William H. Goetzmann | Expert on the West, 80
William H. Goetzmann, 80, who in a Pulitzer Prize-winning book overturned the idea of Western exploration in the 19th century as a series of random thrusts into the hinterland, finding instead that it was a far more systematic effort, died last Tuesday of congestive heart failure at his home in Austin, Texas
William H. Goetzmann, 80, who in a Pulitzer Prize-winning book overturned the idea of Western exploration in the 19th century as a series of random thrusts into the hinterland, finding instead that it was a far more systematic effort, died last Tuesday of congestive heart failure at his home in Austin, Texas.
Mr. Goetzmann's Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West synthesized a vast repository of diaries, reports, monographs, and scholarly studies in presenting a comprehensive picture of what he called the American government's "programmed" information-gathering.
For example, he wrote, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were instructed to collect data not only on transportation routes and trapping grounds in their epic expedition but also on Indian tribes and available natural resources that might affect future settlement. The book won the Pulitzer for history in 1967 as well as the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians.
He also created a documentary series on Western art, The West of the Imagination, broadcast by PBS in 1986.
At the University of Texas, where he began teaching in 1964 and directed the American-studies program until 1980, he opened up the study of American history to blacks, women, and Hispanics. He appointed the first black faculty in the liberal arts.
- N.Y. Times News Service