Writing Westward Podcast

A conversation with historian Dr. Robert Lee about his High Country News article "landgrabu.org.

Dr. Robert Lee is a University Lecturer in American History at the University of Cambridge. He earned is Ph.D. in History from US Berkeley and has a long list of awards and honors to his name. At the end of March 2020, he and journalist Tristan Ahtone published an article with High Country News entitled "Land-grab Universities" and released a companion digital history website landgrabu.org that provide data vizualizations to accompany the article.

This multi-year project examined the Indigenous lands that were used to fund the establishment of Land-Grant Universities around the nation. In the American West, many universities continue to generate revenue for these lands. This work pairs with the growing movement in higher education to study how institutions benefited from slavery in their early years, but it perhaps more universal in scope and relevance. It reveals how the sale of Native lands - especially in the West - were central to the founding of state universities. It reminds us that the lands used to endow public universities were not simply a "donation" from the federal government to the states. They represented millions of acres of recently, and often violently, expropriated Indigenous lands. The project was funded in part by the Pulizter Center and Fund for Invetigative Journalism.

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A conversation with author Miroslava Chávez-García about her book, Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

Miroslava Chavez-Garcia is a Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with affiliations in the Departments of Chicana/o Studies and Feminist Studies. She is an award winning scholar, widely praised for her intersecting the study of gender, race, immigration, incarceration, borderlands, and family. Her books include Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (University of Arizona Press, 2004), States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (University of California Press, 2012), and Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

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A conversation with author Monica Muñoz Martinez about her book, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, published in 2018 by Harvard University Press.

Monica Munoz Martinez is the Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of American Studies at Brown University, an award winning author, and engaged public historian. She is the primary investigator for Mapping Violence, a digital project that documents histories of racial violence in Texas, and a founding member of Refusing to Forget, a non-profit organization that calls for a public reckoning with racial violence in Texas.

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A conversation with writer and historian Megan Kate Nelson about her new book, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner Books, 2020).

Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian of the American Civil War, American West, popular culture, and the 19th century more broadly.

Nelson's new book, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020), unfolds in the American Southwest, pulling our gaze of the U.S. Civil War away from Eastern battlefields. In New Mexico and Arizona Nelson explores the interconnected actions of the Confederacy, the Union, and sovereign Native peoples. Each group projected conflicting plans and desires for the region.

For the Union and Confederacy, their actions in the SW were about empire and the westward expansion of either free-soil and free-labor for the north or slave economies for the south. For Native peoples, the conflict was in defense of homelands and resources and defiance against  growing American empires and ambitions. So while most Civil War battles were in the east, they were fought BECAUSE of the West and competing aspirations projected there. When the Union and Confederate conflict ends in the southwest, Nelson smartly continues to follow the story as Union warfare in the region do not cease, but shifts to Native peoples. This reminds us that in the southwest and elsewhere, the Civil War was more complex than a simple North-South conflict. It was expansionist and imperial in origin, and continental in scope. 

Nelson writes in a fluid narrative style and most chapters present the perspective of individual historical figures. This makes the text delightfully readable. It is academic rigorous history, disguised almost as a novel.

Nelson has written extensively in academic and public venues, and her previous books include  Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (University of Georgia Press, 2005) and Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (University of Georgia Press, 2012). Nelson earned a BA in History and literature from Harvard, a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa, and has taught on those topics at Texas Tech, California State - Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. 

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A conversation with author Jack Nisbet about his dual-biography,The Dreamer and the Doctor: A Forest Lover and a Physician on the Edge of the Frontier, published in 2018 by Sasquatch Books.

Jack Nisbet lives and works with his wife Claire in Spokane. He has authored several collections of essays that explore the human and natural history of the Northwest, award-winning biographies of cartographer David Thompson (Sources of the River) and naturalist David Douglas (The Collector), and additional illustrated volumes. In 2018, the Washington State Historical Society presented Nisbet with the Robert Gray medal for distinguished and long-term contributions to Pacific Northwest history. 

The Dreamer and the Doctor: A Forest Lover and a Physician on the Edge of the Frontier, published in 2018 by Sasquatch Books, relates the biographies of John and Carrie Leiberg and their late-19th and early-20th century experiences in the interior Pacific Northwest. John Leiberg was a would-be miner, turned botanist, naturalist, scientist, and government forestry employee. His reports on forest reserves, ecology, and other related fields were impressive in scope, detail, and influence. Carrie was a surgeon and physician who rose to regional prominence in her profession, published nationally on obstetrics, became politically active, and entertained entrepreneurial dreams. Their lives offer a fascinating glimpse into an oft-ignored region, stage of "frontier" development, and era of scientific discovery.

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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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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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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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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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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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