Sponsored by The Book Club of California Monday June 13, 6:00 PM - 7:15 PM Los Angeles time | In-Person event and Livestream on Zoom Viewers of films and television shows might imagine the dude ranch as something not quite legitimate, a place where city dwellers pretend to be cowboys in amusingly inauthentic fashion. But […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous […]
The Book Club of California Even among iconic frontiersmen like John C. Frémont, Kit Carson, and Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger stands out. A mountain man of the American West, straddling the fur trade era and the age of exploration, he lived the life legends are made of. His adventures are fit for remaking into the […]
A central theme of Making a Modern U.S. West by Sarah Deutsch is the question of what would constitute a modern U.S. and whose vision would define the West and the nation. Modernity for some meant corporate consolidation, capital intensive agriculture, white supremacy, male-headed families and private individual land-holding. For others, modernity could include racial […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California An archive survives to be revived. The archive as a limit, a thing in a box, is always also an opening. It opens on losses sustained, harms inflicted, the tenacity of survival, and on the persistence of lineages both proud and shameful. But what is it to approach […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives—the first slaves transported into California—and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California In popular mythology, the Overland Trail is typically a triumphant tale, with plucky easterners crossing the Plains in caravans of covered wagons. But not everyone reached Oregon and California. Some 6,600 migrants perished along the way and were buried where they fell, often on Indigenous land. As historian […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California James H. Gipson founded Caxton Printers as a small print shop in rural Idaho over a century ago. During the following decades, Caxton grew to publish hundreds of books across all genres––primarily about the American West. Gipson’s philosophy was to help writers from the West get published, regardless […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California The untold, multifaceted story of one of the most adventurous and prolific landscape painters of the American West. California Impressionist Tilden Daken (1876–1935), famous in his day, painted in every California state park and national park in the West—from the redwood forests to the High Sierra—and beneath the […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of California. What does it mean to imagine the American West through Black experience? For too long, popular culture, from Hollywood Westerns to novels, music, and television, has erased or distorted Black presence in the West, leaving us with an incomplete story of American identity. Black Wests: Reshaping Race and Place […]
Sponsored by The Book Club of Washington Doug Leen is a retired dentist and seasonal park ranger. He started his company, Ranger Doug's Enterprises in 1993, with a goal of bringing back into print the striking posters created by the WPA in the 1930s and 40s. Watch the Book Club of Washington events page for […]