Carlos A. Schwantes

Carlos Schwantes is Professor of History at the University of Idaho and Director of the Institute for the Pacific Northwest Studies. In addition to teaching classes on the history of the Pacific Northwest and the Twentieth Century West, he is the author or editor of thirteen books including The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History (1989); In Mountain Shadows: A History of Idaho (1991); and Railroad Signatures Across the Pacific Northwest (1993), which received the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society’s George W. and Constance M. Hilton Book Award as an outstanding work of lasting value to the interpretation of North America’s railroading history for 1992-1994.

Awards committee chair William L. Withuhn, curator of transportation at the Smithsonian Institution, described Railroad Signatures as a “stellar contribution to both scholarly and popular audiences: well-written and lavishly produced, the book tells the story of railroading’s indelible imprint, its “signature on everyday life in America.” Schwantes, who recently completed the manuscript for a companion book on the steamboat and stagecoach era in the Northwest (forthcoming from the University of Washington Press in 1999), received his doctorate in American history from the University of Michigan in 1976 and has been a faculty member at the University of Idaho since 1984. He is an avid photographer and had a collection of his images published in 1996 as So Incredibly Idaho: Seven Landscapes that Define the Gem State. His most recent publication is Columbia River: Gateway to the West. Schwantes serves on the editorial advisory boards of several history journals. Since 1990, he has served as an historian on many Lindblad Expeditions' trips to the Columbia & Snake Rivers and in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.