never regretted getting his undergraduate degree at UW/UW—Madison, focusing on coming back to UW—Madison to teach—leaving a tenured job at an Ivy League school—as a prime example of the effect UW had on him.  Cronon offered his opinions on his father’s role in getting Cronon to matriculate at UW.  Cronon felt his father would be proud if BC attended UW, and Cronon wanted to earn his father’s praise.  Even with the father-son tension, Cronon never thought about attending school far away from Madison.  Cronon felt that even with his father’s presence at UW BC could “be his own man” there.

00:56:18	Question: Mentors at UW/UW—Madison? Answer: Cronon began by detailing how his father, even during their conflicts, in the arena of “pragmatic politics.” Cronon then furnished the list of his interests/majors.  Cronon knew he would major in English “plus something.” Cronon worked for the University Bookstore throughout college, which became relevant when Cronon dropped out for a semester to write a novel.  Cronon thought he would take a year off, but after one semester, he decided he needed to return to academia.  After this hiatus Cronon knew he would be a university professor; at that point he needed to decide what type of professor he would be.  Cronon asked his father what professor/class he should take; Cronon’s father recommended Dick Ringler, even though BC thought that Cronon did not know Ringer well at all.  Ringer taught English 360, an honor’s class entitled The Anglo-Saxons.  Cronon said this class affected him like no other before or since and talked about why Ringler and his classroom performance touched him.  Cronon stated that the best way to describe Ringler’s course was a kaleidoscope and that Ringler’s style was the opposite of Cronon’s.

01:06:13	[no question] Cronon detailed a few of Ringler’s lectures, particularly one on vellum, and why the kaleidoscope metaphor does fit.  Cronon reminded the interviewer of his interest in Tolkien and how this appreciation stitched into Ringler’s The Anglo-Saxons class.  For Cronon this mentorship built from more than right place, right time; it came primarily from “two eccentrics” finding each other.  Cronon fell in love with Ringler’s teaching, took at least three classes, and spent time in Ringler’s office asking questions.  Cronon used his Ringler mentorship to discuss the uniqueness of Ringler/Cronon relationship within the bounds of a big state university.  For Ringler, there were no stupid questions.  Ringler and Cronon would discuss BC’s “sophomoric” questions for minutes.

01:13:10 	[no question] Cronon then discussed two moments that he distinctly remembered from his mentorship with Ringler.  First, Cronon dropped into his office one day unannounced and caught Ringler practicing his lecture.  This instance led Cronon to realize the importance of preparation, because Cronon assumed that Ringler’s lecture arose more from spontaneity.  Second, Cronon walked in one day to ask a simple question.  Ringler mulled it over then said, “I don’t know.” He and Cronon then spent the next several minutes trying to figure it out.  Cronon found importance in being able to say, “I don’t know,” instead of trying to make something up.  By the end of Cronon’s first class with Ringler, Cronon wanted to be a medieval studies major.  He became so intent on this path that he earned his Rhodes Scholarship based on this assumption. 

01:19:51	Question: Why did Cronon shift away from medieval studies?  Answer: Cronon was in the honors program, and he wanted to do a senior thesis.  He wanted this work to be literary biography, which he felt would merge his novelist urges and his academic needs.  Cronon latched onto Robinson Jeffers, a nature poet from California.  Cronon offered context on Jeffers, including winning a scholarship that he used to go to Texas and California to conduct background research on Jeffers.  Cronon loved writing about the 20th Century, and at this time, he thought that the limited archival resources from medieval period would eventually bore him.  

01:24:56	[no question] Along with his writing about Jeffers, Cronon, on his father’s advice, took a class from Dr. Bogue on the American West.  While Bogue did not become a mentor, Bogue class on American West included a block on land and conservation.  It was environmental history before the term existed.  This section of the class provided Cronon with a Eureka moment; western history allowed BC to bring all his interests together in one field.  Just before this epiphany occurred, Cronon applied for, interviewed for, and earned a Rhodes Scholarship in December of his senior year.  He applied as a medievalist; by the time he earned the honor he had basically shifted into a 20th Century, American West historian.  As his second semester played out, Cronon felt more and more guilty about getting the Scholarship “under false pretenses.” So, he wrote the warden at Rhodes House that he wanted to shift to the modern history degree or give back his scholarship.  The warden succinctly wrote back and told him that shift would be fine.  

