The Newsletter

Dear WHA Members, This year we will gather to-gether for the WHA’s semi-centennial celebration in Oak-land, California. With its trans-continental railroad connections and access to an important sea port, Oakland was ideally situ-ated both on the edge of the western frontier and along the eastern Pacific Rim. Its eco-nomic future seemed very bright and indeed, by the twen-tieth century, Oakland emerged as an industrial and manufactur-ing center, earning the name ―Detroit of the West,‖ as it produced automobiles, ships, canned goods, and much else, including ―Rocky Road‖ ice cream.

With the Second World War, Oakland became one of Presi-dent’s Roosevelt’s arsenals of democracy. The Kaiser shipyard (in nearby Richmond) rapidly assembled the famous ―liberty ships‖ for use in the war. Henry J. Kaiser is best known for his pioneering production techniques. But the industrialist also financed Kaiser Perma-nente, which remains headquar-tered in Oakland. Kaiser’s ―health plan,‖ which covered most of his workers, was one of the first large-scale, voluntary, pre-paid, and affordable health plans in the country and was a model for modern Health Maintenance Organizations (HM0s). ―Permanente‖ was named after the Río Perma-

nente, a perennial flow which ran through one of Kaiser’s Bay Area properties. Oakland’s economy never re-covered from the bust that fol-lowed the war. The loss of industries and tax revenue was followed by years of chronic unemployment (twice the na-tional average), racial tensions,

Kevin Fernlund, Executive Di-

rector, WHA.

The Western History Association

Spring 2011 The WHA Newsletter is a semi-annual publication of the Western History Association

Raising “Hell” in Oakland

The Oakland Chapter of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club was the most notorious. Members of the HAMC ride together towards Bakersfield, California, 1965 (Photo by Bill Ray/Time and Life Pictures/Getty Images).

Donald Worster Named as President-Elect

The Nominating Committee proudly nominates Donald Wor-ster as President-Elect. See a full biographical article on page 6.

San Francisco Bay Region:

Ancient and Modern

3

Oakland Attractions 5

Donald Worster named

President-Elect

6

H.H. Bancroft: Berkeley’s

Bookman

7

NAHA TAH Grant Up-

date

9

In Memoriam 9

2011 WHA Candidates 12

Inside This Issue:

white flight, high crime rates, drug trafficking, gang activity, and a score of other social maladies. The situation was so dire and potentially explosive that in 1966 the Johnson ad-ministration selected Oakland, California, to be one of the first American cities to receive a large urban aid package, de-signed specifically to reduce black unemployment. While Oakland was spared a race riot, the city’s overall unemployment remained—and remains in 2011—stubbornly high, even if the city has made progress on many other fronts, including downtown redevelopment. The conference hotel, the newly renovated Oakland Marriott City Center, is located in the revived Old Oakland Historic District, directly across from the city’s vibrant Chinatown. At the same time, Oakland pos-sessed a certain gritty panache that other post-industrial cities lacked. In 1966, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and other radical black separatists, formed the Black Panther Party. The Pan-thers were notorious for their militancy and violence. Mem-bers wore berets and black leather jackets, strung cartridge belts across their chests, and carried shotguns and Colt .45’s. The Panthers were committed

to violent revolution –the ―transformation of the deca-dent, reactionary, racist sys-tem.‖ The party also believed in community organizing as an interim way to improve condi-tions in the city’s black neighborhoods. Membership in

the Black Panthers peaked dur-ing the late 1960s and then went into decline, after key leaders were shot or impris-oned. The party finally dis-solved in the early 1980s. David Hilliard, a co-founder of the Black Panther Party, will lead one of our conference tours—The Black Panther Leg-acy Tour. And in 1957, Ralph ―Sonny‖ Barger founded the infamous Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels, an outlaw motorcycle gang. Their clubhouse was known as the ―Snake Pit.‖ These bikers— descendents of Depression-era Okies and Arkies—were the real grapes of wrath. They rode U.S. made, if chopped up, Harley Davidson motorcycles and wore Levi denim cuts, em-blazoned with a patch of a winged death’s head. Accord-ing to Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, some of the An-gels identified openly with the Old West’s Wild Bill Hickoks and Billy the Kids. The Cali-fornia chapters (the first chap-

ter was started in San Bernardino or ―Berdoo‖ in 1950) spread to other western states and eventually around the world, forming an inter-nationally organized syndicate, allegedly engaged in drug traffick-ing, theft, assault, extortion, and murder. Members, however, have

always insisted they were only a social club of motorcycle enthusi-asts, pointing to a long record of charity work and good deeds. The HAMC motto is, ―When we do right, nobody remembers. When we do wrong, nobody forgets.‖ The Hells Angels captured the na-tion’s imagination early on with their born to be wild lifestyle and have inspired a contemporary popular cable television drama, ―Sons of Anarchy,‖ set in a fic-tional town in Northern California called ―Charming.‖ This modern Western of flaxen-haired cowboys, astride their thundering iron steeds, first aired in 2008. The series, cre-ated by Kurt Sutter, draws no fewer than 4.9 million viewers a week (Sonny Barger is a fan and has made an appearance on one of the shows). In popular culture, the New West has proven to be just as entertaining as the Old West. But Oakland’s history is by no means representative of the history of the other cities in the San Fran-cisco Bay Area, a combined urban region that contains a population of 7.4 million. In starkest contrast to Oakland’s postwar economic

