History

Professor Shannon teaches Early American, Native American, and British history. His most recent book is 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. 

He is also the author of Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (Penguin, 2008) and Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (Cornell, 2000), the latter of which won the Dixon Ryan Fox Prize from the New York State Historical Association and the Distinguished Book Award from the Society of Colonial Wars.  His other books include Going to the Source: The Bedford Reader in Early American History, 5^th edition (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2020); Atlantic Lives: A Comparative Approach to Early America, second edition (Routledge, 2019); The Seven Years’ War in North America: A Brief History with Documents, (Bedford, 2014); and American Odysseys: A History of Colonial North America, co-authored with David Gellman (Oxford, 2014). 

His work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Huntington Library.  His current project examines Benjamin Franklin’s relations with and writings about Native Americans.