Who is Dr. Slatta? [If your answer is "who cares," skip this page.]

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  • Richard W. Slatta is professor of history at North Carolina State University. He has taught at NC State since completing doctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin in 1980. He has been a full professor at NC State since 1990. On May 9, 2000, the NCSU College of Humanities and Social Sciences announced his selection as the CHASS Lonnie and Carol Poole Award for Teaching Excellence for 1999-2000. He is also a teaching fellow in the Hewlett Continuation Project for 1999-2000. In 1999, he designed, created, and taught the history department's first online course.
  • Brief bio: Born in Powers Lake, North Dakota (get out your atlas), Slatta grew up in Wyoming, California, Oregon, and Washington. He attended graduate school at Portland (OR) State University (MA) and the University of Texas at Austin (PhD). He served as an urban community development volunteer for the Peace Corps in Panama City. Drafted soon thereafter into the U.S. Army, he spent two years with the Second Armored Division ("Hell on Wheels") at Ft. Hood, Texas. He has traveled and researched widely throughout the Western Hemisphere. He travels to Bonaire the British Virgin Islands, and elsewhere in the Caribbean to work on his snorkeling skills whenever possible, a passion shared by his wife Maxine and son JD.
  • Books: Comparing Cowboys and Frontiers (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997, paperback 2001), The Cowboy Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO, 1994; paperback Norton, 1996), Cowboys of the Americas (Yale University Press, 1990; paperback 1994); an edited volume, Bandidos: The Varieties of Latin American Banditry (Greenwood Press, 1987); Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983, paperback 1992). He spent the fall 2000 semester on research leave to complete two books: The Mythical West: An Encyclopedia of Legend, Lore, and Popular Culture (ABC-CLIO, due out mid-2001) and Bolívar's Quest for Glory (Texas A&M University Press, 2003), Cowboy: The Illustrated History (Sterling, 2006, 2008).
  • Honors and Awards: The American Library Association and the Library Journal selected The Cowboy Encyclopedia as a Best Reference Source. Cowboys of the Americas won the 1991 Western Heritage Award for Nonfiction Literature, given by the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. The Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies awarded his first book, Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier the 1984 Hubert Herring Book Prize as the best book on Latin American history. Other honors include Outstanding Intellectuals of the Twentieth Century, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, Who's Who in the World, and Who's Who in American Education.
  • Other Writing: Slatta is the author of some two hundred articles and reviews. He frequently writes popular history essays for two leading western magazines, Cowboys & Indians and Persimmon Hill . During 1999-2000, he wrote a regular column called "Riding the Cyber Range" for Roundup, official magazine of the Western Writers of America.
  • Teaching: Slatta teaches classes on Latin American history, comparative frontiers, US-Latin American relations, and the Latino Experience.
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