Review
Title: Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West
Editor: Gregory E. Smoak
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Genre: Western History & Policy
Year Published: 2021
Number of Pages: 232 (notes begin on p. 185)
Binding: Hardback; Paperback; Ebook
ISBN: Hardback 9781647690366; Paperback, 9781647690342; Ebook, 9781647690359
Price: Hardback, 70.00; Paperback, $35; Ebook, 28.00
Reviewed for AML by Julie J. Nichols
When I was growing up in northern California, my dad was an insurance salesman whose beat covered the eleven Western states. One time as a child I naively asked him what he was doing in California, if he “did” the West. “We’re as West as it gets, kiddo,” he told me. I’d had no idea. All those “Bonanza” episodes made me think the West was—you know—Wyoming or Montana, somewhere inland and desert.
What is “the West”? How does public history-making help preserve it? Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West, edited by Gregory E. Smoak, is an informative collection of niche essays that clarify both terms as it explores the relationship of academic and public historians with each other, with agencies and policymakers concerned both with preservation and restoration and with the public. I found the essays fascinating, despite the fact that I am neither a historian nor a policymaker. Though historians of the West and practitioners of public or applied history are the primary audiences of the collection, Western Lands multilayered discussion of the terms related to “public history” and its multiple narratives of public history-making make it eminently readable for laypeople as well.
The first three essays concern themselves principally with definitions. According to Richard White in “Posing the Question,” academic historians know the archives, but those who do public history answer questions posed by the public, providing context and interpretation for nonacademics confronting issues of policy, law, and administrative decision. Neither group can function fully without the other.
Attempting to distinguish between public intellectuals, those who do public history, and those who engage in applied history, Leisl Carr Childers argues in “Taking a Public Turn” that:
[taking the] public turn is doing public-facing history in the public sphere as a public service in ways that transcend the various definitions of public history and how academics operate. Producing history in public as a public intellectual can stimulate engaging and necessary conversations about difficult current events. Public historians largely interpret the past in ways that are designed to reach broader public audiences to shape the discourse about them. Applied history shapes frameworks of thought for public officials who have to grapple with these events. The core relationship between all three endeavors is centered on skilled expertise grounded in historical methodology, which always requires deep historical research and interpretation and an absolute commitment to the integrity of that process. (39)
A further term—”environmental history,” a phrase and a practice developed by Hal Rothman (1958-2007)—defines the work of historians whose concern is the construction and preservation of space for the present and future. The work of environmental history questions received perceptions about the purposes and uses of that space and pushes beyond those perceptions into more accurate, beneficial awareness and action.
A core principle driving the work of all these kinds of history–public, applied, environmental—is attention to specific, local places and their inhabitants. Seven of the remaining nine essays in the collection narrate stories of public historians (individuals and agencies) as they have created change in particular places through collaboration with various constituents. Developing an administrative history of the national parks; creating and managing the Manito Trail; mediating among tribal elders and the Bureau of Land Management in Idaho; restoring the economy of Lake City, Colorado through tourism; building a Native American Studies program on the Indigenous Columbia Plateau—these detailed narratives demonstrate the varied methods and impressive diverse results of public history-making.
The essay by Jedediah Rogers on the evolution of the Utah Historical Quarterly may serve as an example. Rogers’s thesis is that “a close look at the journal and its parent organization, the Utah State Historical Society, suggests how a state-produced publication, aspiring to scholarly respectability but also public accessibility, has both reflected and pushed the boundaries of local history” (156). The society was formed in 1897, the year after Utah achieved statehood, with a goal or mission of preserving the history of the pioneers, largely (and predictably) from the standpoint of “Mormon triumphalism” (157). Under the direction of a succession of editors whose training and commitment to academic historical methods were somewhat narrow, the journal, whose first issue was published in 1928, matured in bumpy fashion to its present incarnation as a still-contested site for the expression of state history. In its early days, articles were often “bound up in biography, entangled with myth and memory, and sometimes not methodologically rigorous” (157). For its first two decades its strength was factual accuracy, but interpretation “lagged behind national standards” (157), “reflecting the state’s rather backwater intellectual climate…that produced mostly poorly researched histories unimaginatively executed” (157).
The essay helpfully charts the development of the journal, appropriately praising its best efforts and acknowledging areas of weakness stemming from its foundations. Because local history almost inevitably keeps its focus narrow; because funding for the journal comes from the state legislature, which has its own interests; because the readers of UHQ are as often “the public” as academic historians—for all these reasons, and more, UHQ (like similar publications nationwide) has to negotiate between what local academics would like to preserve, what more wide-ranging academics believe should be contextualized, and what a lay readership wants to read.
Negotiation of this type is the central challenge and opportunity of public history. The road forward is never a clear, one-way street. Western Lands, Western Voices, named after and expanding upon a conference celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the American West Center (housed at the University of Utah), both clearly introduces and brilliantly illuminates the challenges and opportunities of doing public history in the eleven Western states. Western Lands, Western Voices, is a gift of distinction for those who do history as well as for those of us who are public beneficiaries of their work.