Page 2 The Newsletter WHA

decline, social rot, and descent into a violent tribalism, San Jose to the south, during these same decades, emerged as the capital of a truly revolutionary phe-nomenon: Silicon Valley. In 1965, Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder, predicted that the ―number of transistors incorpo-rated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months.‖ Time proved Moore right. Moreover, the information technology revo-lution that Moore and other en-gineers had envisioned would transform not only the U.S. economy but virtually every as-pect of our lives as well. If Oakland was the past, San Jose was the future. And a new image entered the West’s already crowded mythology: two guys in a garage, starting future Fortune 1000 companies. And these two inventors/entrepreneurs—who packed their holsters with slide rulers rather than six shooters—were probably graduate students from nearby Berkeley or Stan-ford, the West’s two leading uni-versities in science and technol-ogy. We have planned a tour of the Berkeley campus, including the Bancroft Library. Nothing better symbolized the West’s break from its colonial past or the promise of American capital-ism than the creativity, innova-tion, and job creation found in the Bay Area’s electronics indus-try. And, of course, across the Bay from Oakland lies San Fran-cisco—a city with close ties to Silicon Valley but whose own rich economic history predates the Gold Rush. The corporate headquarters of Wells Fargo and the original home of Bank of America, this fog-enshrouded entrepôt would become one of only a few other western cities to be ranked as a top-tier world city. The Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC)—a think tank at Loughborough University in the U.K.—based this evaluation on a

In 1939, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started their business, Hewlett Packard, and used

this garage as a research lab, development workshop, and manufacturing facility for early

products such as the audio oscillator. The garage is a historic landmark and is considered

the birthplace of Silicon Valley (Photo by David Paul Morris/Getty Images).

Oakland Jazz.

city’s level of accountancy, adver-tising, banking, finance, and law. London and New York topped the GaWC roster of world cities. And among cities in the Western U.S., only Los Angeles was ranked higher in importance than San Francisco. This October we will begin our meeting on the Bay with an open-ing reception at the Oakland Mu-seum of California. There the state’s history will be laid out be-fore us; a rich pageantry stretching from hunters of Pleistocene megafauna to today’s lawmakers, locked in fierce battles over the people’s budget. So what better place to come together for three days than Oakland, to consider not only the West’s political, eco-nomic, cultural, environmental, and social history but also to chart the future of our association. See you there. -Kevin Fernlund

Fernlund -Kevin Fernlund Kevin Fernlund

Page 3 The Newsletter WHA

The San Francisco Bay Region: Ancient and Modern the region’s vast central core and climatic air conditioner, would begin to fill out its full 1,600 square miles of marshes, estuaries, and open water.

In the meantime, the many inde-pendent hunter-gathering groups were continually innovating and adapting to the changing land-scapes, climates, and plant and animal communities they nur-tured. Simultaneously, humans, with their fire, tools, and harvest-ing choices, were themselves also helping to shape, sometimes to distort and deplete, regional ecol-ogies. To attain affluent lives har-vesting abundant resources, peo-ple also modified and further dif-ferentiated their economies, tech-nologies, social organizations, cultures, languages, and religions. Their territories shuffled and col-lided around the landscape, most of the time ascending upslope to escape the advancing tides. Many new groups also kept arriving and blending with and/or ejecting older groups, who took off again for other parts. Everyone was an immigrant, or but a few lifetimes

adaptation to environmental change, cultural assimilation and complexity, and economic and technological innovation, as well as persistent social, economic, and ethno-cultural conflict, were as characteristic of life thousands of years ago as they have been since. Thus, inquiring minds are always writing modern histories of ancient places, and ancient histories of modern places.

For example, examine if you will, what is supposedly ―ancient.‖ When itinerant human groups began finding their ways into the area, about 10,000 years ago, the climate and landscape were sub-stantially different from today’s. San Francisco Bay, the region’s defining natural feature, had yet to be born. With the ocean shore still many miles to the west of today’s coastline, global warming and melting ice had only begun to raise the Pacific into a short, narrow estuary arm, barely up the bottom of a deep river canyon at the Golden Gate. It would not be for thousands of years that the bay, the region’s

WHA’s October 2011 confer-ence location, Oakland and the greater San Francisco Bay Area, is no stranger to western histo-rians. Many know about it, having lived, worked, or visited in the region or written about it. However, with natural, cultural, and historical endowments var-ied, ever-changing, and often hidden, the Bay Area continu-ally offers up something new, begging for revisiting, in person and in imagination

This year’s conference theme, ―Modern Histories of Ancient Places,‖ especially suits a gath-ering of historians in the Bay Area. Despite the region’s past of rapid, even revolutionary, natural and human change, it is nevertheless also true that much of importance is neither com-pletely ancient, nor completely modern. Instead, patterns of natural order and human exis-tence often echo back and forth across the ages, deepening our understanding of both past and present. Themes such as hu-man immigration and mobility,

removed from the experience.

Thus, in an important sense, in the San Francisco Bay region, humanity is older than nature. And, the dynamics of ancient life -- migration, human adapta-tion to changing environmental advantages and challenges, eco-nomic and technological innova-tion, rich natural resources pro-ducing relatively high living stan-dards, cultural diversity and change, friction and conflict -- strike modern-day chords. So, what is ancient … or modern?

Continued Pg. 4

Richard Orsi, California State

University, East Bay.

San Francisco Bay at night. Image courtesy of Michael Chu.

Page 4 The Newsletter WHA

From the eighteenth century through the twenty-first, the region’s so-called ―modern‖ era, ever larger immigrant groups from different cultures invaded the region, in the process recapitulating many life patterns of their ancient predecessors. After 1769 -- barely three human lifetimes ago -- came Spanish explorers, soldiers, and missionaries, accompanied by native peo-ples from Mexico and of Afri-can origin, as well as many individuals of mixed racial ancestry. These most recent newcomers imposed different life ways, more commercial economies, and new ecological patterns, the most revolution-ary of which were alien disease organisms decimating earlier local peoples, who lacked bio-logical defenses.

