We noted the passing of
John R. Wunder late last month and now have
an obituary, courtesy of the University of Nebraska, where he was professor emeritus of history. We recall him from his many appearances at the American Society for Legal History as an important, prolific, but approachable legal historian of the Great Plains and the American West and their indigenous peoples. His publications include
Inferior Courts, Superior Justice: A History of the Justices of the Peace on the Northwest Frontier, 1853-1889 (1979);
“Retained by the People”: A History of American Indians and the Bill of Rights (1994), and
Gold Mountain Turned to Dust: Essays on the Legal History of the Chinese in the Nineteenth-Century American West (2018); and the edited collections
Native American Sovereignty (1996);
Americans View Their Dust Bowl Experience (1999);
The Nebraska-Kansas Act of 1854 (2008); and
Echo of its Time: The History of the Federal District Court of Nebraska, 1867-1933 (2019).
On Twitter, his students have remembered him as “wise, encouraging, kind and generous” and “a source of so much goodness in the world.”
--Dan Ernst
