New Books In The American West

Greg Marchildon interviews Molly P. Rozum, the author of Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies (U of Nebraska P & U of Manitoba P, 2021). Molly Rozum is currently the Ronald R. Nelson Chair of Great Plains and South Dakota History at the University of South Dakota. She received her PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has worked on the history of this transnational region throughout her career. Although she grew up and was educated in the United States, she has spent time in Canada as a visiting professor and researcher. In this book, Rozum explores how the northern grasslands in North America were perceived by second and third generations of those who settled in the region to live, work, farm and ranch, including their relationship with the Indigenous peoples. This interview was produced with the support of The Champlain Society. The mission of The Champlain Society is to increase public awareness of, and accessibility to, Canada

As the 1974 school year began, Wayne Woodward was a beloved high school teacher in a rural Texas town. By the following spring, he was embroiled in a local political firestorm that would ultimately cost him his job. Woodward's sin was, in his own words, naively trying to found a chapter of the ACLU in his Hereford, Texas community. In You Will Never Be One of Us: A Teacher, A Texas Town, and the Rural Roots of Radical Conservatism (University of Oklahoma Press, 2022) West Texas A&M Professor Timothy Bowman tells the remarkable story of Woodward's teaching career, his fight over the ACLU chapter, and the nationally-covered wrongful termination trial that followed. Woodward's story casts shifts the story of American conservatism away from the suburbs and toward rural places like Hereford, where local frontier identities helped create distrust of outsiders and a strong streak of libertarianism. The central question of the book is one of human behavior: why otherwise average Americans would work so hard to run an

From the earliest days of non-Native settlement of Montana, when Chinese immigrants made up more than 10 percent of the territory’s population, Chinese pioneers played a key role in the region’s development. But this population, so crucial to Montana’s history, remains underrepresented in historical accounts, and popular attention to the Chinese in Montana tends to focus on sensational elements—exoticizing Chinese Montanans and distancing their lived experiences from our modern understanding. The Middle Kingdom Under the Big Sky: A History of the Chinese Experience in Montana (U of Nebraska Press, 2022) seeks to recover the stories of Montana’s Chinese population in their own words and deepen understanding of Chinese experiences in Montana by using a global lens. Mark T. Johnson has mined several large collections of primary documents left by Chinese pioneers, translated into English here for the first time. These collections, spanning the 1880s through the 1950s, provide insight into the pressures the Chines

Before the craft beer revolution, Coors was a hot commodity. Impossible to find outside a few states in the West, the beer had a level of "cool" that only comes from scarcity. However, this veneer of desirability masked all manner of unfair and discriminatory labor practices within the Coors Brewing Company itself.  In Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism (UNC Press, 2021), La Verne University professor Allyson Brantley describes how labor activists built a coalition that punctured the aura surrounding the iconic beer brand and created lasting change within the company. Chicano activists, union organizers, and LGBTQ protesters found common ground in aligning against Coors, and the story of their boycott movement - its failures as well as its successes - shows that activism and coalition building were vibrant and viable strategies, even during the depths of Reagan era conservatism. The story of Coors is the story of corporate union busting, New Right

Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, the gay sons of immigrants featured in Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons (NYU Press, 2022) could not have felt further removed from a world where queerness was accepted and celebrated. Instead, the men profiled here maneuver through family and friendship circles where masculinity dominates, gay sexuality is unspoken, and heterosexuality is strictly enforced. For these men, the path to sexual freedom often involves chasing the dreams while resisting the expectations of their immigrant parents—and finding community in each other. Anthony Christian Ocampo also details his own story of reconciling his queer Filipino American identity and those of men like him. He shows what it was like for these young men to grow up gay in an immigrant family, to be the one gay person in their school and ethnic community, and to be a person of color in predominantly White gay spaces. Brown and Gay in LA is an homage to second-generation gay men and their radical redefinition o

Just about every major film now comes to us with an assist from digital effects. The results are obvious in superhero fantasies, yet dramas like Roma also rely on computer-generated imagery to enhance the verisimilitude of scenes. But the realism of digital effects is not actually true to life. It is a realism invented by Hollywood—by one company specifically: Industrial Light & Magic. The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light & Magic and the Rendering of Realism (University of Texas Press, 2022) shows how the effects company known for the puppets and space battles of the original Star Wars went on to develop the dominant aesthetic of digital realism. Julie A. Turnock finds that ILM borrowed its technique from the New Hollywood of the 1970s, incorporating lens flares, wobbly camerawork, haphazard framing, and other cinematography that called attention to the person behind the camera. In the context of digital imagery, however, these aesthetic strategies had the opposite effect, heightening the sense of realism

Beginning in the 1970s Chicana and Chicano organizers turned to community radio broadcasting to educate, entertain, and uplift Mexican American listeners across the United States. In rural areas, radio emerged as the most effective medium for reaching relatively isolated communities such as migrant farmworkers. And in Washington’s Yakima Valley, where the media landscape was dominated by perspectives favorable to agribusiness, community radio for and about farmworkers became a life-sustaining tool. Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley (U Washington Press, 2022) unearths the remarkable history of one of the United States’ first full-time Spanish-language community radio stations, Radio KDNA, which began broadcasting in the Yakima Valley in 1979. Extensive interviews reveal the work of Chicana and Chicano producers, on-air announcers, station managers, technical directors, and listeners who contributed to the station’s success. Monica De La Torre weaves these oral histori