From the mid-1800s onward, the arrival of hundreds of thousands, then millions, from the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America multi-plied the immigrant popula-tions and their diversity many fold, and continue to do so. Commerce, industry, agricul-ture, transportation, military operations, and an overwhelm-ingly urban society character-ized the region. Three urban clusters dominated by the twentieth century: San Fran-cisco and its peninsula on the west bay, Oakland and neighbors on the east bay, and San Jose and satellites around the south bay. Most people lived in the thin, sea-level ur-ban strip hugging the bay. Post-Cold-War deindustrializa-tion and military demobiliza-tion was succeeded by world-leading information and bio-technology businesses.

With the growing affluence of each successive phase of hu-man settlement came inter-group ethnic, social, economic, political, and cultural tensions. San Francisco’s 1850s nativist vigilante takeovers, its 1916

Preparedness Day bombing and 1934 general strike; UC Berke-ley’s Loyalty Oath, Free-Speech, and People’s Park conflicts; San Francisco State College’s 1968 Black Studies protests; Oakland-Berkeley’s Black Panther move-ment; the Native American Oc-cupation of Alcatraz Island from 1969 to 1971; and more recent opposition to the nation’s Mid-dle Eastern wars -- all have reen-acted a regional tradition.

Although San Francisco tends to dominate the region’s name and consciousness, here and abroad, Oakland, site of this year’s con-ference, has also been an urban leader. First settled in the early 1850s as a ferry and logging cen-ter, Oakland, its climate sunnier and warmer than across the bay, also became a haven for persons seeking relief from San Fran-cisco’s chilling fogs and winds. After its selection in 1869 as the western terminus of the Trans-continental Railroad, the city became, and still serves as, the region’s land and maritime trans-portation hub and the east bay’s major industrial and urban cen-ter. Oakland quickly developed into a populous, diverse, cultur-ally rich city, a pioneer in many endeavors, with a fascinating history of its own.

Oaklanders spawned some of the region and state’s most impor-tant cultural institutions, includ-ing the University of California and its first campus (1868) and the first women’s college in the Far West (Mills, moved to Oak-land in 1871, incorporated as a college in 1885). The renowned Oakland Public Library, one of California’s first and best, was the setting where librarian and state poet laureate Ina Coolbrith nurtured the talents of a genera-tion of the state’s most impor-tant writers, most notably the young Oaklander, Jack London. The library also pioneered in collecting materials depicting the city’s large African American population. From that effort, in partnership with local African

American historical groups, grew the Afri-can American Mu-seum and Library at Oakland, a celebrated public/private library, archives, and museum of northern California African American life. Site of some WHA conference programs, the Oakland Museum of California, now beginning its second century as one of the oldest and finest pub-lic museums in the West, is the only insti-tution whose exhibi-tions and programs focus on the history, arts, and natural his-tory of the region and state.

As elsewhere, dra-matic population, industrial, and urban growth disturbed earlier natural ecologies, threatening air, water, open space, and native flora and fauna, as well as the quality of human life. In jeop-ardy as recently as the 1960s was the very survival of the bay, in-creasingly polluted and shrinking from relentless marsh-filling and shoreline industrial development. A vigorous regional environmen-talism and citizen activism emerged in response, bearing fruit as early as the 1892 found-ing of the Sierra Club in San Francisco. Created in 1902 in the region’s southwestern Santa Cruz Mountains, Big Basin Red-woods inaugurated both the state’s park system and the ―Save the Redwoods‖ movement, which ultimately produced addi-tional state redwood forest parks in the region’s coastal range and hundreds of miles north to the Oregon border. Additional state, regional, and national parks have proliferated over a hundred miles of coastline surrounding the Golden Gate and in the bay it-self, much new parkland con-verted from decommissioned military bases.

In the 1950s and 60s, the area also pioneered in forming regional gov-ernments to regulate and improve transportation, water and air quality, and urban planning. Outraged east-bay citizens gained statewide sup-port, and in 1969 pressed the legisla-ture to form the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, a world leader in re-gional environmental governance that has greatly expanded public shoreline access and reopened for-merly diked and filled areas to open water and tidal marshes.

Beginning in 1934 with the Oakland-based East Bay Regional Park Dis-trict, county park districts have pre-served hundreds of thousands of acres of important watersheds, open space, and remaining ―natural‖ land-scapes along the region’s seacoast, through hills and valleys, and in and around the bay.

To the formal parkland must be added open space. Open space was used for truck, organic, livestock, and dairy farming in hilly and outly-ing areas, and most famously in the vineyards of the region’s three ―wine countries.‖ These were the Napa/Sonoma valleys in the north, the

Continued Pg. 8

Nineteenth-century advertisement. Courtesy

of the Oakland Museum of California.

Oakland Attractions

Page 5 The Newsletter WHA

The WHA invites you to explore the many attractions Oakland has to offer. From museums, shops, and historical sites, Oakland has a variety of options for entertainment to suit every taste. Listed below are several places you might want to check out while in Oakland. The California Historical Society's List of Oakland Area Cultural Attrac-tions http://www.californiahistoricalsociety.org/programs/ca_listings/001.html African American Museum and Library at Oakland www.oaklandlibrary.org/AAMLO Largest Black Museum and Library in Northern California Alameda/Oakland Ferry www.eastbayferry.com Interesting ferry tours of the East Bay Chabot Space & Science Center www.chabotspace.org The center has the largest public telescope in the Western United States Chinatown/Oakland Asian Cultural Center www.oacc.cc Restaurants, specialty shops, and the Oakland Asian Cultural Center Heinhold's First and Last Chance Saloon www.heinoldsfirstandlastchance.com Built in 1880 and frequented by Jack London, this saloon was designated a National Literary Landmark in 1998 and added to the National Regis-ter of Historic Places in 2000 Jack London Square www.jacklondonsquare.com Major dining, entertainment, and shopping area along the Bay. Oakland Art Gallery www.oaklandartgallery.org Diverse mix of mostly contemporary local artwork. Pardee Home Museum

www.pardeehome.org This restored 1868 Italianate villa estate was home to two Oakland mayors and one governor of California. Preservation Park www.preservationpark.com Sixteen restored Victorian houses near downtown Oakland occupy two richly land- scaped blocks. The houses showcase seven distinct architectural styles. The Oakland Aviation Museum www.oaklandaviationmuseum.org/ Located in a hangar at the Oakland Airport, the museum houses displays, artifacts and the Electra, a plane once flown by Amelia Earhart. The Oakland Museum of California www.museumca.org/ This museum is devoted to the arts, the environment, and the history of California The Peralta Hacienda www.peraltahacienda.org/ This park is known as the birthplace of Oakland. The Peralta house, built in 1870, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Old Oakland.

