James Rice earned his PhD at the University of Maryland in 1994. A professor of history at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh, he teaches courses on First Nations/Native America, colonial America, and historical methodology. His publications focus primarily on eastern North America in the sixteenth—eighteenth centuries. His Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson (an exploration of the connections between environmental change, culture, and politics over the course of more than a millennium) argued that pre-colonial trends amongst Native Americans profoundly shaped cultural and political formations in the colonial period and beyond. As a Carson Fellow, he was working on a synthesis of Native American environmental history in North America. Currently he holds a professorship at Tufts University, where he is teaching early American, Native American, and environmental history.