The Kathy Fiscus Tragedy Transfixed the World. Seven Decades Later, I Can’t Let It Go

A California Historian Can’t Shake His Obsession With the 1949 Death That Became the First Live, Breaking News TV Spectacle

I can walk from my home to the area where Alice Fiscus stood in the kitchen chatting with her sister Jeanette on that fateful late afternoon of April 8, 1949. The landscape is changed now. But with luck, a good map, and a historic photograph, I can get within ten feet of where Alice looked out that window and first realized that her youngest child had disappeared. I have tried it before, and I feel like trying it again as I write this. Right there, at the mouth of an …

by William Deverell | March 10, 2021

Megafires Are Getting More Dangerous—But We Can Better Prepare for Them

To Coexist With a Fierier Planet, We Need to Stop Viewing Fire as the Enemy

by Joe Mathews | July 17, 2020

Megafires—wildfires that burn more than 100,000 acres of land—have long been a fact of life across the American West and elsewhere. But as such fires grow larger and more frequent …

Why Are We Still Arguing Over the Legacy of Cherokee ‘Outlaw’ Ned Christie?

Those Who Have Benefited Most From His Story Have Never Cared About the Evidence That Vindicates Him

by Devon Mihesuah | January 12, 2020

On the spring evening in 1887 that he arrived in Tahlequah, the capital of the Cherokee Nation, U.S. Deputy Marshal Dan Maples was fatally shot in the chest by an …

America’s Hidden History of Conquest and the Meaning of the West

Historian Patricia Nelson Limerick on How Invaders Came to See Themselves as Victims, Then Romanticized the Native Americans They Displaced

Interview by Gregory Rodriguez | November 3, 2019

Patricia Nelson Limerick is a leading scholar of the American West, and the faculty director and chair of the board of the Center of the American West at the University …

The Real Heroes of the Overland Trail Were the Oxen | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

The Oxen Were the Unheralded Heroes of America’s Overland Trails

Over Long Journeys, Westward Migrants Came to Love the 'Noble' Animals They Depended on

by Diana L. Ahmad | August 11, 2019

Between 1840 and 1869, approximately 300,000 people crossed the United States on their way to settle in Oregon, find gold in California, or practice religion as they desired in …

How Basques Became Synonymous With Sheepherders in the American West

Though Few Immigrants Arrived With Experience, They Created an Ethnic Economic Niche That Became a Ladder to Success

by Iker Saitua | July 10, 2019

One enduring myth of the American West is that people of Basque origins or ancestry came to dominate sheepherding because of the skills they brought with them from the old …

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