Richard White (born 1947) is an American historian and the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History Emeritus at Stanford University. He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and completed his MA and PhD at the University of Washington. Over his career, White has held academic positions at Michigan State University, the University of Washington, and the University of Utah. He is also a member of the MacArthur Fellows Program and the American Philosophical Society and was President of the Organization of American Historians. He is also the founding director of Stanford's Spatial History Project, which sought to use digital technology to create a collaborative space for historical research.

White’s research focuses on American history and specializes in the West, Indigenous American history, capitalism, and environmental history. In addition to The Middle Ground, along with other articles, his published works include Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington (1979), The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (1983), “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (1991), The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (1996), Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family’s Past (2003), Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011), The Republic for Which It Stands - The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (2017), and Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University (2022).