Senior Lecturer History & Associate Director Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers & Borders

Jay Gitlin received his BA and PhD at Yale. His work focuses on the history of the French in the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes. He is currently working on The Rise and Fall of Modern Shopping.  The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders & American Expansion was published in 2010 by Yale University Press and won the 2010 Alf Andrew Heggoy Prize for the best book in French colonial history from the French Colonial Historical Society.  He has published numerous articles and contributed chapters to the Oxford History of the American West (Oxford, 1994) and The Louisiana Purchase and the Emergence of the American Empire (Congressional Quarterly, 2003). He is also co-editor and co-author of Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (W.W. Norton, 1992).

 

Gitlin teaches courses on American Indian history, the history of the American West, Canadian history, and the suburbanization of America.