Before 1973's landmark Roe v. Wade decision, abortion in California was illegal for both doctors performing and women seeking the procedure. In From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969 (U Nebraska Press, 2020), Dr. Alicia Gutierrez-Romine, an associate professor of history at La Sierra University, examines the experiences of doctors and patients in southern California during the mid-twentieth century. For doctors, performing abortions carried a good deal of risk, including extensive sentences of jail time. For women, the procedure was often safe, but not always, and carried risk of infection and even death. Women could use resources like the Pacific Coast Abortion Ring, a network of doctors willing to perform abortions, or even cross the border into Mexico, but every aspect of illegal reproductive medicine carried risks, moreso if patient or doctor were Black or poor. This is a relevant book and Gutierrez provides a window not just into the past, but into a post-Dobbs American

In this episode, Tiffany speaks with Professor Cynthia Orozco about her new book, Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales, published with Arte Público Press in 2020. Alonso S. Perales is a leading Latino lawyer of the twentieth century. Though he has remained overlooked in the historical record until now. In Orozco’s newest publication, she argues that Perales was a significant player in civil rights politics and made a profound impact by founding the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and organized many Latinos to engage in political and educational reform. From primary and rich secondary sources across Texas, Orozco masterfully crafted an intriguing life story of Perales. Chapters include Perales upbringing in south Texas, pursuing an education in Washington, D.C., organizing Latinos in San Antonio, the founding of LULAC, familial influence in his personal and political decisions, the rivalries and solidarities he formed over time, and the events leading up to his death. Th

Offering a fresh perspective on the influence of the American southwest—and particularly West Texas—on the New York art world of the 1950s, Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West (Texas A&M UP, 2022) aims to establish the significance of itinerant teaching and western travel as a strategic choice for women artists associated with traditional centers of artistic authority and population in the eastern United States. The book is focused on three artists: Elaine de Kooning, Jeanne Reynal, and Louise Nevelson. In their travels to and work in the High Plains, they were inspired to innovate their abstract styles and introduce new critical dialogues through their work. These women traveled west for the same reason artists often travel to new places: they found paid work, markets, patrons, and friends. This Middle American context offers us a “decentered” modernism—demanding that we look beyond our received truths about Abstract Expressionism. Authors Amy Von Lintel and Bonnie Roos

During the early years of photography, settlers around the Pacific World were fascinated with the landscapes of the places they conquered. According to Dr. Jarrod Hore, a postdoctoral researcher and co-director of the New Earth Histories Research Program at the University of New South Wales, wilderness images helped Americans and Australians make sense of the places they were in the process of dispossessing. In Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism (U California Press, 2022), Hore tells the story of six landscape photographers from around the Pacific World and explains how their images of places like the Tasmanian Central Highlands, the Yosemite Valley, and even California's Spanish Missions, helped construct a narrative of wild frontier spaces emptied of people, waiting to be settled and improved by white hands. Hore places these photographers in their context as imperial actors, and in doing so explains how images attempted to legitimize settler colonialism in the American

Hanford is the most-polluted place in America. In our last episode, you heard about the nuclear plant's largely-forgotten history--how it poisoned the people living downwind. On our season finale: a nuclear safety auditor tries to get it shut down, the downwinders struggle for justice, and we take you into the plant itself. This is part two, if you haven’t heard part one yet go check out yesterday’s episode. The story of Hanford reveals that expertise is always a political battle, and never as straightforward as simply collecting facts--whether it’s executives putting profit over a safety auditor’s well-documented warnings, a community-based research pitted against government-backed studies, or turning a world-changing nuclear reactor into a scientific lecture. This episode is from the pre-Darts and Letters era when we produced a documentary series called Cited. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you u

In this episode of Cited: What it means to live in a place where your home can give you cancer. Richland, Washington is a company town that sprang up almost overnight in the desert of southeastern Washington. Its employer is the federal government, and its product is plutonium. The Hanford nuclear site was one of the Manhattan Project sites, and it made the plutonium for the bomb that devastated Nagasaki. The official history is one of scientific achievement, comfortable houses, and good-paying jobs. But it doesn’t include the story of what happened after the bomb was dropped -- neither in Japan, nor right there in Washington State. In part one of this Cited two-parter we tell the largely-forgotten story of the most toxic place in America. This episode was produced before Darts and Letters existed, when Cited Media was all about a documentary series called Cited. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you

