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Megan Kate Nelson is a historian, cocktail enthusiast, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the author of five books.
Her forthcoming book, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier tells two richly detailed and interwoven stories.
The first reveals the captivating lives of women and men moving through the American West — Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and Canadian and Asian immigrants—in the nineteenth century.
The second tracks the attempts of many Americans to remove these westerners from history, through a frontier myth that lionized individualism and conquest and celebrated white settlers traveling west in search of prosperity.
The Westerners is one of LitHub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2026!
Megan is also the author of The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, which was a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist in History, and Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, winner of the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Non-Fiction, as well as Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American CIvil War, and Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp.
A fellow of the prestigious Society of American Historians, Megan is also a regular guest on radio shows and TV documentaries about U.S. Western history and popular culture. She has recently become a podcast host, interviewing book authors as part of the “Historians and their Histories” podcast for the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Megan also writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Slate, and TIME.
Before leaving academia to write full-time in 2014, Megan taught U.S. history and American Studies at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. She earned her BA magna cum laude in History and Literature from Harvard University and her PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa.
Born and raised in Colorado, Megan now lives in Boston with her husband and two cats.
