MEGAN KATE NELSON
Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer, with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of four books, including Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner 2022; winner of the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Non-Fiction) and The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner 2020; finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History), as well as Ruin Nation (Georgia, 2012) and Trembling Earth (Georgia, 2005).
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. Before leaving academia to write full-time in 2014, she taught U.S. history and American Studies at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. Megan grew up in Littleton, Colorado, and now lives in Boston with her husband and two cats.
Praise for Saving Yellowstone
"The author displays her strong commitment to including the Native presence in any account of Western history ... A readable and unfailingly interesting look at a slice of Western history from a novel point of view."
—Kirkus Reviews
"In Saving Yellowstone, Megan Kate Nelson has accomplished something truly pathbreaking. She has written a new history of Reconstruction, one that shows how the exploration and conquest of the American West intersected with the ill-fated attempts to establish an interracial democracy in the South. While these two strands of American history are often thought of as parallel, Nelson reveals startling new connections. A masterful storyteller, Nelson’s prose is as captivating as the landscapes she describes. This book is a must-read for anyone who appreciates deep research and powerful narrative.”
—Carole Emberton, author of Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War
"Megan Kate Nelson has a remarkable ability to take an unfamiliar event and not only bring it to light, but also use it as a lens for viewing much larger and more familiar events in new ways. In Saving Yellowstone, she presents the making of the first national park as a multi-dimensional story of exploration and conflict and as a new vantage point on the meaning of Reconstruction."
—Steven Hahn, author of A Nation Without Borders
Praise for Megan Kate Nelson's The Three-Cornered War
"Terrific... a very good telling of a story that is unknown to most Americans."
—The Reconstruction Era, blog review
“Engaging and unsparing… A gripping history that integrates the Southwest into broader histories of American expansion.”
—Booklist
“Based on extensive archival research, Nelson’s work expands our understanding of how the Civil War affected Indigenous peoples and helped to shape the nation. [A] nuanced portrait of the era.”
—Library Journal, starred
“Brisk and well-sourced… American history buffs will relish this entertaining and eye-opening portrait.”
—Publishers Weekly
"With lucid storytelling, using nine remarkable characters, Nelson reveals a chaotic, desperate struggle of Union against Confederate, Native peoples against other Native peoples, and Natives on both sides... Rarely is a Civil War book so readable and so new to our understanding."
—David W. Blight, author of the Pulitzer-prize winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
"A gripping story, powerfully told."
—Clay Risen, author of The Crowded Hour
"Fast-paced and suspenseful... This history of invasions, battles, and forced migration shapes the United States to this day—and has never been told so well."
—T.J. Stiles, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
"[A] bautifully written account."
—James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
"Gripping... The Three-Cornered War brings this battle between peoples, armies, agendas, and the environment to living breathing life."
—Joanne B. Freeman, author of The Field of Blood and editor of Alexander Hamilton: Writings
advance praise for the three-cornered war
A dramatic, riveting, and deeply researched narrative account of the epic struggle for the West during the Civil War, revealing a little-known, vastly important episode in American history.
Finalist, 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History
Smithsonian Magazine‘s Top Ten History Books of 2020
Civil War Monitor‘s Top Civil War Books of 2020
Finalist, 2021 Reading the West Book Award (Narrative Non-Fiction)
Fifty Books of the West List, Tattered Cover Bookstore and the Colorado Sun
One of Newsweek‘s 40 Must-Read Fiction and Nonfiction Books to Savor this Spring!
“From Canby tending to wounded soldiers in Confederate-occupied Sante Fe to the July 1862 capture of Tucson by Carleton’s California Column and escalating clashes between Apache warriors and Union troops, Nelson effectively blends military history with a fresh look at a region typically obscured in accounts of the Civil War. American history buffs will relish this entertaining and eye-opening portrait.” — Publishers Weekly
“Of the several ‘western theaters’ in the Civil War that stretched 1800 miles from Knoxville to Tuscson, the events and significance of the one farthest west is least known or understood. Union forces in New Mexico and Arizona repulsed the Confederate attempt to conquer this region and subdued the Navajos and Apaches in a successful effort to ‘reconstruct’ this region in the United States. Megan Kate Nelson’s beautifully written account tell this important story.”
— James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
“In the 1860s New Mexico and the greater West experienced many civil wars. With lucid storytelling, using nine remarkable characters, Nelson reveals a chaotic, desperate struggle of Union against Confederate, Native peoples against other Native peoples, and Natives on both sides. This is the Civil War most Americans do not know and Nelson convinces us once again that the great conflict was about slavery and the winning the West with its land and resources. Rarely is a Civil War book so readable and so new to our understanding.”
— David W. Blight, Yale University and author of the Pulitizer-prize winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.
“A gripping tale of the Civil War in the West. Exploring the interaction of a fascinating cast of characters during a time of immense change, Nelson reveals an all too human struggle for territorial control. Shifting perspective between nine key characters -- men, women, soldiers, and Native Americans -- The Tri-Cornered War brings this battle between peoples, armies, agendas, and the environment to living breathing life.”
— Joanne B. Freeman, Professor of History, Yale University
"Far from the Civil War's famous battlefields, a handful of individuals decided the fate of a vast landscape. In The Three-Cornered War, Megan Kate Nelson vividly portrays a complex struggle between peoples and armies—Navajo, Apache, Confederate, and Federal—over the mountains and deserts of the Southwest. Fast-paced and suspenseful, Nelson's account shifts perspective from the Navajo leader Juanita to the civilian Louisa Canby, from the Chiricahua titan Mangas Coloradas to the Texan Bill Davidson, among many others, in a web of conflicting agendas and shared suffering. This history of invasions, battles, and forced migration shapes the United States to this day—and has never been told so well."
— T.J. Stiles, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
“Symphonic in scale, The Three-Cornered War blends masterfully the intimate and the epic, weaving the biographies of nine individuals into a story of peoples—Apaches, Texans, New Mexicans, Confederates, Navajos, Federals—whose tragedies and triumphs resonate in the West we know today.”
— Dr. James F. Brooks, Gable Distinguished Chair in History, University of Georgia