Le Pays des Illinois Finds its Context: The Early History of Illinois in a Continental Perspective

Robert Michael Morrissey is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, specializing in the history of early America and the Atlantic world, American frontier and borderlands history, ethnohistory, and environmental history. In addition to several articles on early Illinois history, he is the author of Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in the Colonial Illinois Country (2015). His next book project is entitled “The Illinois and the Edge Effect: People, Environment, and Power in the Tallgrass Prairie Borderlands.” It is a study of the relationship between people and non-human nature in one of North America’s most distinctive ecological and social frontiers from 1200 to 1850.