Lake Merritt.

I spent the first twenty-three years of my life growing up in the West and the last twenty-two years learning how to live there again, learning to take the bad and ridiculous with the good and the beautiful. Be-tween those periods I became an apprentice historian, driven by a desire to challenge my eld-ers and at the same time win their approval. Whether being nominated to the presidency of the Western History Associa-tion means that I have suc-ceeded in one or the other goal, I am deeply grateful for the honor bestowed.

My parents were Dust Bowl refugees who ended up in the poor and ugly desert railway town of Needles, California, but fortunately they managed to return to the Great Plains and find a more secure working-class life there after World War Two. A scholarship allowed me to attend the University of Kan-sas, where western history leg-ends George Anderson and James Malin were resident fac-ulty; another scholarship funded my doctoral education

at Yale University, where I had the good fortune to meet and be influenced by the inimitable Howard Lamar. Once I began earning a meager salary as an assistant professor at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, I joined the WHA and have been a member ever since. Like Bernard De-Voto who lived for many years in an adjacent town, I discovered that I was at heart a westerner by liv-ing so long in exile. In 1989 the period of exile ended, and I became the Hall Professor of Ameri-can History at the Uni-versity of Kansas, where courses on the West, along with environmental history, the history of science, agriculture, and interdisciplinary environ-mental studies have been my main teaching subjects.

Admittedly, I have spent as much time trying to promote a big change of perspective among all historians—the per-

spective of environ-mental history, which puts the human rela-tionship to the earth and its systems at the center of analysis—and that work has some-times taken me a long way from western prai-ries, mountains, and deserts. Currently, I am a research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany, and last spring I was the first Strachan Donnelley Visiting Scholar in the Institute for Biospheri-cal Studies at Yale. Over the years I have lectured and traveled extensively in Europe,

Asia, Central America, and be-yond, and my books and articles have been translated into sev-eral languages. But this pattern of transcending borders is, I think, where the history of the American West has been head-ing for a long time now: toward a more international, compara-tive, and global understanding of the meaning and significance of the West. My chief desire for the WHA is to strengthen its environmental dimensions and to extend its international awareness even further.

My books with a distinctly western American focus in-clude: Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s; Rivers of Em-pire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West; Un-der Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West; and An Unsettled Country: Changing Landscapes of the American West. Over the past decade I have published two biographies of

Donald Worster Named WHA President-Elect

Page 6 The Newsletter WHA

western figures: A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell and A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir. I am proud to say that, along with a few other prizes, I was the recipient of the Caughey Prize given by the WHA.

Currently, I am at work on a book tentatively entitled: ―Facing Lim-its: Abundance, Scarcity, and the American Way of Life,‖ to be published by Oxford University Press. Naturally, my understand-ing of this subject has been deeply shaped by my experience as a westerner, growing up in and studying a region where boom and bust have been the central terms of existence. But for the WHA I hope for a more steady and stable future that builds on the past and faces the future with modest optimism.

-Donald Worster

From the Dorothea Lange Archive, Man beside Wheelbarrow , 1934. Courtesy of the Oak-

land Museum of California.

Book Cover: Dust Bowl, The Southern Plains

in the 1930s, 1979.

H.H.Bancroft: Berkeley’s Bookman

swung north. A turn right would take in the Rockies and western intermountain scenes in a final visual sweep south. Ban-croft, freed from academic in-fluences (he never graduated from high school), was certain, as he was in so many areas, that his perspectives were the right ones.

Bancroft collected the largest personal library in the West. Ransacking bookstores and private collections in the U. S. and then cajoling or hijacking splendid collections out of Mexico and Europe, he amassed thousands of volumes and numerous valuable manu-scripts. Later, Bancroft and his research lieutenants interviewed hundreds of persons through-out the West, thereby adding valuable oral histories to his collection and utilizing them in his later volumes. To protect his priceless collection, Ban-croft erected a virtually fire-proof brick building in the cen-ter of a San Francisco lot to isolate it from any possible dis-astrous fires. Eventually, Ban-croft's huge library contained more than 60,000 volumes.

The library in place, Bancroft organized an assembly line of historical research and writing like no other. In the first stage, translators prepared transcripts of the hundreds of documents in languages other than English. Next, librarians and other re-searchers pulled together thou-sands of essential details and arranged them in chronological order. Then one of the dozen or so authors wrote—or per-haps one should say, com-piled—a basic narrative, largely innocent of any interpretive framework save chronology. The final stop was at Bancroft's desk, where standing for twelve hours a day, he tinkered with the stories given him or added

his own glosses to the narrative. Some-times a poet or lin-guist Bancroft had hired provided hun-dreds of quotations from classic sources or references to an-cient worthies. Bancroft was convinced these citations added panache to his narratives. Some reviewers believed other-wise, often pointing to the allu-sions as useless padding in the seven-and-a-half feet of Ban-croft's Works.

