Dr. Anne Hyde, a historian at Colorado College, will speak about “Western zombies and their killers” when she visits the CSU campus on Dec. 4.
Hyde has been published widely in the history of the American West, served on editorial boards for the Pacific Historical Review and the Western Historical Quarterly, and has been elected to the Councils of the Western Historical Association and the American Historical Association. Her studies focus on family relations in four western regions: St. Louis, the Great Lakes, Santa Fe and the Arkansas River, and the Pacific Coast.
Hyde’s lecture, which will begin at 4:30 p.m. in the Cherokee Park Ballroom at the Lory Student Center, is called “Western Zombies and Their Killers: Exceptionalism, the Empty West, and Mixed Race Families.” It is drawn from her book Empires, Nations, and Families: The North American West,1800-1860, which won the 2012 Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.
The book focuses on the broad family associations that crossed national and ethnic lines. These families, along with the river systems of the trans-Mississippi West, formed the basis for a global trade in furs. This trade operated for 100 years before the lands became part of the United States. The book depicts how the world of river and maritime trade shifted political power away from the military and diplomatic circles and into the hands of local people.
Event sponsor
The American West Program was a popular public educational series that CSU’s Department of History sponsored for several decades beginning in the 1970s, with support from the Office of the Provost. Last year, the Public Lands History Center, a research and public programming unit affiliated with the department, revived the American West Program to bring speakers on topics related to the history of the U.S. West and environmental history back to campus in a regular series. For more information about the PLHC and the American West Program, visit http://publiclands.colostate.edu.
Hyde will take questions after the presentation and will sign copies of her book, which will be available for sale. During the book signing there will be light refreshments.
The American West Program event is co-sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and the departments of History, Anthropology, Political Science, English, and Human Development and Family Studies.