01:29:40	[no question] Cronon reminded the interviewer of his Honors Convocation Address, which was entitled, “Food and Other Things,” which focused on the 1970s Energy Crisis.  Cronon called it a “powerful and risky address.” Cronon gave an “ambitious, big message.” BC noted the importance of this speech as it does pertain to his time in Oxford.  Cronon’s advisor at Oxford argued against getting a second B.A. and for getting a B.Lit. degree, which included a thesis component.  Cronon had one week to find a thesis topic.  From his speech Cronon thought about doing a study of an English town and the history of its energy sources/uses.  Cronon asked David Ward, a UW—Madison faculty member who studied English towns/cities.  Ward pointed him toward towns that owned its own energy supply, such as Coventry.  Cronon then wrote Oxford to pitch a thesis on energy supply in an English city, perhaps Coventry.

01:34:19	Question: Feelings about going to Oxford?  Answer: Cronon felt ambivalent about going to Oxford and briefly explained why, but he said that a full answer would perhaps be better for the beginning of interview three.

01:35:30	End of Second Interview Session

Third Interview Session (March 21, 2008): Digital File

Time	Keywords
00:00:00	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction

00:00:20	Question: Going to Oxford as Rhodes Scholar? Answer: Cronon’s two years at Oxford changed his life.  Cronon backed up briefly to note that he won not only the Rhodes Scholarship but also a Fulbright Scholarship and the Danforth Fellowship.  He turned down the Fulbright, but he was able to use the Danforth, although because he deferred it, he lost one of the four years.  He explained the Danforth’s mission, including attending a week-long teaching retreat in the August before he left for England.  The retreat delved into why teaching mattered in academia.  The retreat became an important event for many reasons, including meeting two people who also went to England on Rhodes Scholarship.

00:04:53	[no question] Cronon returned to the Rhodes, including mentioning the ship trip across the Atlantic.  Cronon experienced terror during the Danforth retreat, the ship trip, and his first few weeks at Oxford.  The terror arose from meeting so many smart, talented, and worldly people.  The difference from Madison was the way that these people knew and thought so deeply about the arts, humanities, and current events.  Cronon noted that smart, talented students at Madison took advantage of doing deep research on specific topics.  Cronon found at Oxford that students not only showed talent in the field of interest but also showed talent/acumen in the issues of the day.  

00:09:20	[no question] Cronon also felt “deeply inarticulate” during his early time in Oxford.  Cronon then explained how Madison’s verbal dexterity compared with Oxford’s.  In hindsight Cronon realized that part of this terror and insecurity stemmed from Cronon leaving his comfort zone for the first time.  Cronon noted that within 6-12 months, through reading British newspapers, he learned about the world, which allowed him to be more at ease talking to his cohorts and others.  Cronon also took this opportunity to compare British and U.S. newspapers.  Cronon concluded his thoughts about this subtopic with the idea that being shown your ignorance, as well as understanding your shortcoming, can benefit your growth.

00:13:59	Question: Did the in-depth research topic benefit or hurt Cronon at Oxford? Answer: Cronon does now feel ambivalent about being steered into the deep research topic.  Cronon compared the English and U.S. B.A. History degree.  The modern history degree at Oxford would have given him detailed overview from the time period 451-1939.  Cronon did note that by going to Oxford to work on a detailed topic, he took no classes.  He worked independently.  Cronon took this chance to compare graduate education in history at U.S. and England.  Cronon discussed his two advisors at Oxford, including why he changed from one advisor to another.  

00:19:20	[no question] Because of his experiences at Madison (both secondary and college), Cronon could work independently and write about Coventry.  So, during one meeting with his advisor, in which they discussed BC’s 100-page chapter on electricity, Cronon’s advisor told him that he should submit this manuscript for the Ph.D. degree.  This attempt could not happen in U.S. graduate school.  Cronon did submit and did earn the doctorate, although some of the reviewers had deep questions about the work.  Cronon focused on the Conventry manuscript itself, including how the work led him toward avenues for future research in what would become environmental history.

