New Books in the American West

Updated: 27 Jun 2025 • 504 episodes
newbooksnetwork.com

Interviews with Scholars of the American West about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-west

Show episodes

Fire is a means of control and has been deployed or constrained to levy power over individuals, societies, and ecologies. In Burn Scars: A Documentary History of Fire Suppression, from Colonial Origins to the Resurgence of Cultural Burning (Oregon State UP, 2024), Pomona College professor Char Miller has edited a colle

80 min
00:00
01:20:58
No file found

Los Angeles was a cinematic city long before the rise of Hollywood. By the dawn of the twentieth century, photography, painting, and tourist promotion in Southern California provided early filmmakers with a template for building a myth-making business and envisioning ideal moviegoers. These art forms positioned Califor

56 min
00:00
56:51
No file found

Burdens of Belonging: Race in an Unequal Nation By Jessica Vasquez-Tokos, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon W.E.B. Du Bois famously pondered a question he felt society was asking of him as a Black man in America: “How does it feel to be a problem?” Jessica Vasquez-Tokos uses this question to examine ho

33 min
00:00
33:20
No file found

When did the West lose its way? In 1889, when the US government carved five states out of the spawling Dakota Territory, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and North and South Dakota, all created state constitutions that enshrined certain progressive values into their structre of government. These included the right for women to

47 min
00:00
47:16
No file found

Conservation Is Not Enough: Rethinking Relationships with Water in the Arid Southwest (University of Wyoming Press, 2025) by Dr. Janine Schipper reconsiders the most basic assumptions about water issues in the Southwest, revealing why conservation alone will not lead to a sustainable water future. The book undertakes a

41 min
00:00
41:40
No file found

A massive oil spill in the Pacific Ocean near Santa Barbara, California, in 1969 quickly became a landmark in the history of American environmentalism, helping to inspire the creation of both the Environmental Protection Agency and Earth Day. But what role did the history of Santa Barbara itself play in this? In Natura

44 min
00:00
44:50
No file found

Show participants