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The Bill Lane Center for the American West
research, teaching and reporting on the American West
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.
Visiting Journalism Fellow Verlyn Klinkenborg from The New York Times
Verlyn Klinkenborg, an editorial writer for The New York Times, is currently a visiting journalism fellow at the Bill Lane Center for the American West. While with us, Verlyn is researching what he calls "ferality" or the state of becoming wild, and the ways in which species we tend to think of as domesticated, including horses and homo sapiens, become wild and the consequences of feral species. This week, Verlyn is participating in a seminar on writing about animals sponsored by the Environmental Humanities Project, from 4:00 to 6:30pm on Tuesday, November 17. Participants are reading in advance Verlyn's book Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile. And space is limited. If you would like to participate, please contact Justin Eichenlaub.
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,
Here at the Center, we're already looking forward to spring and beginning to plan in earnest for "Walking the Farm" again on May 1, 2010, even while enjoying this beautiful western autumn weather. We're continuing our campus conversations with visiting journalism fellow Verlyn Klinkenborg. We welcome two new research assistants. We note some conference presentations. And we honor a long-time friend and supporter, George Shott, whose extraordinary life was remembered at a memorial service last week.
If you would like to join us in all or part of "Walking the Farm" — our 20-plus-mile spring peregrination around our 8,180-acre campus, a moving seminar examining Stanford's lands as a microcosm of the American West — please let me know as soon as possible. We have to keep the core hiking group to under 30 people so that we can keep together and cover a lot of ground all in one day, and this has become a popular event. This spring, we'll be focusing on climate change in the natural and built environments on campus, in the research and teaching that goes on here at Stanford, and in the university's efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change. It promises to be a hot ticket.
Read the entire message
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
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.”
Frisby said the poll found that new Californians were not as pessimistic about the direction of the state. Only 57 percent of Latinos and Asian Americans thought the state was moving in the wrong direction, compared to 64 percent of whites and African Americans. Latinos and Asians were also more likely to say that they were not dissatisfied with the initiative process.
But there was concern from some attendees that because the poll of about 1,000 Californians was conducted in English only and via the Internet, the sample did not accurately represent California. Read the complete article
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.
Events |
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Nov
| An Evening with Author and Columnist Verlyn Klinkenborg An acclaimed author of several books, and of the much-loved New York Times column “The Rural Life.” The Bill Lane Center is pleased to be hosting Mr. Klinkenborg as a Western Enterprise Reporter this fall. Details |
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Nov
| Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile: A Seminar on Writing about Animals with Verlyn Klinkenborg |
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