00:24:32	Question: Compare terror/fear in Oxford and while caving in WI? Answer: Cronon does not seek out thrills, but his least confident/most fearful times have become his times of deepest growth.  Cronon talked about complicated challenges and associated ideas and how he felt that those challenges/ideas gave opportunities for growth.  Cronon wanted to mention two more things about his time in Oxford.  The first was remeeting Nan Fey, during the summer before Oxford, which led to a whirlwind romance, culminating in their engagement/marriage during Cronon’s first Christmas Break in Oxford.  The second was the British/Irish landscape, specifically how the writings/documents, such as Making of the English Landscape, about those landscapes greatly influenced BC.  Cronon also returned to the importance of British fantasy literature, this time focusing on the maps that illustrate these works.  From his deep interest/research in the British landscapes, Cronon, in his writing and lectures, take people on journey stories.  So, his work in environmental history has great influence from his time at Oxford, studying the land and landscapes.

00:36:04	Question: Why Yale? Answer: Cronon reminded the interviewer that when applying for graduate school he still considered being a medievalist.  So, he applied to University of Toronto, and he thought he would use the Danforth fellowship there.  But as his senior year continued, his interest changed to the U.S. Western history.  So, he wanted to study at the best place for that field, which was Yale University.  While at Oxford, Cronon and his wife befriended J.M. Blum, who was a Yale professor and was serving a rotating faculty position at Oxford during Cronon’s time there.  Cronon and his wife spent many wonderful moments with Blum and his wife, and Blum, being from Yale, lobbied for Cronon to matriculate at Yale after Oxford.  So, Cronon focused on Yale, because he knew that was where he wanted to go.  At Yale Professor Howard Lamar and his work in the U.S. Western history had attracted a strong cadre of graduate students.  Cronon arrived at Yale with the repeated feeling of being undereducated; his fellow graduate students again felt worldlier to him.  His experience at Oxford, however, had prepared him for that feeling.  This story led him to repeat a saying about Yale that eighty percent of people at Yale felt their admission had been a mistake.

00:42:37	Question: Was going to Yale a continuation of the Oedipus Complex, in regards to his father? Answer: By this point in Cronon’s life, going to Yale—a place where his father’s ties still existed—did not bother him.  Cronon, even with the conflicts, was immensely proud to be his father’s son.  And Cronon understood the value of mentoring, so he felt comfortable listening to older people, such as Blum and Lamar.  And Cronon, in his mind, had his own bona fides.  Yale accepted him because of his work.  It might have been Oedipal, but Cronon and his father felt comfortable in their own realms.

00:46:45	Question: Where to go in the Yale narrative: the course that led to Changes in the Land or Lamar’s mentorship and the dissertation that became Nature’s Metropolis?  Answer: Cronon took a two-semester research seminar on colonial history, taught by Edmund Morgan.  Morgan knew that Cronon’s interests were land and people.  Cronon discussed Morgan’s teaching style, including Morgan’s way of posing seemingly easy questions with never easy answers, and Cronon talked about the question Morgan posed to Cronon, which led him to understand retrospective narrative.  Cronon then offered his example of finding the anti-document.

00:51:53	[no question] Morgan and Cronon met to discuss possible research subjects.  Cronon started looking into colonial records, specifically travelers’ accounts to find description of land and landscape.  From this research he found a lot about environmental changes but not a lot about any specific change.  Cronon decided to write about all environmental changes in colonial period, instead of focusing on one specific change; he focused on New England, with a little documentation from the Middle Colonies.  Cronon wrote the research paper during a “feverish” 3 or 4 day period to get a draft of the paper to his cohorts in preparation for Cronon’s oral presentations.  Cronon’s paper was too large; he “cheated” it down to about 40 pages.  His fellow students seemed puzzled by it, but Morgan liked it.  So, Cronon polished it up and submitted it.  Then, he put it away.

00:57:31	[no question]  Cronon’s essay on environment change in New England was, to him, frontier history, steeped in his Wisconsin undergraduate work, than colonial history.  A few years after he put his New England paper away, Lamar became Dean of Yale College.  This fact meant that Yale history department needed someone to teach his western history course.  Because of Cronon’s Oxford doctorate, he could apply for the position.  Cronon ended up a finalist for the job.  He needed something for a job talk, so he used his Morgan essay.  Even though the question session was “aggressive,” the committee offered him the professorship.  So, Cronon proceeded towards his Yale Ph.D. while he worked as a professor in its history department.  From that job talk, a history professor recommended the essay to Arthur Wang of Hill & Wang publishing.  Wang met Cronon, and Cronon submitted the essay.  Wang liked it and offered Cronon a contract to turn it into a book.

