Oscar Osborn Winther

Born 1903 Weeping Water, NE (USA)

Died 1970-05-22
Bloomington, IN (USA)

Oscar Winther was a well known historian who taught for many years at the University of Indiana. Like his brother, the great novelist of Danish immigration, Sophus Keith Winther, he grew up in Weeping Water, Nebraska. A distinguished historian of America's westward expansion, especially into "the Great Northwest," Oscar Winther was also the long-time editor of the The Mississippi Valley Historical Review who shepherded the transformation of that journal into the modern Journal of American History, the leading journal of the American Historical Association. He remained as editor of The American Historical Review until 1966, when his health began to fail.

The Indiana University Archives hold the Oscar Osburn Winther papers, 1913-1979, and the online guide to the collection includes a longer biographical sketch.

dsc

Places Lived

Weeping Water, NE
Eugene, OR
Cambridge, MA
Stanford, CA
Bloomington, IN

Author Of

Nonfiction

Keywords

History--American; Oregon--History; Frontier and Western Expansion--History

Education

Bachelor of Arts Degree in History, 1924, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
Master of Arts Degree in History, 1928, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Ph.D. in History, 1934, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

Occupation

Scholar
Educator
College Dean
Writer
Historian

Places Worked

Stanford University, Stanford, CA
University of Indiana, Bloomington, IN

Honors

Fulbright Fellowships, 1952, 1965
Guggenheim Fellowship, 1959
Numerous research grants
The Western History Association Council established the Oscar O. Winther Award for the best article to appear in the Western Historical Quarterly each academic year

Associations

Brother of the great novelist Sophus Keith Winther

Bibliography

Express and Stagecoach Days in California : From the Gold Rush to the Civil War. 1936.
Via Western Express and Stagecoach. 1945. UN Press edition, 1968.
The Great Northwest. 1947.
The Old Oregon Country : A History of Frontier Trade, Transportation and Travel. 1950. Bison Books edition, 1969.
The Transportation Frontier: Trans-Mississippi West, 1865-1890. 1964.

We appreciate corrections and additions to our information about authors, but please read the following guidelines and caveats carefully.

The Nebraska Authors database is based on publicly available sources. Unless you are the author contacting us in person, it helps us if you cite the source or sources of your information. We cannot include unsourced information in the database.
We may be appreciative of information we choose not to include in the publicly available database.
To include an image on an author profile, please send jpg attachment to nebraskaauthors@lincoln.ne.gov. A photo-release agreement is required before the image will be published on this site.
Because of the way we are staffed, expect corrections or additions to take time, sometimes up to three months.
While we initially included some actual links to external URLs in the database, we will in the future no longer provide functioning links. We will instead record the presence of specific external materials in language that we hope will help intelligent users find it themselves. Web rot, in which actual materials remain online but undergo changes in their URLs, is too demanding in terms of staff time for us to hope to keep external links current.

Please copy, fill out the form below, and email it to heritage@lincoln.ne.gov to suggest a change.