Winter 2023 Newsletter (Vol. 11)

BYU Redd Center Newsletter

Winter 2023 (Vol. 11)

In this Issue:

- Winter 2023 Lectures

- 2023 Awards Season is Here

- The North American West in the Twenty-First Century Anthology Published

- Recent Publication Grants

- Recent Redd Center-funded Awards

- Writing Westward Podcast Update

- Intermountain Histories Update and Stats

- New People at the Redd Center

Follow us on social media for more regular updates

 BYU
Redd Center
 

Intermountain Histories
 

Writing Westward Podcast
 

Redd Center YouTube Channel

 

  Winter 2023 Lectures

Follow on YouTube and Facebook to find which of these lectures will be livestreamed.

Lecture titles are tentative and room locations are tentative. Updates will be posted on the individual Facebook Event page (linked below). View all upcoming events here: https://www.facebook.com/pg/BYUReddCenter/events.

Subscribe to this blog or like our Facebook Page for more updates when the event dates approach.

 

26 January 2023

Fred Woods, Professor of Religious Education, Brigham Young University

  • Film Screening of "A Swede and a Seed: The Conversion Story of Ivban Sandberg"

Time: 11:00 AM
Location: B192 JFSB (Education in Zion Auditorium)

 

2 March 2023

Sasha C. Reed, Research Ecologist, US Geological Survey

  • Finding Hope in Times of Change: 
    How science and management can work together to face an uncertain future in Utah and on the Colorado Plateau

(Annual Annaley Naegle Redd Lecture)

Time: 11:00
Location: B192 JFSB, Education in Zion Auditorium

 

11 April 2023

Yukio Shimomura, WWII Japanese Interee

  • My Two and Half Years Behind Barbed Wire During World War II in the United States

Time: 3:00
Location: B192 JFSB, Education in Zion Auditorium


 For previous lectures visit our YouTube Channel:

Redd Center
YouTube Channel

2023 Awards Season

Applications are due March 15, 2023

Click here for information on the awards and how to apply

It is funding season at the Redd Center for our annual awards, grants, and fellowships. Each year these funding opportunities support Western-focused research, programming and events, publications, and other activities across the world.
 
 In the midst of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions on travel and other activities, many categories request explicit details on how these may impact your project, whether there are contingency plans to work amidst restrictions or if project progress would require delay until restrictions are lifted.
 
There are specific categories for students and faculty (at BYU and Off-Campus anywhere), independent scholars, public institutions and programming initiatives, etc. Priority is given to research on the Intermountain regions Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, or Wyoming. All disciplines (history, literature, sociology, geology, botany, range science, etc., literally any discipline or approach) are eligible as long as the proposed work will increase understanding about the region.
 

New Anthology Available

In Summer 2019, Associate Director Brenden W. Rensink hosted a seminar workshop, gathering established and emerging scholars working on histories of the "modern" American West. Each wrote a chapter-length piece that the small groups workshopped, and in subsequent months, edited and revised for publication. A couple additional chapters, a foreword by Patricia Nelson Limery, and an afterword by Frank Burgon were added along the way and the resulting anthology, The North American West in the Twenty-First Century was published in November 2022 by the University of Nebraska Press in November 2022. Below is a description and supporting blurbs.
 
To learn more, listen to this podcast interview that Rensink did with the New Books Network.
 
[Pre-order from the University of Nebraska Press or Amazon]
 
In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the generational process of meeting and conquering the supposedly uncivilized western frontier is what forged American identity. In the late twentieth century, “new western” historians dissected the mythologized western histories that Turner and others had long used to embody American triumph and progress. While Turner’s frontier is no more, the West continues to present America with challenging processes to wrestle, navigate, and overcome.

The North American West in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Brenden W. Rensink, takes stories of the late twentieth-century “modern West” and carefully pulls them toward the present—explicitly tracing continuity with or unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s. Considering a broad range of topics, including environment, Indigenous peoples, geography, migration, and politics, these essays straddle multiple modern frontiers, not least of which is the temporal frontier between our unsettled past and uncertain future. These forays into the twenty-first-century West will inspire more scholars to pull histories to the present and by doing so reinsert scholarly findings into contemporary public awareness.
 