01:03:46	[no question] Cronon described the intense period of re-researching, gathering new material, and re-writing and writing what became Changes in the Land.  BC also described the book’s additions that made the essay and book markedly different, specifically the inclusion in the book of Indians and property.  The book hit with little splash until 1984 when it won the Parkman Prize—an award for both literary and historical excellence.  This led the New York Times Review of Books to publish a review.  The reviewer wrote a “wonderful, extraordinary, to-die-for, full-page review,” which shined a light on Changes in the Land.  It led Cronon to become a leader in the new field of environmental history.

01:09:02	Question: Howard Lamar and Cronon’s dissertation work?  Answer: Cronon entered Yale, thinking about what he would do as a western historian and what type of dissertation he would write.  BC did not know if he could call himself an environmental historian and get a job, so he couched the dissertation prospectus as a frontier/western history, not an environmental history.  Cronon once called himself a neo-Turnerian, because he thought the frontier was a great place to see all aspects of history.  After the Coventry thesis, Cronon knew where the gaps in that work were, so he came to Yale with an idea to write a frontier history by looking at a city through its hinterland.  The dissertation became “turning Turner on its head.” 

01:14:37	[no question] After his first year at Yale, BC discussed with Lamar the city/hinterland dissertation.  He and Lamar looked at North American cities, focusing on New Orleans, St. Louis, San Francisco, or Chicago.  It took little time for Cronon to focus on Chicago, because it was his “homeland.” On top of that, Chicago, as well as other locations, held a treasure trove of documents.  Cronon found work in Chicago, working with computers and statistics, which helped him get close to the records; he also discovered documents at Wisconsin Historical Society and at Yale.  Cronon offered an overview of the importance of Chicago in the growth of the U.S. West.  Cronon recalled that he pitched the dissertation prospectus without featuring the environment aspects of it, because he did not think he could find a job as an environmental historian.  A problem arose during the dissertation when Changes in the Land came out and received the Parkman Prize.  Cronon became known as an environmental historian, and his in-progress dissertation downplayed the environment.

01:19:30	[no question] Cronon had placed himself in the history job market as a U.S. western historian.  With Changes he was an environmental historian with two chapters—boosterism and railroads—in an ambitious dissertation.  These chapters were economic in focus.  Between the Parkman Prize and his teaching at Yale, he lost confidence in his dissertation, because of its lack of environmental focus.  Cronon noted that other projects—both before and after the dissertation—had reached a crisis point.  Cronon needed to write with his “heart and head,” and for a period he could not feel his heart in it.

01:24:00	[no question] During this crisis Cronon wrote a new prologue about the Cronon family driving from Connecticut to Wisconsin one summer.  The prologue discussed the “unnaturalness” of cities, which Cronon tried to debunk in this introduction.  He wanted people to rethink the boundary between “humanity and nature.”  Cronon talked her about his “core moral project,” that people need to take moral/ethical responsibility for how their actions affect the natural world.  Cronon argued with himself in his prologue and persuaded himself that his dissertation would be environmental history.  Cronon then offered a brief overview of how he finished the dissertation and how it became Nature’s Metropolis.  Cronon turned in the published book as the archival copy of his dissertation.  Cronon furnished a synopsis of his life in 1991, including being tenured at Yale with two published books. 

01:29:42 	Question: Compare Howard Lamar as a mentor to Ringler and Cronon’s dad? Answer:  For Cronon all three men were “decent” people that cared profoundly about people, abstract ideas, scholarship, and ambition.  Lamar modeled decency and generosity as well as anyone ever BC has known.  Cronon offered an overview of Lamar’s scholarship, which became “old fashion” territorial, political, institutional history.  In the the 1960s and ‘70s, he embraced the “new histories,” including environmental history.  Lamar was a Southern, white male who was committed to civil rights movement and to race and social justice.  Through his background and scholarship, Lamar argued for new approaches to western history, eventually called the “new western history,” using new tools to ask complicated questions about the past.  This call attracted new graduate students to work with him. 

01:34:37	[no question] Lamar, according to BC, never has a negative word to say about anybody, seeing the positive even in academic “critical thinking.” He created an island of generosity and support in western history with his Yale graduate students.  Lamar and the students formed a westerners group, which met periodically at Lamar’s house and included drinks, food, and lively discussion.  Cronon’s two most important (academic) political mentors were Lamar and Cronon’s father.  Both helped Cronon to become an effective member of the academy.  Cronon gave the example of Lamar’s asking Cronon to serve on a committee to create an environmental studies major at Yale, as an example of Cronon learning academic politics through Lamar’s tutelage.  Cronon became the director of undergraduate studies for the environmental studies program after its creation.  Lamar taught Cronon how to be a well-rounded academic.

