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BA, Williams College
PhD, Clark University

Environmental change, hazards and resources, environmental history

Human geography, cities, climate-society relations, nature-society relations, environmental history, northeastern United States.

• Meyer, W.B., “Early American Versions of a Homosexual-Advances Defense,” American Journal of Legal History 64 (2025), 241-259.
• Meyer, W.B., The Great Murdering-Heir Case: A Biography of Riggs v. Palmer (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2024).
• Meyer, W.B., “Samuel Nelson and Judicial Reputation,” Journal of Supreme Court History 48 (2023), 299-316.
• Meyer, W.B., “The Best Answer? Justice Nelson’s Concurrence in Dred Scott v. Sandford,” American Journal of Legal History 63 (2023), 1-18.
• Meyer, W.B., “Nature, Society, and Conjoint Constitution,” Geographical Review 113 (2023), 519-535.
• Meyer, W.B., “‘No Quixotry in Redress of Grievances’: How Community Abatement of Public Nuisances Disappeared from American Law,” Law and History Review 41 (2023), 171-191.
• Meyer, W. B., “Class, Conservation, and the Police Power in the American Gilded Age: The Origins of Lawton v. Steele,” American Journal of Legal History 62 (2022), 215-236.
• Meyer, W. B., “Borderlands of the Local State,” Political Geography 92 (2022): 102498 (9 pp.).
• Meyer, W. B., “The Background to Riggs v. Palmer,” American Journal of Legal History 60 (2020), 48-75.
• Meyer, W. B., “First Effective Settlement: Histories of an Idea,” Journal of Historical Geography 65 (2019), 1-8.
• Meyer, W. B., “Urban Primacy before Mark Jefferson,” Geographical Review 109 (2019), 131-145.
• Neo-Environmental Determinism: Geographical Critiques (with Dylan M.T. Guss '14) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
• The Progressive Environmental Prometheans: Left-Wing Heralds of a ‘Good Anthropocene’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
• "The Suburban Bias of American Society?" (with Jessica K. Graybill), Urban Geography 37 (2016), 863-882
• Americans and Their Weather: A History, updated edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014).
• The Environmental Advantages of Cities: Countering Commonsense Antiurbanism (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013).
• “Burgess and Hoyt in Los Angeles: Testing the Chicago Models in an Automotive-Age American City” (with Christopher R. Esposito ’14), Urban Geography 36 (2015), 314-325.
• “Residential Patterns in the Pre-Automotive American City” (with Christopher R. Esposito ’14), Geographical Review 104 (2014), 346-60.
• “The Making and Unmaking of a Natural Resource: The Salt Industry of Coastal Southeastern Massachusetts,” Massachusetts Historical Review 15 (2013), 123-50.
• Meyer, W.B., “Hills as Resources and Resistances in Syracuse, New York,” Geographical Review 102 (2012), 1-16.
• “A City (Only Partly) on a Hill,” in Conrad E. Wright and Anthony Penna, eds., Remaking Boston: An Environmental History of the City and Its Surroundings (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
• “Boston’s Weather and Climate Histories,” in Conrad E. Wright and Anthony Penna, eds., Remaking Boston: An Environmental History of the City and Its Surroundings (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

Associate, Belfer Center, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University 1997-2003; Research Associate, Clark University 1987-1996