Colorado State’s Annual American West Program to Focus

Leading scholars and public experts from throughout the West will come to Colorado State University this summer to discuss "Growth and Development in the American West" as part of the American West Program’s 2005 summer lecture series.

Sessions will focus on the economic, ecological and cultural issues triggered by the expansion of the United States westward in the 19th and early 20th century, issues that continue to resonate today. The six-week series kicks off on May 24 with a talk on "Holding the Purse Strings: The Creation of Denver and a Regional Economy" and ends June 28. This is the 28th year of the program.

"We will bring a range of scholars in historical geography, environmental history, legal, industrial, and urban history to the university and local community," said Ruth Alexander, coordinator of the American West Program and chair of Colorado State’s Department of History. "Last year, the program continued to be one of the best public educational events in this community, and we expect the 2005 program to be of equal quality."

In addition to five evening lectures by prominent experts in the field, this year’s American West Program includes a partnership with the Fort Collins Museum to present a special program for parents and children about the "Lore of the Western Settlers." The program, presented by Idaho State University folklorist Jennifer Eastman Attebery, will be at 1 p.m. June 12 at the Fort Collins Museum, 200 Mathews St.

All other sessions will be at 7 p.m. Tuesday evenings in Yates Hall Room 104. Tickets for those sessions are $7 per lecture or $25 for the series, $15 for Colorado State students. The June 12 session costs $5 for an adult and $2 for each child.

For more details on parking, tickets and the lectures, call Alexander at 491-6334.

The schedule of events for the American West Program:

–     May 24: "Holding the Purse Strings: The Creation of Denver and a Regional Economy" by Kathleen Brosnan of the University of Houston. Brosnan is the author of "Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law and Environmental Change Along the Front Range."

–     May 31: "A Sustainable Future for the New West: Balancing Economies, Ecology and Culture Through Working Landscapes" by Bruce Runnels and Greg Gamble of The Nature Conservancy.

–     June 7: "Capitalist Utopianism: What the Ideas of William Jackson Palmer Revel about the Triumphs and Tragedies of Development in the Late-Nineteenth-Century West" by Thomas Andrews of California State University, Northridge. Andrews is author of the forthcoming "Power, Toil and Trouble: The Nature of Industrial Struggle in Colorado Coalfields through the Ludlow Massacre of 1914."

–     June 12: "Lore of the Western Settlers" by Jennifer Eastman Attebery of Idaho State University. Attebery is the author of "Building Idaho: An Architectural History" and "Building with Logs: Western Log Construction in Context."

–     June 21: "In the Courts for Good: An Anecdotal History of Liberty-Based Public Interest Litigation in the American West" by William Perry Pendley, president and chief legal officer of the Mountain States Legal Foundation.

–     June 28: "Sustainability Questioned: What Limits Western Development?" by William R. Travis of the University of Colorado, Boulder.