On November 19, 1895, eighteen year old Lloyd Montgomery murdered his parents and their neighbor at his home in rural Linn County, Oregon. In Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon (U Washington Press, 2022), Peter Boag, professor of history at Washington State University, tries to explain how this horrific crime came to pass. Boag explains that rural America in the late nineteenth century was in a state of crisis, and rural boyhood in particular was an experience fraught with both symbolism and peril. With an ongoing economic crisis and with violence and death everywhere, young American boys in places like Linn County found themselves with fewer future prospects and more expectations upon their shoulders than ever. The Montgomery murder thus spoke directly to the fears and the hopes that many Americans had for their nation's future, as well as to the inherent violence at the core of the American Western experience. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history

Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands (U Chicago Press, 2022) begins with the 144 children of Nazi scientists who moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1946 as part of the military program called Operation Paperclip. These German children were bused daily from a military outpost to four El Paso public schools. Though born into a fascist enemy nation, the German children were quickly integrated into the schools and, by proxy, American society. Their rapid assimilation offered evidence that American public schools played a vital role in ensuring the victory of democracy over fascism. Jonna Perrillo not only tells this fascinating story of Cold War educational policy, but she draws an important contrast with another, much more numerous population of children in the El Paso public schools: Mexican Americans. Like everywhere else in the Southwest, Mexican American children in El Paso were segregated into "Mexican" schools, where the children received a vastly different educational expe

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many African Americans moved westward as Greater Reconstruction came to a close. Though, along with Euro-Americans, Black settlers appropriated the land of Native Americans, sometimes even contributing to ongoing violence against Indigenous people, this migration often defied the goals of settler states in the American West. In Black Montana: Settler Colonialism and the Erosion of the Racial Frontier, 1877-1930 (U Nebraska Press, 2021), Anthony W. Wood explores the entanglements of race, settler colonialism, and the emergence of state and regional identity in the American West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By producing conditions of social, cultural, and economic precarity that undermined Black Montanans' networks of kinship, community, and financial security, the state of Montana, in its capacity as a settler colony, worked to exclude the Black community that began to form inside its borders after Reconstruction. Black Montana depicts the history of

Childbirth defines families, communities, and nations. In Birthing the West, Jennifer J. Hill fills the silences around historical reproduction with copious new evidence and an enticing narrative, describing a process of settlement in the American West that depended on the nurturing connections of reproductive caregivers and the authority of mothers over birth. Economic and cultural development depended on childbirth. Hill’s expanded vision suggests that the mantra of cattle drives and military campaigns leaves out essential events and falls far short of an accurate representation of American expansion. The picture that emerges in Birthing the West presents a more complete understanding of the American West: no less moving or engaging than the typical stories of extraction and exploration but concurrently intriguing and complex. Birthing the West: Mothers and Midwives in the Rockies and Plains (U Nebraska Press, 2022) unearths the woman-centric practice of childbirth across Montana, the Dakotas, and Wyoming,

Between 1848 and 1899, miners extracted more gold from the earth than in the previous 3,000 years of human history combined. Each gold rush in this period, from the Sierra Nevada to the highlands of Australia to the Transvaal, was a global event, drawing argonauts and others seeking new lives from all corners of the world, including from China. In her Bancroft-Prize winning book, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (Norton, 2021), Columbia University Professor of Asian American Studies and History Mae Ngai seeks to dispel a long held myth that Chinese gold-seekers arrived as unfree labor to sites of gold rushes. Instead, Mae describes in great detail not just the global nature of gold rushes, but the complicated lives and politics of Chinese participation in imperial-era gold mining. Using a comparative study of three gold rushes in California, Australia, and South Africa, Ngai explains why "The Chinese Question" became a driving social and political question among White settlers in each

Conversations with LeAnne Howe (UP of Mississippi, 2022) is the first collection of interviews with the groundbreaking Choctaw author, whose genre-bending works take place in the US Southeast, Oklahoma, and beyond our national borders to bring Native American characters and themes to the global stage. Best known for her American Book Award-winning novel Shell Shaker (2001), LeAnne Howe (b. 1951) is also a poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, theorist, and humorist. She has held numerous honors including a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship in Amman, Jordan, from 2010 to 2011, and she was the recipient of the Modern Language Association's first Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages for her travelogue, Choctalking on Other Realities (2013). Spanning the period from 2002 to 2020, the interviews in this collection delve deeply into Howe's poetics, her innovative critical methodology of tribalography, her personal history, and her position on subjects ranging from the Lone

Tejanaland: A Writing Life in Four Acts (Texas A&M UP, 2021) by Teresa Palomo Acosta--poet, historian, author, and activist--spans three decades of her writing, from 1988 through 2018. The collection is divided into four parts: poems, essays, a children's story, and plays. Each work addresses cultural, historical, political, and gender realities that she experienced from her childhood to the present. The plays, set in the Central Texas Blackland Prairies where Acosta was raised, provide a unique Latina vision of memory, identity, and experience and are a vital contribution to Chicana feminist thought. The essays focus on Acosta's literary heroes Jovita González de Mireles, Sara Estela Ramírez, and Elena Zamora O'Shea, important writers who contributed significantly to Tejana literature and to Texas letters. The children's story, "Colchas, Colchitas," is based on Acosta's most notable poem, "My Mother Pieced Quilts," which pays homage to her mother and the many women of her generation who employed needles and