“Anthologies such as Trails Toward a New Western History (1991) have marked seminal moments in the developing field of western history. Brenden Rensink’s collection The North American West in the Twenty-First Century is a new landmark volume in this tradition, one that marks a seminal moment in our understanding of what contemporary western history is. The contributors—a distinguished and adventurous group of emerging and established scholars—take on the vital issues of environment, Indigenous sovereignty, labor and migration, and politics, and place the transition to the twenty-first century at the forefront of our thinking. Every scholar and student of the West needs to engage with this important collection.”—David M. Wrobel, author of America’s West: A History, 1890–1950
“This book is in the vanguard of scholarship on the twenty-first-century West. It will provide a benchmark for future generations of historians as they assess [this time period].”—Todd Kerstetter, author of Inspiration and Innovation: Religion in the American West
 

Recent Publication Grants

The Redd regularly awards publication grants to support presses publishing books on the American West. Presses use these subventions for a variety of purposes such as including additional images or maps, improving production quality, or lowering list price. Below are new books that have been supported by recent Redd Center publication grants.
 

Michelle K. Berry, Cow Talk: Work, Ecology, and Range Cattle Ranchers in the Postwar Mountain West (University of Oklahoma Press, 2023)

 

Other Redd Center-funded Awards

 Every year the Redd Center provides funding tp sponsor awards administered by a number of organizations. This is a powerful way to extend the benefits of Redd Center resources beyond the scope of what our limited staffing allows us to administer.

American Historical Association - Pacific Coast Branch

  • Charles Redd Center Graduate Student Travel Award (Funds travel for graduate students presenting on Western topics at the annual AHA-PCB conference
    • Donna Anderson, Eliana Buenrostro, Peter Hick, David Kerry, Hayden Nelson, Brendan Thomas, and Jenni Tifft-Ochoa

BYU College of Family, Home and Social Sciences

  • Mary Lou Fulton Conference Awards (Award for best student posters dealing with the Intermountain West)
    • Winter 2022
      • 1st place: Autumn Welling, Geography
        • A City Set on a Mine: Negative Health Effects of Mining on Utah Communities
      • 2nd place: Sophia Harris, Geography
        • Investigating Characteristics of The Spanish Flu Pandemic (1918-1920) in Utah Mining Communities
      • 3rd place: Jordan Coburn, Taylor Topham, Morgan Duffy, and Hannah Dixon, Sociology
        • STEM Internships for Native American Students: Mentors' Perspectives
    • Fall 2022
      • 1st place: Sabrina Wong, Sociology
        • Liminal Belonging: The Role of Documentation Status in Shaping Utah Immigrants' Sense of Belonging
      • 2nd place: Kirsten Sanders, Geography
        • Investigating the Bioavailability of Toxic Heavy Metals in the Soil of Urban Parks in Salt Lake City, Utah
      • 3rd place: Isaac Jordon, Anthropology
        • Pottery Takes Flight

BYU College of Life Sciences

  • Charles Redd Award (Best poster from the graduate student enclave on the American West)
    • Jason Stettler, “Speak to Me Beardtongue: Discovering a ‘New’ Beardtongue Species in Northern Utah and Southern Idaho”
  • Charles Redd Award (Best oral presentation from the graduate student enclave on the American West)
    • Justin Taylor, “Rodent Deterrent Seed Coating Technologies for Restoration Seeding”