01:40:32	Question: The MacArthur Fellowship? Answer: Cronon offered an overview of the MacArthur Fellowship, which was fairly new when Cronon received the honor, including how he learned about winning it.  He commented on the “genius” label that the media penned for the Fellowship.  But Cronon had navigated the “ego perils” of the MacArthur, because they seemed similar to the “perils” of the Rhodes Scholarship.  Cronon then explained how the MacArthur worked for him at Yale; it became quite problematic because Yale’s teaching rules would not allow to use the MacArthur as fully as possible.  While he respected Yale rules, it became a “modest annoyance,” as did the underfunded environmental studies program, which helped him make the decision to return to UW—Madison.  Before the move to UW—Madison, both Cal Tech and Northwestern tried to recruit Cronon with the perks of tenure, but Cronon stayed at Yale and eventually earned tenure there.

01:48:39	[no question] The Fellowship would allow the fellow to buy out time from his or her home institution.  Cronon found out from others that a fellow did not need to give the money to his or her money to the home institution.  So after the first year, Cronon gave the money to other entities, such as the American Society of Environmental Historians and WGBH in Boston on a project that became the show, The American Experience.  Cronon pitched an idea of a documentary regarding the American landscape; he worked with a filmmaker and raised 1 million dollars, but they could not produce the series.  Cronon learned a lot about the documentary process during his work with WGBH and became a “talking head” in several documentaries and a consultant for filmmakers.

01:53:24	End of Third Interview Session

Fourth Interview Session (March 25, 2008): Digital File

Time	Keywords
00:00:00	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction

00:00:24	Question: Why return to UW—Madison in 1992? Answer: Up until the early 1990s, BC was quite happy at Yale.  There were some minor annoyances, including the aftermath of the MacArthur Fellow, the frustrations with the environmental studies program, and the examples of corrosive union politics and class warfare, that opened the door for Cronon to ponder leaving.  

00:04:41	[no question] Carol Toussaint asked Cronon to come to Madison and speak on sense of place, as part of a lecture series based on a Wallace Stegner essay on sense of place.  Cronon’s piece began with his memories of cave exploration and ended with the cluster of people in Wisconsin’s history who shaped the human place in nature.  Cronon noted that the theme of land and people have been deeply embedded in UW—Madison culture.  The preparation and presentation of the essay reminded him how much he loved Wisconsin.  On top of this essay, the then chair of the history department, Kenneth Sachs, asked Cronon to give the Curti Lectures around the same time, and Allan Bogue, Frederick Jackson Turner professor, was retiring.  Becoming the FJT chair would mean a lot of Cronon; he noted that he still held FJT in high regard.  All of this, along with Donna Shalala as chancellor, led them to seriously recruit BC for the chair.  And Cronon would seriously consider it.

00:10:59	[no question] BC talked with Howard Lamar about the UW—Madison’s recruitment of Cronon.  Cronon discussed the interesting dynamics in the conversation between Lamar and him about Cronon possibly returning to UW—Madison.  Cronon then described the negotiation that he went through with Wisconsin wanting him and Yale wanting him to stay.  Cronon noted that salary was not a sticking point but leave time was.  Sachs manipulated the system to give Cronon leave time similar to Yale’s.  Yale countered with more money for environmental studies and moving them out of New Haven.

00:16:30	[no question] BC felt torn about moving back to Madison.  He commented on some the reasons: moving back home (for both BC and his wife [Nan Fey]) and wife’s losing the chance to work (law).  Although Cronon noted that Fey felt strongly for moving to WI.  Cronon told a story about the moment that sold him on returning to UW—Madison.  Cronon was back in Madison on warm, early spring day.  He walked the nature path along Lake Mendota and stopped.  He looked around and thought that New Haven contained no landscape such as this one.  This led him to ask, “Why is this such a hard decision?”  He made up his mind then that he would return.  Fey then travelled to Madison to look for a house with a large, dry basement for all of Cronon’s books.  

00:20:49	Question: Was there a job talk/application process? Answer: Cronon then discussed the technical process after this initial recruitment until UW—Madison history department hired him.  His job talk was an essay that Cronon had worked on during the late 1980s, where BC grappled with post-modernism.  Since Cronon does see himself as a storyteller and post-modernism does attack narrative, Cronon felt the need to address this critique.  His job talk was published by the Journal of American History.  Cronon recalled the liveliness of the question and answer session after the presentation.

