About the Author

William Lilley III (1938 - 2021) had an academic career at Yale in the 1960s, where he taught American History for eight years. He wrote his dissertation on The Early Career of Francis G. Newlands, 1848-1898 (1965). His interests centered on the political and economic development of the American West in the 19th century. He co-authored an article analyzing why so many of the irrigation ventures in the 19th century West were failures.

Lilley had careers separate from academics. He first worked in the federal government as deputy assistant secretary for the Department of Housing & Urban Development, then as the director of the Council on Wage and Price Stability, and lastly as the director of the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives.

Lilley also worked in the private sector. He started working for CBS Inc., the media company in New York, where he was the senior vice president for corporate affairs for eight years. Lilley left CBS to co-found and manage iMap Data Inc. for a number of years before selling the company. iMapData was one of the several companies in the 1990s that built extensive libraries of databases which could be visualized on a web-based platform. Clients were able to merge their own data with iMapData’s data and detect anomalies in their performance. Lilley made the platform available to the Bill Lane Center to analyze water, rural poverty and institutional change, all in the West.