Michael J. Lansing is a historian of the modern United States. His scholarship focuses on the North American West and Midwest.
His most recent book is A Police State: Politics and Public Safety in Minneapolis, 1945-2020 (University of Chicago Press, 2027). Michael’s other books include Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2015), the co-edited Wallace Stegner’s Unsettled Country: Ruin, Realism, and Possibility in the American West (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), and the co-authored The American West: A Concise History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). He has also published articles in the Western Historical Quarterly, Environmental History, the Journal of Historical Geography, the Middle West Review, the Utah Historical Quarterly, Minnesota History, and Ethics, Place, and Environment.
Michael has held fellowships at the Newberry Library, Science History Institute, and Minnesota Historical Society and received awards from the Western History Association, the Midwestern History Association, the Montana Historical Society, the Minnesota Historical Society, and the Utah Historical Society.
An active public historian, his work includes an oral history project with the Minnesota chapter of the Sierra Club, a congregational history, co-founding the Historyapolis Project, two years on the Legacy Strategic Agenda Collaborative (co-sponsored by the Minnesota Historical Society and the Minnesota Association of Local History Museums), co-creating Purple Places: A Digital History Tour of Prince’s Minneapolis, and co-founding Overpoliced and Underprotected in MSP. His reflections on history and current events have appeared in MinnPost, the Minnesota Reformer, The Conversation, Zócalo Public Square, Jacobin, The Progressive, and the Washington Post.
He is currently working on two books. Enriched: Industrial Carbohydrates and the Rise of Nutrition Capitalism (under contract with the University of Chicago Press), is an environmental and business history of factory-processed grains and the propagation of a political economy that demarcates the way we understand, make, and eat food. Building a Cooperative Commonwealth: Floyd B. Olson and the Farmer-Labor Movement uses biography to explore the story of the most successful third party in the twentieth-century U.S.
At Augsburg, Michael teaches a wide range of courses in U.S. history, including environmental history, public history, and histories of democracy. He is also a co-founder of and participating faculty member in the Environmental Studies program and has served as the content advisor for Augsburg’s secondary social studies education majors since 2012. Before arriving at Augsburg in 2005, he taught at Utah State University and the State University of New York at Buffalo and served as visiting assistant editor at the Western Historical Quarterly.
Education
- A.B. College of William & Mary
- M.A. Utah State University
- Ph.D. University of Minnesota