Description
The public lands of the United States—national parks and monuments, state and local parks, military lands, and other properties owned or managed by governmental entities—are one of the nation’s greatest resources. They’re used for recreation by the public, farmed and mined for commercial purposes, and conserved as open space and as habitats for wildlife. But they’re also sites rich in history, places inhabited, used, visited, argued and fought over by diverse communities for centuries.
These histories are poorly documented—by historians and on the public lands themselves. Colorado State University’s Public Lands History Center seeks to tell the stories of the nation’s public lands in all their complexity, and in partnership with the communities who have shaped these histories. Founded in 2007 as an affiliate of CSU’s history department, the Center conducts research, trains public historians, and disseminates what it learns through conferences, publications, and reports.
Much of the Center’s research is commissioned by public lands managers seeking to document buildings or other sites in order to apply for listing on the National Register, update their records, or prepare new public education materials. Such projects provide the Center’s graduate students with opportunities to learn their craft and to gain valuable work experience. And faculty researchers can also use such projects in support of their scholarship. But the Center would like to undertake more ambitious projects that are not limited by the more narrowly-defined goals of the public lands managers.
In particular, the Center aspires to uncover and relate the untold stories of America’s public lands. For example, the Center undertook a project at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia exploring the history of segregation and desegregation in the Park, producing a report and an on-line curriculum for teachers. Center leaders would like to build upon that project to explore the broader history of communities of color in national parks.
Likewise, a project at Nebraska’s Scotts Bluff National Monument aimed to produce a more complex story about westward expansion that incorporated the perspective of indigenous people, religious minorities, and women. The Center would like to take a similar approach to Bears Ears in Utah, where conservationists, indigenous communities, and local farmers and ranchers are engaged in a struggle over the meaning and appropriate use of the monument. The Center hopes to produce a history of Bears Ears that would contextualize the multiple perspectives that drive and characterize the contemporary controversy.
Luce funding would enable the Center to nurture new partnerships with key stakeholders and to pursue at least two new projects like those described above, conducting community-engaged research and sharing learnings with stakeholders and the general public. The Center would also launch another site for its Parks as Portal to Learning Program, which administers an intensive summer workshop in environmental history for park managers, students, and scholars.
A Luce grant would support faculty conducting research, graduate students, research-related travel, convenings, summer workshops, and the production of public history materials. The project would be led by Jared Orsi, a professor of history at Colorado State. Professor Orsi directs the Public Lands History Center and is an expert on Western and environmental history.
