About me
Born and raised in Colorado, Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer based in Boston, with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of five books, including The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist in History) and Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (winner of the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Nonfiction). Her new book, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier, will be published by Scribner in March 2026.
Megan 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. She is an elected member of the prestigious Society of American Historians and was the 2024-2025 Rogers Distinguished Fellow in Nineteenth-Century American History at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
