Richter earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University and then taught at Dickinson College and the University of East Anglia. He now teaches at University of Pennsylvania.

Awards

1993 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians, for The Ordeal of the Longhouse
1993 Ray Allen Billington Award, Organization of American Historians, for The Ordeal of the Longhouse
1994 Choice Outstanding Academic Book, for The Ordeal of the Longhouse
2001-02 Louis Gottschalk Prize in Eighteenth-Century History, for Facing East from Indian Country
Pulitzer Prize finalist for Facing East from Indian Country

Works

Whose Indian History? Daniel K. Richter The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 50, No. 2, Early American History: Its Past and Future. (Apr., 1993), pp. 379–393.
The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. University of North Carolina Press. 1992. ISBN 978-0-8078-4394-9.
Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Harvard University Press. 2001. ISBN 978-0-674-00638-6.
Daniel K. Richter, James H. Merrell, eds. (2003). Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600-1800. Penn State University Press. ISBN 978-0-271-02299-4.
William Pencak, Daniel K. Richter, eds. (2004). Friends and Enemies in Penn's Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania. Penn State University Press. ISBN 978-0-271-02385-4.
Peter C. Mancall, James Hart Merrell, eds. (2000). "War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience". American encounters: natives and newcomers from European contact to Indian removal, 1500-1850. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-92375-0.
Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pasts. Harvard University Press. 2011. ISBN 978-0-674-07236-7.