Bancroft's methods of research and writing were unorthodox. Hiring dozens of industrious librarians, copyists, bibliogra-phers, translators, and a few writers—including one trained historian, Frances Fuller Vic-tor—Bancroft gathered histori-cal facts like a medievalist lov-ingly constructing footnotes. From these mountains of sto-ries, Bancroft and his army of researchers and writers rip-rapped together thirty-nine huge, calf-bound volumes of Works in the 1880s, and still other volumes before and after-

Hubert Howe Bancroft—bookman, publisher, entrepre-neur, and historian. Bancroft's hefty, fact-loaded volumes pub-lished in the late-nineteenth century remain notable sources for studying the West of Native Americans, Hispanics, and An-glo Americans. His important legacy also lives on in the un-paralleled collection of books and documents that he amassed and eventually sold and which became the core of the Ban-croft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Ban-croft was our most important frontier and western historian before Frederick Jackson Turner.

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Bancroft wanted to shift the historical focus of Americans to the Far West. Rather than have viewers stand at Turner's Cumberland Gap and peer west, Bancroft urged them to perch on the rim of the Sierra Nevada. From that illuminating position they should look south to examine Native and evolving Hispanic cultures in Central America and Mexico and then, doing an about face, glance along the Pacific Coast as their view

wards. Salesmen strong-armed buyers into purchasing these scis-sors-and-paste histories, whose mushrooming numbers often alienated buyers but also paid Bancroft's bills. He was as much or more a businessman as histo-rian.

More than a few commentators have poked fun at Bancroft and his History Factory. One re-viewer contended that even though Alaska lacked a history, Bancroft had devoted 750 pages to it. Englishman Lord Bryce was convinced that Bancroft had listed "every bullock whose hide was ever exported from Mexican Cali-fornia." Another observer pointed out that, considering Ban-croft's tendency to quote at length every available primary source, it was no plagiarism "to copy from him."

Page 7 The Newsletter WHA

Richard W. Etulain, Past President of the WHA.

H.H. Bancroft, c.a. 1880s. Courtesy

of The Bancroft Library.

Reading Room of the Bancroft Library, 1911. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library.

Page 8 The Newsletter WHA

Unsurprisingly, several of Ban-croft's writers were much upset when they discovered he would not credit them for their work on the title pages or spines of his volumes. Bancroft listed only himself as author of all the vol-umes. The writers had not been promised otherwise, and they had been paid decently for their long, arduous work. But as any attention-craving author knows and understands, he or she wants their name in print. It did not happen. Bancroft probably wrote but nine of the thirty-nine volumes of the Works, although

many of the other vol-umes carry evidence of his pen tracks.

Putting major empha-ses on Bancroft's ec-centricities and blind sides misses much of his importance, how-ever. For a generation or two Bancroft's hefty volumes provided his-torians and general readers alike the fullest accounts of the far-western past. Not until several years into the twentieth century did

other scholars move beyond Ban-croft in their cover-age of the Pacific Slope. Even today his oral histories, widely varied sources, and extensive cover-age of relatively unknown topics remain valuable for historians.

After drawing extensively on his extremely valuable library holdings for more than sixty published books, Bancroft sold the unparalleled book, manuscript, and oral history collection on the Far West to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1905. Appraised at $300,000 by Turner's librar-

ian colleague Reuben Gold Thwaites, the library brought Bancroft $150,000 in cash and a gift credited at $100,000.

A half dozen years later Her-bert Eugene Bolton arrived in Berkeley from Stanford and established what became the country's premier program in Spanish Borderlands history. The voluminous works of Bolton, as well as the writings of his hundreds of graduate students, drew extensively on the Bancroft collection. Among most historians the

famed Bancroft Library ranks with the Huntington Library in San Marino, the Newberry in Chicago, and two or three other western state and uni-versity libraries and archives as the premier research Val-hallas for western scholars. It all began with the ambitious dream of young Hubert Howe Bancroft to gather a superb collection of books for his historical research and writing.

- Richard W. Etulain

Bay Area Continued ...

the Livermore/Pleasanton dis-trict in the east, and the Santa Cruz Mountains to the south-west.

Since the twentieth century, and continuing, the San Francisco Bay area has developed into a rare metropolis, with dense, technologically sophisticated cities, surrounded and inter-laced with open space and natu-ral park landscapes to an extent perhaps greater than anywhere else. Yet, in an ironic twist of fate, for all the region’s remark-able natural preservation and restoration, renewed climate

change and rising oceans -- echoes from the distant past -- again threaten and challenge the region’s shore-dwelling peoples.

What is ancient, what modern? In Oakland, WHA conference participants will find both.

-Richard Orsi

Herbert E. Bolton, Photograph, n.d. Cour-

tesy of The Bancroft Library.

Viewing of the “Women in the West” exhibit at the Friends’ annual meeting. Photo-

graph, May 5, 1963. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library.

The Western History Association seeks a new Executive Director

and home for its executive office, beginning July 1, 2012. Univer-

sity-based applicants should be tenured with appropriate publica-

tions and administrative experience. Applicants from other institu-

tions, such as a research library or museum, should have sufficient

seniority and institutional backing to provide assurance of security

of tenure and ongoing support. The successful applicant should be

able to demonstrate institutional support (office space, clerical-

administrative staff, etc.) and the ability to devote fifty percent of

his or her time to the WHA. Applicants should send a c.v., a letter

of interest, and the names of three references (including a letter of

interest from the institution) by regular mail or e-mail to Prof. Al-

bert Hurtado, Chair of the Search Committee, Department of His-

tory, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019-0535, or

<ahurtado@ou.edu>. Deadline for applications is September 1,

2011, with interviews to follow at the annual WHA meeting in

October. The WHA is an AA/EOE.