Utah Division of State History

  • Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Award (Best general interest article in the Utah Historical Quarterly)
    • Lisa Olsen Tait,
      • "'I Have Shot My Betrayer': The Trail of Amanda Olson, 1890" (Utah Historical Quarterly, Spring 2021)
  • Utah National History Day Awards (Awards for student NHD projects on the American West)
    • Daniella Lopez, Junior Individual Documentary, Thomas Edison Charter School North
      • "Successes and Failures of La Raza Unida Party  in the United States”
    • Lance Larsen, Junior Individual Website, Thomas Edison Charter School North
      • “Powell's Debate Preventing Water Wars”
    • Rachel Parke, Senior Individual Exhibit, Mountain Heights Academy
      • “Mountain Meadows Massacre”
    • Wesley Ellsworth, Senior Paper, Hillcrest High School
      • “The Trail of Broken Treaties: A Pathway to Understanding Between the United States Government and the Native American Nation”

Western History Association

  • Arrington-Prucha Prize (Best essay of the year on religious history of the West)
    • Eileen Luhr, California State University, Long Beach
      • "Pilgrims' Progress: 'Efficient America,' 'Spiritual India,' and America's Transnational Religious Imagination" (Pacific Historical Review, Winter 2021)
  • Charles Redd Center Teaching Western History Award (Given to K-12 teachers who demonstrate excellence in teachin gthe American West)
    • Liam Concannon, Notre Dame Academy, Hingham, Massachusetts
      • Lesson Plan: "Protocols and Politics: The History of Income Inequality for Chinese Americans"
    • Todd Gragg, Capitol Hill High School, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
      • Lesson Plan: "The Battle for Hetch Hetchy"
  • Jensen-Miller Award (Best article in the field of women and gender in the North American West)
    • Lina-Maria Murillo, University of Iowa
      • "Birth Control, Border Control: The Movement for Contraception in El Paso, Texas, 1936-1940" (Pacific Historical Review, Summer 2021)

Western Political Science Association

  • Charles Redd Award for the Best Paper on the American West
    • Mahina Tuteur, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
      • "The Hawaiian Land Hui Movement: Race, Property, and Law in Territorial Hawai'i"lll

Writing Westward Podcast Update

The Writing Westward Podcast is a monthly author-interview podcast. Each episode features a conversation with writers of new work on the North American West, sampling from a vareity of disciplines and subfields. The podcast is hosted and produced by Redd Center Associate Director, Professor Brenden W. Rensink.

Recent Episodes:
(full episode list at www.writingwestward.org)

Listen and Subscribe Via:

           
 

Connect with Writing Westward on Social Media

        

 

  Intermountain Histories Update

  

The Intermountain Histories project curates local histories on a website (http://www.intermountainhistories.org) and free mobile apps (iOS and Android). Stories are written by students from universities around the Intermountain West, and in collaboration with various professors.


Recent

Stats:
  • Appx. 70 stories with more being added every few weeks

  • 16 Collaborating Professors at 8 Universities

  • Over 500 student authors

  • 17 BYU Student Interns and 10 BYU Student Research and Editorial Assistants
  • Appx. 9,000 website users per month

 

 

Mobile Apps: Apple
iOS / iTunes Store

Google Play
Android Store

 

Follow on Facebook and Twitter for notifications of regularly published new stories!


       

  New People at the Redd Center

 

Winter 2023 Visiting Scholar

Ryan Davis
Professor of Hispanic Studies, Illinois State University


 Professor Ryan Davis is currently working on a book-length study on representations of Mormon/Mormonism in modern Spain, drawing from their prominence in popular periodicals and 30 "Mormon Westerns"

Winter 2023 Intermountain Histories Research and Editorial Assistant

Lindsey Meza


 

Lindsey is studying History at BYU with a minor in Latin American Studies, with an April 2023 graduation date. She plans to continue her education by obtaining a Master’s degree in History. After a semester as the IH Intern she is contiuing on as the project Research and Editorial Assistant. 

 

Winter 2023 Intermountain Histories Intern

 

Abigail Beus

Abigail is from Los Alamos, New Mexico and is studying history and minoring in Spanish and Art History. She is a firm believer that history can be exciting, edifying, and approachable when properly explained. As such, she hopes to develop her research and writing skills to animate the past and bring more awareness to overlooked aspects of history in the Intermountain West.

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