Jared Orsi is Associate Professor of History at Colorado State University. He is the author of the prizing-winning Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles.
[An] engaging, readable, and insightful biographical history * Ohio Valley History * Shifting his lens between grand politics and the nitty-gritty of early American life, Jared Orsi gives us a wonderfully real Zebulon Pike, grounded in the material realities that determined personal and social choices in the evolving West. He presents us with Pike as a man of his times, caught by the promises of a nation that couldn't yet deliver on them. * Anne F. Hyde, author of Empires, Nations, and Families, A New History of the American West, 1800-1860 * With thorough research and clear prose, Jared Orsi insightfully recovers the dramatic life and violent death of a military hero and western explorer of the early republic. In an unstable age of competing regions, Zebulon Pike pioneered a national style of manhood which flourished in, and gave shape to, the American West. * Alan Taylor, author of The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 * This interesting and well-researched book fills the information gap concerning Pike. ... In Citizen Explorer Jared Orsi, an associate professor of history at Colorado State University, finally presents the complex and almost-quixotic life of Pike. ... In his impressive collection of primary and secondary sources, Orsi was able to discover the hidden life of a simple soldier who rose to the role of brigadier general. * Journal of American History * As Orsi demonstrates in this nifty environmental biography, the true state of Pike and his nation was in flux....Orsi's environmental biography invites further contemplations, large scale and small. * Jon T. Coleman, Environmental History * In bringing the tools of environmental history to bear on themes that have long engaged scholars of the early republic, Orsi gives us a fresh take on Pike's life and the spaces he explored. ... [Citizen Explorer is] a boundary-crossing model worth emulating. * Western Historical Quarterly *