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Pulitzer Prize-winning historian William H. Goetzmann passed away on September 7, 2010. Goetzmann, emeritus professor of history at The University of Texas at Austin, taught history and American studies for fifty years, first at Yale, then at The University of Texas. As chair of the UT history department from 1968–1969 and later as director of the American Studies Program from 1964–1980, he played a key role in the racial integration of the university's faculty and in the development of multi-cultural studies in the humanities. In 1968, he recruited the College of Arts and Sciences' first African American faculty members, Dr. Henry Bullock and Dr. George Washington. Additionally, he instituted the University's first courses in women's studies and Hispanic-American studies.

His book Exploration and Empire, a study of the nineteenth-century scientific exploration of the American West, won both the Pulitzer and Parkman Prizes in history in 1967. His most recent work, Beyond the Revolution (2009), traced the development of post-Revolutionary American thought. Goetzmann was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000 and the American Philosophical Society in 1999.