00:24:39	Question: How was FJT chair composed in 1992?  Answer: In 1992 two other departments/entities—Geography and WI Historical Society—joined in the recruitment and gave BC some additions to enhance the recruitment.  Once Cronon joined the faculty has asked and was granted permission to also be included in the Environmental Studies program.

00:26:58	Question: UW—Madison & Madison between 1978 and 1992? Answer: BC noted the obvious growth, in both Madison’s Westside & outlying communities, such as Sun Prairie.  Another change for Madison was an increase in sophistication and cosmopolitan nature; Cronon noted better restaurants, beer, and coffee.  Returning to Madison, from his years at Yale, allowed him to see things differently; for example, he detailed the difference between undergraduate education at UW—Madison and Yale.  This discrepancy between the two institutions led Cronon to advance ideas, such as Chadbourne Residential College and the Pathways to Excellence Program, and to write an essay calling for better undergraduate education. 

00:34:31	[no question]  Cronon described the status of the history department when he arrived in 1990s.  When Cronon returned he noticed a group that had not seen a lot of turnover and a group that included some collegial resentment.  Cronon, and others, tried to revivify the history department.  Question: Why try to rebuild the relationship between history department and WI Historical Society? Answer: Cronon offered some background on the historical relationship between the two groups, including the joint building of a library (the current WI Historical Society building on Library Mall) and the cleaving of the collection when Memorial Library was built in the 1950s.  Cronon felt that cleaving led to many problems, including a cleaving of the relationship between UW—Madison and WIHS.  In the past history faculty had used the collection and had joined the WIHS board of curators.  Cronon became the history department liaison then became a member of the board of curators soon after that. 

00:42:16	Question: Teaching load at UW—Madison? Answer: Cronon was hired to teach U.S. Western history and environmental history; he offered context about his teaching at Yale to help answer this question.  Cronon tried to make the courses complementary, reducing or eliminating possible overlap.  Cronon detailed how he separated his narratives into the separate courses.  Here at UW—Madison these courses are numbered in the 400s, so graduate students could take them.  Cronon also taught a seminar course each semester.  Cronon did feel a frustration here at UW—Madison, because he could not teach a two-semester, full year course.  Since the mid-1990s Cronon had been given a reduced teaching load, for various reasons.  So he has taught 1 class each semester.

00:50:08 	Question: Research interests at UW—Madison? Answer: When BC started thinking about employment, he did not figure he could get a job as an environmental historian.  So, he focused on U.S. Western or frontier history.  BC returned to FJT and his geographic/environmental determinism, which fell out of favor after WWII, due to some of its racial overtones.  After WWII political/cultural determinism arose within the study and teaching of history.  With Silent Spring the question became, “how do people affect nature?” So, environmental history arose and combined the geographic/environmental determinism and political/cultural determinism.  The study became nature and culture and its dialogue.  Cronon listed the pre-environmental history texts and teachings, such as Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, Sam Hays’ Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, and Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind.

00:57:15	[no question] Cronon noted that neither Hays nor Nash would have called their works environmental history; the fields really burgeoned, according to BC, with three dissertations (and later books) written in the 1970s.  Cronon listed the works and their authors—Donald Worster’s Nature’s Economy, Richard White’s Land Use, Environment, and Social Change, and Carolyn Merchant’s Death of Nature.  Cronon said that his work, Changes in the Land, which came a little later than those, also helped create the field.  He then noted what interesting history has been written, including topics that only have been penned in the last decade or so.  Cronon then discussed how he fit into the beginnings of environmental history; he found it interesting that the first environmental historians worked in silos, disconnected from each other.  Cronon also noted Steve Pyne, who wrote about fire.

01:02:26	[no question] Environmental history early works, according to BC, were passionate but diffuse.  Environmental history has been a field that has been very collegial and very mentor-focused.  With publication of Changes in the Land, Cronon came to the forefront, but he never saw himself as the leader or founder of the movement; he thought the best he could ask for would be mention within the founding generation.  In the late 1980s, Cronon served as president of ASEH; he described what he envisioned for the organization and how he tried to implement those visions.  Cronon returned to his idea of each of his work critiquing a previous one by focusing on his and Richard White’s first books.  After providing context of how his work was shaped by the politics of the 1960s/1970s, Cronon noted that he wrote about how material and social life connect to ideas.

