Historian of the American West, Great Plains, & Canadian Prairies

Hi, I'm Jason A. Heppler, a digital and environmental historian writing about the twentieth century North American West, Great Plains, and Canadian Prairies. I'm the senior developer-scholar at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and an Affiliate Fellow at the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

My latest books —

Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism

The environmental inequalities of Silicon Valley's post-World War II development.

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Digital Community Engagement

Case studies on campus-community partnerships and the creation of digital humanities projects.

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Find more of my work on my scholarship page or my CV.

Recent Essays —

A New Design for Readability Mar 2026

Design updates for 2026

How I Use Obsidian Redux Jan 2026

An update on how I use Obsidian for historical research.

Generative AI and the Work of History Dec 2025

Generative AI lacks the ability to understand context, historical ambiguity, and cannot generate new knowledge, rendering it inadequate for certain kinds of historical research and meaningless for education.

The Farmall H Restoration, February Update Feb 2025

A February update on the 1946 Farmall H restoration.

Friction Jan 2025

Migrating to Micro.blog made writing easier and more productive.

All essays →

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