Obituary: William Goetzmann, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian

William Goetzmann, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. Born: 20 July, 1930, in Washington. Died: 7 September, 2010, in Austin, Texas, aged 80.

IN A Pulitzer Prize-winning book William Goetzmann overturned the idea of the push into the American West in the 19th century as a series of random thrusts into the hinterland, finding instead that it was a far more systematic effort.

Goetzmann's book Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West" (Knopf, 1966) synthesised a vast repository of diaries, reports, monographs and studies in presenting a comprehensive picture of what he called the American government's "programmed" information gathering.