Deindustrialization, addiction and high housing costs, plus frayed social services and mental health care, have fed a housing crisis on the west coast. One town's mayor experienced this firsthand.
From animal husbandry to epidemiology, the work of scientists was critical to America's conquest of the west, while the region also provided critical evidence in the debate over Darwin's theory of natural selection.
Among the period-correct details establishing the provenance of the pants was an inner tag proclaiming the garments were made with only "white labor" in the era of Chinese exclusion.
All five members of the center's executive committee have resigned in support of Prof. Limerick. She has argued that her dismissal will make other scholars reluctant to commit to public engagement outside the university wall.
A report alleged that the professor misused the time and work of center staff for personal projects; it remains unclear if the report was the reason for her removal from an academic center she founded.
The Colorado River Compact is based in an egregious exaggeration of how much water flows through the river—and how much downstream farms and cities have been entitled to use.
Only recently has popular culture revived interest in Bass Reeves, one of the first Black men to serve as a US Marshal, and the scourge of Texas fugitives.
Cameron Blevins's new book documents the role of the postal service in enabling the westward expansion of the United States and the conquest of Native American peoples.
Ammon Bundy has been looking for another battle since the takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. With a new administration promising increased regulation of public lands use, he may choose one soon.
Activists in Oregon are working to recover knowledge of the state's forgotten African American history, which is as old as white settlement in the region.
New novels disrupt the stories of white heroism at the heart of the Western genre and grapple with the multiethnic, violent, and exploitative history of the continent.
African Americans were an important, but largely forgotten, presence in the mining industry of the far west, a story that connects race, national expansion, and labor politics in the Gilded Age.
The same period that saw the public affirmation of the Confederate Lost Cause myth saw a proliferation of monuments that portrayed the conquest of the indigenous people of the west as virtuous pioneering. The case of Marcus Whitman shows a national reckoning is in order.
The city of El Monte in southern California has embraced a false origin story--that the town was the end of the Santa Fe trail--to focus public history on white/anglo settlers and not the Native, Mexican, and Asian immigrant people who have also built the city.
Silas Soule and Joseph Cramer, two Civil War-era heroes who rebelled and refused to join a brutal attack against Native peoples represent the moral courage we would do well to honor.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the notion of American exceptionalism. The same is true for the golden myth of California, where American inequalities are perhaps most starkly displayed.
