History

Professor Shannon teaches Early American, Native American, and British history. His most recent book is a critical edition of Peter Williamson’s eighteenth-century captivity narrative French and Indian Cruelty, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023.  He is also the author of Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain (Harvard University Press, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 Frank Watson Book Prize for best book in Scottish history, and Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (Penguin, 2008).  His first book Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (Cornell, 2000) won the Dixon Ryan Fox Prize from the New York State Historical Association and the Distinguished Book Award from the Society of Colonial Wars.  

Other books that he has edited or co-authored include The Seven Years’ War in North America: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford, 2014); Atlantic Lives: A Comparative Approach to Early America (Routledge, second edition, 2019); American Odysseys: A History of Colonial North America (Oxford, 2014); and Going to the Source: The Bedford Reader in Early American History, (Bedford, fifth edition, 2020).  His work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Huntington Library.