Access Utah

Historian and Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was recently on the USU campus to give a talk presented by the USU History Department and sponsored by the Tanner Talks Series in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

It’s a pledge drive special edition of Access Utah today. My special guest for the hour is Dr. Jason Gilmore, assistant professor of Communication Studies at Utah State Unviersity. We’ll reach into the archives for parts of some of our favorite episodes of the program. We’ll hear from Phillip Dray, author of "At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America." Then we’ll hear part of my conversation with Sonia Nazario on the family separation and zero tolerance immigration crisis. Sonia Nazario is author of the book "Enrique's Journey." And we'll conclude with a segment from my interview with Gary Paul Nabhan who is working to use food to unite people across social and political divisions. We also discuss Chimamanda Adichie's TED Talk, "The Danger of a Single Story."

Witty, inspiring, and charismatic, Oscar Wilde is one of the Greats of English literature. Today, his plays and stories are beloved around the world. But it was not always so. His afterlife has given him the legitimacy that life denied him. Making Oscar Wilde reveals the untold story of young Oscar's career in Victorian England and post-Civil War America. Set on two continents, it tracks a larger-than-life hero on an unforgettable adventure to make his name and gain international acclaim. 'Success is a science,' Wilde believed, 'if you have the conditions, you get the result.'

Today, as a part of Utah State University’s Year of the Arts, we’ll focus on the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, which is looking forward to its grand reopening Saturday, September 15th. We talk about a new book, “Collecting on the Edge: Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art.” We’ll talk with the museum’s Executive Director and Chief Curator, Katie Lee-Koven; writer, curator, and museum director Bolton Colburn, who edited the book; and independent curator and corresponding editor for Art in America, Michael Duncan, who wrote an introductory essay for the book.

Utah State University’s Mountain West Center for Regional Studies has announced the 2018 winners of the Evans Biography Awards for books published in 2017. Author and ethnographer Rodney Frey won the Evans Handcart Award for his book Carry Forth the Stories: An Ethnographer’s Journey into Native Oral Tradition (Washington State University Press, 2017).

If you are a bystander and witness a crime, should intervention to prevent that crime be a legal obligation? Or is moral responsibility enough?Amos N. Guiora addresses these profound questions and the bystander-victim relationship from a deeply personal and legal perspective, focusing on the Holocaust and then exploring cases in contemporary society. He shares the experiences of his parents and grandparents during the Holocaust and examines sexual assault cases at Vanderbilt and Stanford and other crimes where bystanders chose not to intervene. Guiora recommends that we must make the obligation to intervene the law, and thus non-intervention a crime.

In this fresh and introspective collection of essays, Julia Corbett examines nature in our lives with all of its ironies and contradictions.

Using minimal tools and a simple technique of bending, interweaving, and fastening together sticks, artist Patrick Dougherty creates works of art inseparable with nature and the landscape. With a dazzling variety of forms seamlesslyintertwined with their context, his sculptures evoke fantastical images of nests, cocoons, cones, castles, and beehives. Over the last twenty-five years, Dougherty has built more than two hundred works throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia that range from stand-alone structures to a kind of modern primitive architectureevery piece mesmerizing in its ability to fly through trees, overtake buildings, and virtually defy gravity. Stickwork, Dougherty's first monograph, features thirty-eight of his organic, dynamic works that twist the line between architecture, landscape, and art. Constructed on-site using locally sourced materials and local volunteer labor, Dougherty's sculptures are tangles of twigs and branches that have been transformed into something unexpected and wild, elegant and artful, and often humorous. Sometimes freestanding, and other times wrapping around trees, buildings, railings, and rooms, they are constructed indoors and in nature. As organic matter, the stick sculptures eventually disintegrate and fade back into the landscape. Featuring a wealth of photographs and drawings documenting the construction process of each remarkable structure, Stickwork preserves the legend of the man who weaves the simplest of materials into…

“The Man Who Caught the Storm” is the saga of the greatest tornado chaser who ever lived: a tale of obsession and daring, and an extraordinary account of humanity’s high-stakes race to understand nature’s fiercest phenomenon.

For nearly 2 decades, professional photographer Jim Herrington has been working on a portrait series of influential rock and mountain climbers. The resulting book, “The Climbers” documents these rugged individualists who, from roughly the 1930s to 1970s, used primitive gear along with their wits, talent, and fortitude to tackle unscaled peaks around the world. Today, these men and women are renowned for their accomplishments and, in many cases, are the last of the remaining practitioners from the so‐called “Golden Age” of 20th century climbing.