Mari Sandoz’s The Battle of the Little Bighorn encouraged a change in how Americans viewed this infamous fight. By the mid-twentieth century a towering Custer myth had come to dominate the national psyche as a tale that confirmed national exceptionalism and continental destiny. Sandoz set out to dismantle this myth in an intimate account of […]
Commemorates the 50th anniversary of the American West Program at Colorado State University. Between 1972 and 2022, the program deployed the resources of CSU to engaging public audiences in the history of the American West. Essays in the anthology, written by noted scholars of the American West such as Patricia Limerick, Elliott West, and Philip […]
Wallace Stegner is an iconic western writer. His works of fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Angle of Repose and Big Rock Candy Mountain, as well as his nonfiction books and essays introduced the beauty and character of the American West to thousands of readers. Wallace Stegner’s Unsettled Country assesses his life, work, and legacy in […]
In the southwestern corner of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, on the border between Arizona and Mexico, one finds Quitobaquito, the second-largest oasis in the Sonoran Desert. There, with some effort, one might also find remnants of once-thriving O’odham communities and their predecessors with roots reaching back at least 12,000 years—along with evidence of their […]
At 14,259 feet, Longs Peak towers over Colorado’s northern Front Range. A prized site for mountaineering since the 1870s and the crown jewel of Rocky Mountain National Park, Longs has been a site of astonishing climbing feats—and, unsurprisingly, of significant risk and harm. Careless and unlucky climbers have experienced serious injury and death on the […]
Tracing the history of Colorado’s ski industry from the early twentieth century through the start of the twenty-first, Colorado Powder Keg: Ski Resorts and the Environmental Movement argues that the development of ever-larger ski resorts on national forest lands led to profound environmental changes and controversies over rural growth, recreation, and public land management.
