A conversation with Frank Bergon about his 2019 collection of essays, Two-Buck Chuck and the Marlboro Man: The New Old West (University of Nevada Press, 2019)

Frank Bergon is Professor Emeritus of English at Vassar College. He is a novelist, essayist, and critic of the American West, and member of the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. His new collection of essays, Two-Buck Chuck and the Marlboro Man: The New Old West, was published by University of Nevada Press in 2019. These essays focus on the San Joaquin Valley in California, bringing its history and present into conversation with one another. Bergon tells stories of the region's inhabitants, their experiences in seemingly traditional "Old West" contexts, and their grappling with "New West" economies and socio-cultural devleopments. In these stories we discover "wesern" identities that overlap, compete, and meld. Bergon uses the story of wine industry figure Fred Franzia to consider how individuals and industries navigate a region in constant transition. Bergon deconstructs western "identity" and iconic imagery through stories of his life-long friend Darrell Winfield - the real-life cowboy made famous in iconic "Marlboro Man" advertisements. Bergon presents vignettes from Winfield's life to illustrate the tensions between imagined, manufactured, and actual regional identities and lives. Bergon's eloquent storytelling reveals the complexity of the region and asks insightful questions about how we think about its past and present.

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 Podcast Notes:

• Host and Producer Brenden W. Rensink is Associate Director of the Redd Center, an Associate Professor of History at BYU, General Editor of the Intermountain Histories project, and author of the 2018 book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands. Links to other publications and projects here: https://linktr.ee/bwrensink

A conversation with Prof. Manu Karuka about his 2019 book, Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press, 2019)

Manu Karuka is Assistant Professor of American Studies, and affiliated faculty with Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad was published by the University of California Press in 2019 in their "American Crossroads" series.

Empire's Tracks takes familiar histories of American westward expansion and transcontinental railroad construction and retells them through the often missing contexts of captialism, finance, and what Karuka terms a "military-finance nexus." Viewed as "continental imperialism," Karuka shows how the entreprises of expansion, military conquest, and capitalist enterprise were intertwined and that their continental extension unfolded over colonized territories, not American homelands. By featuring histories of how Natives peoples and Chinese laborers experienced the transcontinetnal railroad story, Empire's Tracks expands our view of history. Integrations of global economic networks, political and economic philosophy, and post-colonial literature and theory offer a powerful set of lenses through which to read old stories anew.

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 Podcast Notes:

• Host and Producer Brenden W. Rensink is Associate Director of the Redd Center, an Associate Professor of History at BYU, General Editor of the Intermountain Histories project, and author of the 2018 book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands. Links to other publications and projects here: https://linktr.ee/bwrensink

Conversation with Rebecca Robinson and Stephen E. Strom about their books, Voices from Bears Ears: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land (University of Arizona Press, 2018) and Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land (George F. Thompkins Publishing, 2018).

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 Podcast Notes:

• Host and Producer Brenden W. Rensink is Associate Director of the Redd Center, an Associate Professor of History at BYU, General Editor of the Intermountain Histories project, and author of the 2018 book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands. Links to other publications and projects here: https://linktr.ee/bwrensink

A conversation with Leah Sottile about her Bundyville Podcast and longform journalism. Visit https://longreads.com/bundyville.

Leah Sottile is a freelance journalist whose features, profiles, investigations and essays have been featured by the Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, Outside, The Atlantic, Vice and several others. She is currently the T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor at the University of Montana School of Journalism.

Sottile's National Magazine Award-nominated Bundyville podcast is paired with a textual longform journalism version at Longreads.com and was produced in collaboration with Longread and Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Both the podcast and textual version of Bundyville investigate conflicts over public lands in the American West, federal jursidiction over them, the Bundy ranching family's involvement in a 2014 armed standoff with federal officials in Nevada and the 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, and the myriad cast of associated characters in the world of patriot, milita, anti-government, religious, and state-seperatist movements.

The multi-chapter textual version of both seasons are available at Longreads.com. The podcast is not a simple recitation of the longform text, but a seperately produced narrative that features interviews and other audio unique to the podcast version. Find it at Longreads.com or anywhere you can subscribe to podcasts.

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 Podcast Notes:

• Host and Producer Brenden W. Rensink is Associate Director of the Redd Center, an Associate Professor of History at BYU, General Editor of the Intermountain Histories project, and author of the 2018 book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands. Links to other publications and projects here: https://linktr.ee/bwrensink

A conversation with Debra Gwartney about her book I Am a Stranger Here Myself, published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2019.

