Inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of the University of Utah’s American West Center, the oldest regional studies center in the United States, Western Lands, Western Voices explores the many dimensions of public history. This collection of thirteen essays is rooted in the real-world experiences of the authors and is the first volume to focus specifically on regional public history.
Contributors include tribal government officials, state and federal historians, independent scholars and historical consultants, and academics. Some are distinguished historians of the American West and others are emerging voices that will shape publicly engaged scholarship in the years to come. Among the issues they address are community history and public interpretation, tribal sovereignty, and the importance of historical research for land management. The volume will be indispensable to researchers and general readers interested in museum studies, Native American studies, and public lands history and policy.
To read Western Lands, Western Voices is to get an up-close look at what it’s like to wade into the messy, fascinating, unfinished work of public history in the American West, and perhaps even to be inspired to enter the public sphere oneself.
Western American Literature
Impressive. . . . an important and welcome addition to the scholarship of public history and the American West.
Pacific Northwest Quarterly
A solid contribution to contemporary understandings of public historians and their role in assessing, preserving, and promoting regional histories for the larger public.
Montana: The Magazine of Western History
At a time when the flash points of American politics center on what versions of the past we remember and forget—and, by extension, which stories we tell about ourselves and who we are becoming—this book will appeal not only to the niches of museum studies, American history, or Native American studies, but also to general interest readers who want to understand how the past becomes history, and how history becomes memory.
Oregon Historical Quarterly
Western Lands, Western Voices has material that will appeal to readers specifically interested in studying the American West as a region, Indigenous peoples, policy decisions, environmental issues, and education. The greatest value to broader audiences, however, lies in the discussion of public history itself, using these topics as case studies to show how public history has evolved, how it is used today, and how it can be used in the future for the greater public good.
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
Western Lands, Western Voices provides an excellent overview of the power and promise of public history in the West. Each essay should be considered a model in its particular field.
H-Environment
Western Lands, Western Voices is a gift of distinction for those who do history as well as for those of us who are public beneficiaries of their work.
Association for Mormon Letters
These works go beyond just talking ABOUT public history work to show how the lives of the practitioners are part of the story as well. This is a type historiography rooted in the context of the people who wrote it.
Jay M. Price, professor of history and director of the Local and Public History Program, Wichita State University
This collection makes a unique and important contribution to the literature of the field. I look forward to using it in my own classes. I know this sentiment will be widely shared.
Andy Kirk, professor of history, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
About the Author
Gregory E. Smoak is director of the American West Center and associate professor of history at the University of Utah. He is the author of Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century and a forthcoming environmental history of Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. He is currently the president of the National Council on Public History.
Table of Contents
Foreword – Gregory C. Thompson
Editor’s Acknowledgments
Introduction: Putting History to Work in the American West – Gregory E. Smoak
1. Posing the Question: What Makes Public History Public?
Richard White
2. Taking a Public Turn: Public History as Public Service in the American West
Leisl Carr Childers
3. Rothman’s West: The Education of a Western Public Intellectual
Michael Childers
4. Mythic Spaces, Real Places: Thoughts on Administrative History in the Western National Parks
Leighton M. Quarles
5. Prospecting the Past: How Public History and Tourism Remade Lake City, Colorado
Mette Flynt
6. Finding and Building Community on the Manito Trail
Trisha Venisa-Alicia Martínez and Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez
7. “Working on the Dark Side”: Public Land Management and Tribal Relations
Yvette Towersap Tuell
8. The Adjudication of Three Tribes’ Water Rights
E. Richard Hart
9. “This Is Our Home; This Is Our Land”: Memory, Visual Sovereignty, and Museum Exhibition on the Klamath River Basin
Brittani R. Orona
10. Placemaking in Public: Building a Native American Studies Program on the Indigenous Columbia Plateau
Laurie Arnold
11. Scholarship, the Public, and the Challenge of Local History
Jedediah Rogers
12. Building Bridges
Stephen Aron and Virginia Scharff
Notes
Contributors
