Adam M. Sowards — Taking Bearings

Sign in Subscribe

history

America's National Parks Were Never Wild and Untouched

"America's National Parks Were Never Wild and Untouched: Montana's Emblematic Glacier National Park Reveals the Impact of Human History and Culture," Zócalo Public Square (June 11, 2018). America’s National Parks Were Never Wild and Untouched | Essay | Zócalo Public SquareIn 1872, Congress created the

The Devolution of Conservation's Trust Fund

"Reckoning with History: Teh devolution of conservation's trust fund," High Country News (June 8, 2018). Reckoning with History: The devolution of conservation’s trust fund - High Country NewsThe Land and Water Conservation Fund is set to expire, thanks to a partisan Congress.High Country NewsAdam

Calling Things Truly

I’m not sure any writer stimulates me like Rebecca Solnit. Her dead-aim truth telling and her exquisite control of language serves up so many reminders and inspirations. In “Silence Is Broken,” an early essay in The Mother of All Questions, Solnit writes: The task of calling things by their

On Historical Thinking; Thinking about Technology

Three facts: 1. I am teaching Native American history as a standalone course for the first time. 2. According to many, history (or the humanities more broadly) is not especially relevant today or for the future. 3. Technologies are rearranging our daily lives in fundamental ways. I want to connect

Dispossession in a Minute: On Shifting Perspectives

The visualization unfolds briskly, envelops the continent with a relentlessness that shocks. Almost an entire continent consumed in a century; from Native land to a nation’s land, sped up to a minute. The continent is eaten away as if by acid, the edges crumbling like old letters long stored

On Creativity and History, or Imagining an Unimaginable Future

In 1978, in a fit of optimism that civil rights had arrived and would never retreat, the southern writer Walker Percy, told a Georgia audience, Like most great historical changes, the change happens before our inkling of it and before its consequences begin to dawn on us. His shortsightedness on

Finding Complexity in a Ditch

Finding Complexity in a Ditch

"Finding Complexity in a Ditch: Hugh T. Lovin and Idaho Irrigation History," in Complexity in a Ditch: Brining Water to the Idaho Desert, by Hugh T. Lovin (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2017): 1-14. Sowards-IntroductionSowards-Introduction.pdf212 KBdownload-circle Publisher's Site