Debra Gwartney is a former journalist and current author and memoirst who teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University. I Am a Stranger Here Myself was published in 2019 by the University of New Mexico Press and won the River Teeth Literary Nonfictin Prize. In this book Gwartney pairs the 19th century history of missionary Narcissa Whitman, who was killed in an 1847 massacre by Cayuse Indians, with her own life and complicated relationship with Salmon, Idaho and the West. It is part history and part memoir, and grapples with Western identity, belonging, and coming to peace with the tensions therein. 

Gwartney is also the author of Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Mariner Books, 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, and Oregon Book Award, and coeditor of Home Ground: A Guide to the Americna Landscape (Trinity University Press, 2006).

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 Podcast Notes:

• Host and Producer Brenden W. Rensink is Associate Director of the Redd Center, an Associate Professor of History at BYU, General Editor of the Intermountain Histories project, and author of the 2018 book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands. Links to other publications and projects here: https://linktr.ee/bwrensink

A conversation with Eric Perramond about water in the American West and his book, Unsettled Waters: Rights, Law, and Identity in the American West, published by the California University Press in 2019.

Eric P. Perramond is Professor of Environmental Science and Southwest Studies and W.M. Keck Director of the Hulbert Center for Southwest Studies at Colorado College. Unsettled Waters: Rights, Law, and Identity in the American West was published by University of California Press in 2018. His previous books include An Introduction to Human-Environment Geography: Local Dynamics and Global Processes, published by WILEY-Blackwell in 2013, and Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching in Northern Mexico: Private Resolutions, published by University of Arizona Press in 2010.

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 Podcast Notes:

• Host and Producer Brenden W. Rensink is Associate Director of the Redd Center, an Associate Professor of History at BYU, General Editor of the Intermountain Histories project, and author of the 2018 book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands. Links to other publications and projects here: https://linktr.ee/bwrensink

A conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist, John Branch, about his book The Last Cowboys: A Pioneer Family in the New West.

John Branch is a New York Times sports reporter. Branch's previous work has received considerable acclaim. In 2011 and 2012 he ws a finalist for Pulitzer Prizes in feature writing, and in 2013 his multimedia project "Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek" on a deadly avalanche in Washington State won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing. In 2015, his biography, Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard, won the 2015 Pen/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing.

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 Podcast Notes:

• Host and Producer Brenden W. Rensink is Associate Director of the Redd Center, an Associate Professor of History at BYU, General Editor of the Intermountain Histories project, and author of the 2018 book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands. Links to other publications and projects here: https://linktr.ee/bwrensink

Conversation with historian David A. Chang about his award-winning book The World and All Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2016.

A conversation with David A. Chang about his award-winning book The World and All Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2016. This book won  the Albert J. Beveridge Award for the best book in English on the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada from 1492 to the present from from the American Historical Association, the John C. Ewers Award for best book in North American Indian Ethnohistory from the Western History Association, the Best Subsequent Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and was a Finalist for the John Hope Franklin Award for Most Outstanding Book in American Studies from the American Studies Association.

David A. Chang is a Distinguished McKnight Professor of History and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is also author of the award-winning The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2010.

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 Podcast Notes:

• Host and Producer Brenden W. Rensink is Associate Director of the Redd Center, an Associate Professor of History at BYU, General Editor of the Intermountain Histories project, and author of the 2018 book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands. Links to other publications and projects here: https://linktr.ee/bwrensink

A conversation with Professor Beth Lew Williams and her award-winning 2018 book, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018)

Beth Lew-Williams is an Assistant Professor and Philip and Beulah Rollins Bicentennial Preceptor in the Department of History at Princeton University. The Chinese Must Go recently won the 2019 Ray Allen Billington Prize and 2019 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, as well as the 2019 Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era.

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 Podcast Notes:

• Host and Producer Brenden W. Rensink is Assistant Director of the Redd Center, an Assistant Professor of History at BYU, General Editor of the Intermountain Histories project, and author of the 2018 book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands. Links to other publications and projects here: https://linktr.ee/bwrensink

A conversation with geographer Terence Young about his book, Heading Out: A History of American Camping (Cornell University Press, 2017)

Terence Young is a professor emeritus of geography at California State Polytechnic University. He has published widely on camping, parks, sustainability, and other topics of the environment, geography, and history. Heading Out won the 2018 Hal K. Rothman Award from the Western History Association for the Best Book of Western Environmental History, and the 2018 J.B. Jackson Prize from the American Association of Geographers. He also published Building San Francisco's Parks: 1850-1930 in Johns Hopkins University Press' "Creating the North American Landscape Series" in 2008.

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Podcast Notes:

• Host and Producer Brenden W. Rensink is Assistant Director of the Redd Center, an Assistant Professor of History at BYU, General Editor of the Intermountain Histories project, and author of the 2018 book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands. Links to other publications and projects here: https://linktr.ee/bwrensink