Our Mission

The Bill Lane Center for the American West is dedicated to advancing scholarly and public understanding of the past, present, and future of western North America. The Center supports research, teaching, and reporting about western land and life in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Californians Split on Constitutional Reform

New America Media, News Report, by Edwin Okong'o
October 31, 2009
Photo by Linda Cicero

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Latinos and Asian Americans are less dissatisfied with the process of putting initiatives on the ballot and are less eager to change California's constitution to restrict direct democracy than whites and African-Americans, says a poll from the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University.

Presenting poll findings recently at a conference about reforming California’s constitution held at the Sacramento Convention Center, Tammy Frisby, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, said the poll showed differences between what she called the fast-growing “new California” voters and the shrinking “old California” voters.

“There is an interesting divide in what we term new California and old California,” said Frisby. “What we mean by that is that the traditionally largest groups of the California population – whites and African Americans – have different views than new Californians, that is the fastest growing segment of our population, Latinos and Asian Americans.” Read the entire article

"Walking the Farm" on Alumni Weekend

Jon Christensen, executive director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, spoke to a group of Reunion Homecoming participants last weekend before leading them on a 90-minute walk that outlined the biodiversity and habitat conservation challenges at Stanford and in the American West. The homecoming event was a reprise of our annual "Walking the Farm" spring event — a walking seminar that covers more than 20 miles in one day around Stanford's 8,180-acre campus, examining Stanford as a microcosm of the West. This coming spring, Walking the Farm will focus on climate change.
Photo by L.A. Cicero, Stanford News Service. See Linda's slideshow of the Reunion Homecoming.

America's National Parks: Another Idea

An essay from High Country News
October 26, 2009

by David M. Kennedy

In 1912, James Bryce, the British Ambassador to the United States, proclaimed that the national parks are "America's best idea." Others have called them "America's best places." But if the parks are our best places, what about all those other places where we live and work and go about our daily rounds? Don't they deserve our respect, too?

The idea of a "nation's park" was first conceived in May 1832, by the Pennsylvania-born portraitist and ethnographer George Catlin. Traveling up the Missouri River on an artistic expedition to paint the Plains Indians, at Fort Pierre, S.D., he encountered a large party of Sioux, intoxicated on whiskey received in trade for bison tongues. The mutilated carcasses of some 1,400 bison lay reeking outside the stockade.

Catlin was appalled by this "debauchery of man and nature." He climbed a nearby bluff and pondered "the deadly axe and desolating hand of cultivating man." And then he had his great idea - if only, he thought, "by some great protecting policy of the government," there could be created "a magnificent park ... a nation's park, containing man and beast, in all the wildness and freshness of their nature's beauty...." That is the first recorded statement of what might be called the "national park idea." Read the complete article

This Week at the Bill Lane Center for the American West

Read Executive Director Jon Christensen's weekly letter about what is happening at the Bill Lane Center for the American West.

Dear colleagues,
This week we've got several events taking place that show, each in its own way, the work that we do with faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, journalists, policymakers, and the public. A visiting scholar is training scientists how to be effective legislative staffers in Sacramento. A faculty member is engaging graduate students in an intensive western history seminar with colleagues at U.C. Davis. A visiting journalism fellow is speaking at two events that promise to be wildly popular and tasty! And we're celebrating Bill Lane's 90th birthday and the internship program that is so close to his heart because it sends students to do real work in the western national parks.

In Sacramento this week,Thad Kousser, the director of our California Constitutional Reform project, is running a boot camp for the California Science and Technology Policy Fellows — 10 professional scientists and engineers who are taking up yearlong positions as staffers in the California State Legislature. The fellows will be working on developing solutions to some of the most complex scientific and technical challenges facing California today, from climate change to overstretched water resources, green technology, public health, bioinformatics, food systems, invasive species, mobile location sharing technologies, GIS, and voting and elections. Thad will be giving the scientists the inside scoop on how to really get things done in the capitol.
Read the entire message

Stanford Courses on the American West

Stanford offers an astonishing variety of courses that deal with the American West in important ways, taking on significant western subjects and issues, engaging directly with westerners and western places, and connecting the region to the rest of the world and larger themes in very practical as well as theoretical ways. We've compiled a list of nearly 100 courses being taught this year in departments throughout the university, courses such as Brenda Frink's class on "Women and Race in the American West, 1849-1950," taught through the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, as well as the History Department, and the Feminist Studies program. You can find the entire list of courses here

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