WHA Seeks New Director

NAHA TAH Grant Update

John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Fernlund high-lighted key historiographical moments including Walter Prescott Webb and current conceptions of the West by historians William Cronon,

Patricia Limerick, Richard White, Donald Worster and others. Fernlund ended his presentation with a clip from John Sayles 1996 movie Lone Star and engaged teachers in a lively discussion about what kind of history is taught in the classroom and how controver-

sial and political history can be. Teachers responded enthu-siastically, finding different takes on the West fascinating. Using different perspectives of the West’s many historical events can help students not

only read and understand the past more fully, but it can help them analyze multiple ways the past is told.

The Arizona Historical Society and other partners have also visited the class and shared historical understandings and numerous teaching resources.

The Northern Arizona History Academy Teaching American History Grant (NAHA TAH) began in August 2010 and is now fully underway, with WHA a vital partner in the endeavor. The first cohort of fifteen ele-mentary and secondary teachers recently became WHA mem-bers and began their first his-tory graduate class this semester at Northern Arizona University. ―Learning, Doing, Teaching History via the Grand Canyon‖ is the first of five courses de-signed especially for teachers to help them enrich their content knowledge, improve their his-torical thinking skills, and de-velop new strategies for teach-ing history. Western history is a primary focus for each class, as the project follows a local to global approach.

WHA’s executive director, Kevin Fernlund, traveled to Flagstaff, Arizona for the first class meetings and delivered a captivating session on the ―History of Western History.‖ His talk and film clips opened up new ways of understanding the historical discipline. Begin-ning with Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis and its expression in movies such as

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The teachers have also done work at NAU’s Colorado Pla-teau archives and visited a local museum. Mid-April, the cohort took a trip to Grand Canyon to tour the archives and visit Kolb studio and other sites. They attended workshops by Arizona Project WET on Colorado River history and by the West-ern Region of the LOC Teach-ing With Primary Sources.

In August, the TAH team will very happily welcome WHA member Leisl Carr Childers to the project. Dr. Childers, a re-cent graduate of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and stu-dent of David Wroebel and Andy Kirk, will teach classes, lead workshops, and work with teachers in the classroom. Her work on the Nevada Test Site will be another terrific contribu-tion to the project.

Want to learn more? Sign up for the NAHA TAH newsletter and get monthly updates. Come to the WHA conference in Oakland and meet some of the teachers and project leaders. Contact project director and WHA member Linda Sargent Wood with any questions or comments at Linda.Sargent.Wood@nau.edu.

NAH TAH, Cohort, leaders and Library of Congress team at the Grand

Canyon, April 2011.

In Memoriam Dr. Oakah L. Jones, Jr., passed away November 23, 2010, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, on June 20, 1930 and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Oakah graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1953. After graduation, he joined the United States Air Force, serving from 1953 to 1976 and rising to the rank of Lt. Colonel. While in the Air Force, Oakah pursued ad-vanced studies at the University

of Oklahoma where, under the mentorship of Max L. Moor-head, he began to deepen his understanding of the subjects that became the focus of his scholarly endeavors: the Span-ish Borderlands and Latin American history. He earned both the M.A. (1960) and the Ph.D. (1964) from the Univer-sity of Oklahoma. A long-time member of the Western History Association, Jones served as program chair for the 1967 meeting in San Francisco.

Professor Jones began his teaching career while still in the military. He offered a variety of history courses at the U.S. Air Force Academy from 1960 to 1973 and in Panama from 1973 to 1976. In the fall of 1977, Oakah joined the faculty in the Department of History, Purdue University, his ―home base‖ until his retirement in 1994. In the academic years 1988-1989 and 1989-1990, Professor Jones held the O’Connor Chair of Spanish Colonial History of

Texas and the Southwest at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas. When he and his wife, Marjorie, moved to Albuquer-que, New Mexico, in 1994, Oakah continued his teaching by giving lectures and presenta-tions to varied audiences. In some ways Oakah Jones’s scholarship conformed to the conventions of his field and his generation. His work was grounded in a careful scrutiny of the archives, analysis based on primary sources, and a

straightforward narrative un-complicated by overt theoretical or ideological engagement. Still, in many ways Oakah’s scholarship broke with conven-tion and displayed a certain freshness throughout his distin-guished career. Take Pueblo Warriors and Spanish Conquest (1966), his study of eighteenth-century New Mexico. The heretofore conventional Bor-derlands story of Spanish con-quistadores, missionaries, bu-reaucrats, and presidiales gave way to a narrative that empha-sized the role of Native peoples as actors in their own right. He showed us that if not for Pueblo Indian auxiliaries (who made up a significant portion of

the provincial ―Spanish‖ mili-tia), the Spanish colonial pro-ject in New Mexico could eas-ily have crumbled. Jones’s next book, Santa Anna (1968), took him away from the Bor-derlands while it also allowed him to explore another genre of historical writing, biogra-phy. It is still considered a ―must-read‖ in the abundant scholarship on one of the most prominent figures of nineteenth-century Latin America.

In Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (1979; 2d ed., 1996), Oakah Jones returned to the Borderlands, though it was a Borderlands broader in scope and with a different emphasis than most works in the field. In this path-breaking study, Jones examined the funda-mental make-up of colonial civilian settlements not only in the Southwestern United States but also in the Mexican far north. In important and palpable ways, his work laid the groundwork for the vari-ous ―borderlands‖ or ―norteño‖ paradigms that oth-ers theorized and refined in later decades. Oakah Jones did the very difficult spade-work research by investigating in every pertinent archive—on

tion for that year will be open to any non-fiction book, including biography, on any aspect of Southwest-ern life, past or present, with a 2011 copyright. The purpose of the prize is to promote and recognize fine writing and original research on the American Southwest. The author will receive $2500 and an invitation to give the annual Weber-Clements Prize Lecture at

The WHA Council and the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist Univer-sity announce a new book prize to be administered by the WHA. The David J. Weber-Clements Prize for the Best Non-Fiction Book on Southwestern America will be presented for the first time at the 2012 WHA conference in Den-ver, Colorado. The competi-

Southern Methodist Univer-sity, expenses to be paid by the Clements Center.

