Larson, John Lauritz 1950- (John Larson, John L. Larson)

PERSONAL:

Born March 6, 1950, in Eagle Grove, IN; married; children: two. Education: Luther College, B.A., 1972; Brown University, A.M., 1976, Ph.D., 1981.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, Purdue University, University Hall, 672 Oval Dr., West Lafayette, IN 47907-2087, E-mail—larsonjl@purdue.edu.

CAREER:

Historian, educator, and writer. Brown University, Providence, RI, teaching assistant, 1975-78; Conner Prairie Pioneer Settlement, Fishers, IN, director of research and collections, 1979-83; Earlham College, Richmond, IN, lecturer, 1979-83; Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, assistant then associate professor of history, 1988-2001, professor of history, 2001—, director of graduate education in history, 2005—.

MEMBER:

Society for History of Early American Republic, Indiana Historical Society.

AWARDS, HONORS:

John E. Rovensky, fellow, 1978-79; Newberry Library fellowship, 1978; Joan Cahalin Robinson Prize, Society for the History of Technology, 1980; Northeaster Association of Graduate Schools Annual Book Award in Humanities, 1984; National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), summer grant, 1986, 1992; American Bar Foundation Legal History Grant, 1986; Indiana Committee for the Humanities, summer fellow, 1988; American Association for State and Local History grant, 1988; Article Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, 1988; McNeil Center for Early American Studies Barra postdoctoral fellow, 2005.

WRITINGS:

Bonds of Enterprise: John Murray Forbes and Western Development in America's Railway Age, foreword by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University (Boston, MA), 1984, expanded edition, University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 2001.

Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2001.

(As John Larson, with Michael Morrison) Whither the Early Republic: A Forum on the Future of the Field, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.

Contributor to books, including The State and Economic Knowledge: Reflections on the American and British Experience, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1990; Jeffersonian Legacies, University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), 1993; Launching the Extended Republic, University Press of Virginia/U.S. Capitol Historical Society (Charlottesville, VA), 1996; The State of Indiana History, Indiana Historical Society (Indianapolis, IN), 2001; The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 2001; and Blackwell's Companion to the American Civil War, Blackwell Publishing (Oxford, England), 2005; contributor to periodicals and journals, including Indiana Magazine of History, Journal of American History, Journal of the Early Republic, Indiana Academy of Social Sciences Proceedings, and Traces. Coeditor of the Journal of the Early Republic, 1994—.

SIDELIGHTS:

John Lauritz Larson is an historian who primarily focuses on American history in the areas of early republic public policy, economic development, legal and political culture, westward movement, and slavery and race. In his book Bonds of Enterprise: John Murray Forbes and Western Development in America's Railway Age, the author examines the many facets of the American railroad business and how it affected American business and America itself as an economic powerhouse. He achieves his goal by examining the life of nineteenth-century entrepreneur John Murray Forbes, whose career spanned the eras from the personal market capitalism in the United States to the country's ultimate move toward big-business management. Albert J. Churella, writing on the H-Net Web site, called the book "a fascinating and important work." Churella went on to write that "Bonds of Enterprise is a beautifully written and superbly organized account of a pivotal time, and a pivotal person, in the history of American business."

Larson examines the U.S. government's early approach to internal improvements, such as roads, bridges, and railroads, in his book Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States. Specifically, the author explores why the government left much of the responsibility for infrastructure improvements to state and local municipalities, as well as private enterprise. "Larson provocatively argues that the United States would have been much better off if it had established a strong tradition of national planning of internal improvements," wrote John Majewski on the EH Net Web site. Majewski went on to note: "The result of Larson's national political narrative and overview of state-level initiatives is an important and much-needed synthetic study. It successfully integrates a wide range of new evidence with scores of older works on internal improvements. Filled with detail, it nevertheless steadfastly keeps the bigger picture clearly in view."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

ONLINE

EH Net,http://eh.net/ (February 23, 2007), John Majewski, review of Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States,

Humanities and Social Sciences Online,http://www.hnet.org/ (February 23, 2007), Albert J. Churella, review of Bonds of Enterprise: John Murray Forbes and Western Development in America's Railway Age,

Purdue University, Department of History Web site,http://www.cla.purdue.edu/history/ (February 23, 2007), faculty profile and author's curriculum vitae.