Donald Jackson

Special interests: history of engineering and technology with focus on dams and water resources development in the American West; environmental history; business history; American popular culture; United States history post-Civil War.

Selected publications:

“Something Better for the City”: John R. Freeman, Hetch Hetchy, and San Francisco’s Yosemite Water Supply, book manuscript under contract with the University of Oklahoma Press, Public Land Series.

Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster, Co-authored with Norris Hundley, 2016 (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library Press in association with the University of California Press) Winner of the 2017 Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology – the Hacker Prize is awarded annually to honor books in the history of technology “of exceptional scholarship that reach beyond the academy toward a broad audience.”

Pastoral and Monumental: Dams, Postcards and the American Landscape (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013)

Big Dams of the New Deal Era: A Confluence of Engineering and Politics. Co-authored with David Billington, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006)

Building the Ultimate Dam: John S. Eastwood and the Control of Water in the West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).

Editor, DAMS, Volume 4, Studies in the History of Civil Engineering (Aldershot, England: Ashgate/Variorum Press, 1998).

Great American Bridges and Dams (New York: John Wiley, 1988).

“TVA and the Price of Progress: Eli Kazan’s Wild River,”in American Energy Cinema, Robert Lifset et al, ed., West Virginia University Press, forthcoming Spring 2023

“Rules of the Game: Dam Building and Regulation in California, 1910-1930.”in The Emergence of Routines: Entrepreneurship. Organization, and Business History, Phil Scranton and Dan Raff, eds. (Oxford University Press, 2017).

“The Engineer as Lobbyist: John R. Freeman and the Hetch Hetchy Dam,” Environmental History (Spring 2016), pp. 288-314.

“Politics and Dam Safety: The St. Francis Dam Disaster and the Boulder Project Canyon Act” in Proceedings of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Hoover Dam 75th Anniversary History Symposium, Richard Wiltshire, ed. (Reston, VA: ASCE, 2010): 1-24.

“Structural Art: John S. Eastwood and the Multiple Arch Dam” in Engineering History and Heritage Journal, Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers 162 (August 2009), pp. 137-146.

Colorado River Basin Water Management: Evaluating and Adjusting to Hydroclimatic Variability, Co-author/member of the Committee on the Scientific Bases of Colorado River Basin Water Management, Water Science and Technology Board, National Research Council of the National Academies (Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, 2007)

Honors: Heavy Ground, Winner of the 2017 Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology – the Hacker Prize is awarded annually to honor books in the history of technology “of exceptional scholarship that reach beyond the academy toward a broad audience.”Overseas Prize, 2010, Institution of Civil Engineers, for article on “Structural Art: John S. Eastwood and the Multiple Arch Dam,” Outstanding Academic Book for 1996, selected by CHOICE, the official publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, for Building the Ultimate Dam; Ray A. Billington Award in 1994 from the Western History Association for the best article on the history of the American West, for article on history of the early U.S. Reclamation Service; Lafayette College’s Van Artsdalen Prize for sholarship, 2009; Thomas and Lura Jones Lecture Award for excellence in scholarship and teaching,1996.