The prize originated at the Clements Center where it has been awarded for a dozen years under the name William P. Clements Prize. This spring the Clements Center approached the WHA about taking over administration of this prize as a way to honor Center

New WHA Prize Announced

giving counsel and encourage-ment to young scholars.

I had the good fortune of being his departmental colleague at Purdue University, and what a great colleague he was. In his inimitable way—humane, re-spectful, and encouraging—he advised us ―newbies‖ who were trying to make it over the tenure hurdle. He also was one of the very few who read EVERY book and article submitted as part of a tenure file! Oakah L. Jones, Jr., is survived by his wife Marjorie Jones, his children Marcia Curtis and Chris-topher Jones, and his stepchil-dren Craig and Grant Henderson and Lisa O’Harra. Oakah was a true gentleman, a kind and gener-ous soul, and a very good histo-rian and teacher. We will miss him. Charles Cutter Purdue University

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each side of the border. There are few scholars of the Border-lands (in its many forms) who have not relied on Los Paisanos for basic data. His continued work in north Mexican archives resulted in Nueva Vizcaya: Heart-land of the Spanish Frontier (1988). Once again, Jones defied con-vention by investigating the colonial era of an area under-studied by both U.S. and Mexi-can historians.

Guatemala in the Spanish Colonial Period (1994), as he explained it to me, was a ―labor of love,‖ the result of having become acquainted with Central Amer-ica decades earlier. Thus, Oakah Jones once again left the comfort zone of the Border-lands to write for a Latin Americanist readership. I re-member him showing me a copy of the book, hot off the press, and him announcing ―this is my last book!‖ Indeed, it was his last book. But Oakah continued to produce scholar-ship in written articles and for-mal presentations and to share his encyclopedic knowledge of the Hispanic and Indian South-west with anyone interested; and he did so in a variety of venues—whether at profes-sional meetings with other aca-demics, talks and presentations to civic groups, or informally,

Los Paisanos by Oakah L. Jones.

Founding Director and past WHA President David J. Weber who passed away in August 2010.

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Peter Boag has been a committed WHA member since 1989. In addition to partici-pating in many sessions at annual confer-ences over the years, he has previously chaired the WHA’s Nominating Commit-tee, served on the Program Committee twice, served on the Joan Paterson Kerr Book Prize committee, and was a member of the Western Historical Quarterly editorial board. He is also a dedicated contributor to the western scholarly community more generally. He currently serves on the edi-

torial board of the Pacific Historical Review, on the Steering Committee of the Coalition for Western Women’s History, and as chair of the Armit-age-Jameson Book Prize committee.

Peter earned his Ph.D. at the University of Oregon in 1988 and then served on the faculty at Idaho State University (1989-2002) and the University of Colorado, Boulder (2002-2009)—at the latter institution he also chaired the history department. He is now a professor at Wash-ington State University where he serves as the Columbia Chair in the History of the American West. He is the author of three books on western history. The most recent, Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, releases this fall with the University of California Press. He looks for-ward to many more years of active and engaged membership and ser-vice in the WHA.

Mark Fiege is associate professor of history and William E. Morgan Chair of Liberal Arts at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, where he teaches western Ameri-can history, American environ-mental history, and U.S. history, and where he serves as director and faculty affiliate of the Public Lands History Center. He is the author of Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agri-cultural Landscape in the American West (Washington, 1999) and The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (Washington, forthcoming Febru-ary 2012). He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Theodore C. Blegen Award, the Wayne D. Rasmussen Award, the Alice Hamilton Prize, and the Oscar O. Winther Award for ―The Weedy West,‖ which appeared in the spring 2005 issue of the Western Historical Quarterly.

2011 Candidate Information

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Council Position A

Council Position B L. G. Moses (George), professor of history at Oklahoma State University since the fall of 1989, first joined the WHA while a doctoral student at the University of New Mexico in the mid-1970s. His membership, like his salary in those scuffling days, lacked constancy. In 1977 with doctorate in his back pocket—and no song in his heart, it being the confused years of Disco—he journeyed further West to camp at the base of the San Francisco Peaks. Still safe within the shadows of the Four Sacred Moun-tains, he had nevertheless joined a department

at Northern Arizona University with no fewer than four westerners, three of whom mistrusted the sources and practitioners of ethno- history. For twelve years at NAU he remained the youngest member of the department. When W. David Baird quit the bucolic languor of Stillwater, Oklahoma, for a green promontory with date palms overlooking Malibu’s strand, Moses grabbed a chance to work with graduate students at OSU. Eighteen (all employed) doctors of philosophy finished their degrees under his direction; but he will never match the thirty-seven of his mentor, Richard N. Ellis.

He has served the WHA variously as a member of the Indian Scholarship Committee, the Caughey Prize committee (thank you, Richard!), the Billing-ton Award committee, the local arrangements committee for the Tulsa meeting, the editorial board of the WHQ, and twice as co-chair of the pro-gram committee, once for the Portland meeting of the association, and again for Oklahoma City where the Kiowa Black Leg society spectacularly welcomed attendees. In 2007 he received the WHA award of merit; and most recently at the Denver meeting, the Indian Scholars group recognized him for his scholarship and work with graduate students. That is his most

treasured memory among a career’s worth in the WHA.

