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Patty Limerick And “Hair-Raising Tales From The Department Of The Interior” On Access Utah Thursday

usu.edu

American West historian, author, and teacher, Patty Limerick, says that contrary to the stereotype of the boring bureaucrat, the stories of the men and women who have worked for the agencies of the Department of the Interior carry intrinsic interest and give rise to thought-provoking insights into the American West: past and present. Enormously important in the shaping of the American West, federal employees have been unjustly and inaccurately classified as "boring." Formed just as the United States completed its coast-to-coast conquest of contiguous land, Interior became the pivot point for the nation's attempts to absorb and manage the West's peoples and lands.

Patty Limerick will give the annual Leonard J. Arrington Lecture in Logan LDS Tabernacle on Thursday, September 29 at 7:00 p.m. In her lecture, titled “Hair-Raising Tales from the Department of the Interior,” she will make the case for directing more sustained and robust attention to the roles of federal clerks, surveyors, engineers, superintendents, agents, rangers, teachers, inspectors, and scientists in shaping the region.

Patty Limerick joins Tom Williams for Thursday’s Access Utah to tell “Hair-Raising Tales from the Department of the Interior” and to talk about much more.

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by USU Special Collections & Archives, USU University Libraries, The Leonard J. Arrington Lecture and Archives Foundation, USU College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Utah State University. All area college students are invited to participate in a writing competition in conjunction with the lecture.

Patty Limerick is the Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she is also a professor of environmental studies and history. In addition, Patty was named to serve as the new Colorado State Historian and appointed to the National Endowment for the Humanities advisory board called The National Council on the Humanities. Patty was nominated by President Obama in Spring 2015 and was confirmed by the United States Senate in November of 2015. She is the author of Desert Passages, The Legacy of Conquest, Something in the Soil, and A Ditch in Time. A frequent public speaker and a columnist for the Denver Post, Limerick has dedicated her career to bridging the gap between academics and the general public, to demonstrating the benefits of applying historical perspective to contemporary dilemmas and conflicts, and to making the case for humor as an essential asset of the humanities. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Hazel Barnes Prize (the University of Colorado’s highest award for teaching and research), she has served as president of the American Studies Association, the Western History Association, the Society of American Historians, and the Organization of American Historians, as well as the vice president for teaching of the American Historical Association. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her Ph.D.  from Yale University.

 

Tom Williams worked as a part-time UPR announcer for a few years and joined Utah Public Radio full-time in 1996. He is a proud graduate of Uintah High School in Vernal and Utah State University (B. A. in Liberal Arts and Master of Business Administration.) He grew up in a family that regularly discussed everything from opera to religion to politics. He is interested in just about everything and loves to engage people in conversation, so you could say he has found the perfect job as host “Access Utah.” He and his wife Becky, live in Logan.