Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West ed. by Gregory E. Smoak

Abstract

Reviewed by: Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West ed. by Gregory E. Smoak Emily Gowen Gregory E. Smoak, editor, Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2021. 232 pp. Hardcover, $70; paper, $35; e-book, $28. In the twelve essays that make up Gregory Smoak’s Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West, the University of Utah’s American West Center comes into view as the contested center of a fifty-year battle to define and expand the parameters of public history. In one sense the volume is a rich, polyvocal institutional history of the center, and a loving tribute to its founders’ vision. In another sense, though, the volume is an extended meditation on the most pressing questions that animate the field of public history. What sorts of tensions arise when historians, Richard White asks, enter the public sphere? How do we resist the popular urge to instrumentalize history, to make it speak the way we want it to? Or as Liesl Carr Childers puts it, what happens when history is “hostage” to politics? (27). And what would it look like to truly center Native voices in the way we tell stories about the American West? The volume offers several models of good public history: Michael Childers writes about Hal Rothman, the late historian and public intellectual who sought to “engage the public on its own terms” and “create the ears with which to hear us” (41). Leighton M. Quarles shares lessons from his own work as a historian for the National Park Service, a role in which nationalist mythmaking, tribal memory, environmental preservation, and the mandates of a tourism economy jostle for primacy. As many of the essays insist, a professional historian is uniquely positioned to understand and combat the settler colonial origins of land preservation projects that, in the popular imagination, are often billed as an unalloyed good. Yvette Towersap Tuell calls walking the line between serving Native history and public land management “working on the dark side” (101). But she insists that inhabiting such a vexed position is essential if we are to “better incorporate Native history and local knowledge into . . . policy decisions” (101). From the adjudication of tribal water rights to the interpretive decisions made on ghost tours, to the creation of new centers for [End Page 88] Native American and Indigenous studies programs, to the digitization of archives, the volume charts the American West Center’s sprawling and complex legacy, and showcases the hard, often frustrating, but richly rewarding work of “doing public history in the American West” (1; emphasis original). In its best moments the volume lives up to its own definitions of public history, offering a road map to young scholars interested in forging careers that span disciplines, audiences, and institutional constituencies. For those entering the profession today this volume may even feel like a life raft. Its vivid accounting of the wide range of purposes to which a historian’s credentials can be put offers a much more expansive vision of a fulfilling academic career than we often see in discussions of the academy today. To read Western Lands, Western Voices is to get an up-close look at what it’s like to wade into the messy, fascinating, unfinished work of public history in the American West, and perhaps even to be inspired to enter the public sphere oneself. [End Page 89] Emily Gowen The American Antiquarian Society Copyright © 2023 Western Literature Association