01:09:28	[no question]  Cronon always had been fascinated with “stuff,” both the physical and material.  So, Cronon’s early works dealt with acts of consumption and how it affected the physical world.  Cronon returned to the idea that the cursory mention of capitalism in Changes were dealt with in detail in Nature’s Metropolis. By the late 1980s, he saw big problems in his arguments, specifically that the men and women in his book were motivated primarily by economics.  He wanted to bring ideas into the dialogue of material and physical, which led him to write a long essay, “A Place for Stories.” He offered an overview its thesis, including grappling with ideas, narrative, and post-modernism.

01:15:45	[no question]  Cronon wanted an environmental history that took ideas critically, and along with that strain, he wanted to understand the rise of the Conservative Movement, particularly the religious right, to be able to get a handle on including the sacred into the ideas paradigm.  At UW—Madison social history “ruled the roost.” And environmental historians had not worked the subcategory of social history (race, class, gender) into the relationship between people and nature.  A watershed moment for this oversight became a roundtable symposium where Donald Worster argued to keep the dialogue on material and physical ideas, keeping social history out of environmental history.  At least four historians were asked to comment on Worster’s polemic, including Cronon.  BC offered an overview of each of their arguments, which focused on why social history should be included into environmental history.  So, the 1990s led to a “wonderful body of scholarship” by upcoming historians (Cronon did name several of them), where they asked, “How can we bring the social into the environment?”

01:22:05	Question: How does the environmental studies program fit into environmental history?  Answer: BC had been careful not to use the term environmental studies until now, except for his comments about his Yale tenure.  He then jumped into the entity of environmental studies by starting with noting that the early leaders in the environmental history were tenured in either a history or American studies programs, not an environmental studies program.  Cronon confessed to ambivalence toward environmental studies as a graduate degree.  Cronon then offered an overview of most undergraduate majors, including when the major entered academia and how they have used intellectual rigor to justify their field.  By the 1960s/1970s, people began to argue against the “neat little boxes” that the academy had cleaved its majors into.  Certain important questions, including those dealing with the environment, needed to be answered outside the disciplines.

01:29:59 	[no question] Cronon then focused on the environmental studies program at UW—Madison, founded by a “renegade” geographer, Reed Bryson.  Bryson found the Institute of Environmental Studies, which later became the Nelson IES to bring people with different ideas together to work on difficult environmental questions.  Cronon noted that IES began with a tense relationship to the geography department and an ambiguous relationship to other departments.  Cronon detailed the reasons for the ambiguity.  IES wanted to have a major, but it ended up being able to give only a certificate. (UW—Madison does not give minors.) Cronon does see the Nelson as a precious resource that has never achieved its fullest success.  Cronon does feel that UW—Madison can claim preeminence in environmental studies, but the university has not pursued that brand. 

01:34:52	[no question] When Cronon returned to UW—Madison, he wanted to create a place where people who see things differently can dialogue can meet and chat.  Cronon noted that his life, since the school newspaper, has been grounded by the idea that bringing different people together to discuss their thoughts can benefit them all.  In regards to environmental studies, Cronon created a breakfast discussion group, which he started at Yale and continued at UW—Madison.  He described the rules of the Yale group, which he brought to Madison.  The meetings at Madison will bring 2 to 3 times as many people as the Yale gathering.

01:41:22	Question: Can you describe the brief history of CHE (Center for History & Environment)?  Answer: Cronon’s story about the breakfast group created a transition to CHE’s story.  By the end of the 1990s, UW—Madison had gained more environmental historians than probably anywhere else.  Cronon offered the story about how these historians, such as Nancy Langston, Gregg Mitman, Arthur McEvoy, Arne Alanen, Jess Gilbert, and (later) Sara Hotchkiss, ended up in myriad departments all over campus.  As these people taught their classes and mentored their students, a question arose: How to cooperate in teaching students, specifically graduate students?  

01:48:41	[no question] So, BC, Langston, Mitman, and Hotchkiss came together to try to answer that question.  The answer began with Environmental History Colloquium, a lunch meeting, which drew large numbers from all over campus.  This led to the idea of CHE, and Cronon detailed an overview of the events that arose, including anonymous funding, to turn the idea into reality.  Cronon concluded with some of the things that CHE has done, including an environmental film festival, in the past two years.  

01:55:16	End of Fourth Interview Session

End of Second Interview

END OF ORAL HISTORY #548