Marsha Weisiger is an Associate Professor and the Julie and Rocky Dixon Chair of U.S. Western History at the University of Oregon, where she teaches the history of the American West and environmental history. Until re-cently, she taught at New Mexico State Uni-versity, where she was also part of their Public History program. Weisiger did her under-graduate work at Arizona State University, earning BAs, in anthropology and history. It was during a first career as a public historian that she became smitten with western history. Her research on the John Slaughter Ranch near Douglas, Arizona; suburban development in early Phoenix; and the mining town of Globe, Arizona, convinced her to apply to graduate school to study western environ-mental history. She earned her M.A. at the University of Oklahoma and her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her book Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country (University of Washington Press, 2009) won the Norris and Carol Hundley Book Award from the American Histori-cal Association, Pacific Coast Branch, and the Caroline Bancroft Honor Book Award from the Denver Public Library; her first book, Land of Plenty: Oklahomans in the Cotton Fields of Arizona, 1933-1942 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), won the Angie Debo Prize. Weisiger is also the principal author of Buildings of Wisconsin, forthcoming in the Buildings of the United States series.

Her current projects include The River Runs Wild and Breaking Ground: Environmental Art and Our Conceptions of Nature, which she is co-writing

with Jarma Jones Vorhauer. She serves on the editorial boards of Envi-ronmental History and the New Mexico Historical Review, and on the nomi-nating committee for the WHA. She first joined the WHA in 1989 and supports its continuing efforts to promote an inclusive, collegial, and fun atmosphere.

Please Note: Paper Ballots will be sent to members. Filled out ballots

should be returned to the Western History Association Office. Only ballots

received by September 25, 2011 will be counted. Please mark only one

candidate for each position. The following statements have been provided

by the nominees.

Francis Flavin is a historian for the Assistant Secretary – Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C. He has been a member of the WHA since 1993. He received his Ph.D. in history at Indiana University in Bloomington and taught as a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas before moving to Washington. He has published several articles, including an article on Native American history for the National Park Service and an article about adventurer-artists in the mid-nineteenth century American West. His current book-length project explores American perceptions of Plains Indians.

Flavin is committed to promoting Western history, art, and culture in uni-versities, museums, and public venues—both nationally and internationally. While in Texas, he served on the Teacher Advisory Committee at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. He has lectured at the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, the Amon Carter Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution, and he is a member of the National Council for Public History. He has lectured on the American West in Finland and Estonia. Flavin reviewed museum and historic site grant proposals for the NEH and served as a judge for the Western Writers of America’s annual Spur Award. He is currently a research associate for the American Indian Studies Research Institute at Indiana University and sheriff of the Potomac Corral of Westerners International. Flavin has served the WHA by chairing a Joan Paterson Kerr book award panel, by chairing the membership com-mittee, by participating on the technology committee, and by assisting with the local arrangements for the WHA’s 2003 meeting in Fort Worth. Flavin will work with WHA to ensure that the American West is studied in a broad, thoughtful, and vigorous manner and that the American West con-tinues to be an exciting and important field of inquiry.

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2011 Candidate Information Nominating Position A Nominating Position B

Kathleen A. Brosnan is an associate pro-fessor of history and the associate director of the Center for Public History at the University of Houston. She received her J.D. from the University of Illinois in 1985 and earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago in 1999. Dr. Bros-nan is the author of Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law and Environmental Change along the Front Range (2000) and articles that have appeared in the Journal of the West, Environmental History, the Catholic Historical Review, and various edited volumes. She was the lead editor for the Ency-clopedia of American Environmental History (2010) which included nearly 800 entries and 365 contributors from around the world. She is co-editor of two forthcoming volumes, City Dream, Country Schemes: Commu-nity and Identity in the American West (with Amy Scott - 2011) and Energy Capitals: Local Impact, Global Influence (with Joseph Pratt and Martin Melosi - 2012). Brosnan was the project coordinator for the online exhibit, To Bear Fruit for Our Race: a History of African American Physicians in Houston. She is a member of the editorial board for and contributed an article to the digitalization of the Graff Collection on the American West at the Newberry Library. She has served on the editorial boards of various journals, including the Western Historical Quarterly. For the West-ern History Association, she has been a member of the program com-mittee and previously chaired the Rothman book prize committee. At present, Brosnan is completing a book manuscript, tentatively titled Napa Nature: an Environmental History of America’s Premier Wine Region, and has begun work on her next book, a transnational environmental his-tory of Old World viticulture in the New World, which includs Califor-nia, Texas, and Oregon, among other regions.

Margaret Jacobs is currently a professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Formerly, she taught at New Mexico State University from 1997-2004. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California-Davis in 1996. Her research and teaching focuses on women, gender, indigenous peoples, and colonialism in the American West and other settler colonies. Her first book, Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879-1934 (University of Nebraska Press, 1999) won three awards, including the Gaspar Perez de Villagra Award from the Historical Society of New Mexico and the Sierra Prize from the

Western Association of Women Historians. Her most recent book, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Re-moval of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 (University of Nebraska Press, 2009) won the Robert G. Athearn Book Award, the inaugural Armitage-Jameson Prize, and the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University. She is engaged in several new projects, including a book on the history of American Indian adoption; a com-parative study of indigenous dance; and an analysis of gender, colonial-ism, and changing foodways. She has been a long-time member of the Western History Association, the Coalition for Western Women’s His-tory, and the Western Association of Women Historians.

Cathleen Cahill received her B.A. at the University of California, Davis and her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2004. She is currently an Assistant Profes-sor of History at the University of New Mexico. Her research interests focus on the intersection of race and gender in the U.S. West as well as the role of the federal government in that region. Her first monograph was Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933 (University of North Carolina Press) is forthcoming this June

2011. She also co-edited the special issue on "Intermarriage in American Indian History: Explorations in Power and Intimacy in North America" for Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (Vol. 29: 2-3, 2008). During 2009-2010 she held a Bill and Rita Clements Research Fellowship at Southern Methodist Univer-sity's Clements Center for Southwest Studies. She has been a proud member of WHA since 1999 and previously served on the program committee (2006) and the Arrell M. Gibson Award Committee.