White received his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington.[1] He was chosen for the MacArthur Fellows Program in 1995, and was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2016.[2] White was founding director of Stanford's Spatial History Project,[3] which implements digital technologies and analyses to illuminate patterns and anomalies for research purposes.
Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington. University of Washington Press, 1979. ISBN0-295-95691-7 (hardback); ISBN0-295-97143-6 (1992 paperback).
The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos. University of Nebraska Press, 1983. ISBN0-8032-4722-2; ISBN0-8032-9724-6 (1988 paperback).
The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN0-521-37104-X (hardback); ISBN0-521-42460-7 (paperback).
"It's Your Misfortune and None of my Own": A History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. ISBN0-8061-2366-4.
The Frontier in American Culture: An Exhibition at the Newberry Library, August 26, 1994-January 7, 1995, with Patricia Nelson Limerick, edited by James Grossman. University of California, 1994. ISBN0-520-08843-3; ISBN0-520-08844-1 (paperback).
The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. ISBN0-8090-1583-8.
Remembering Ahanagran: A History of Stories. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998. ISBN0-8090-8072-9.
"Corporations, Corruption, and the Modern Lobby: A Gilded Age Story of the West and the South in Washington, D.C.", Southern Spaces, 16 April 2009. online