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About Stephen Hausmann

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

NBN Episodes hosted by Stephen:

American West May 23, 2023

Resisting Change in Suburbia

Asian Immigrants and Frontier Nostalgia in L.A.

James Zarsadiaz

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
The myth of the frontier West found its home in America's late twentieth century suburbs, argues University of San Francisco associate professor James Zarsadiaz in Resisting Change in Suburbia: Asian Immigrants and …
American West May 2, 2023

Valley of Heart's Delight

Environment and Sense of Place in the Santa Clara Valley

Anne Marie Todd

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
This agricultural history explores the transformation of the Santa Clara Valley over the past one hundred years from America's largest fruit-producing region into the technology capital of the world. In …
American West April 28, 2023

Pacific Confluence

Fighting Over the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Hawai'i

Christen T. Sasaki

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
What if Hawai'i wasn't the 50th state? In Pacific Confluence: Fighting Over the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Hawai'i (U California Press, 2022), UCSD assistant professor Christen Sasaki argues that the years 1893-1898 marked a …
American West April 20, 2023

Speculative Wests

Popular Representations of a Region and Genre

Michael K. Johnson

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
The Western as a genre is alive and vibrant, argues University of Maine - Farmington professor of English literature Michael K. Johnson. In Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and a …
American West March 24, 2023

Making America's Public Lands

The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands

Adam Sowards

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
Over one quarter - some 640 million acres - of the United States consists of public land owned, not privately, but by the federal government, much of it in the …
American West March 16, 2023

A People's History of SFO

The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport

Eric Porter

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
What can an airport tell us about a city? Quite a bit, according to UC-Santa Cruz history professor Eric Porter in A People's History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and …
American West February 26, 2023

Hella Town

Oakland's History of Development and Disruption

Mitchell Schwarzer

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
Oakland grew up on the shadow of the dynamo of the nineteenth century West, always the "other" city on San Francisco Bay.  But as Mitchell Schwarzer, Professor Emeritus of art …
American West February 17, 2023

We the Miners

Self-Government in the California Gold Rush

Andrea G. McDowell

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
When miners arrived in California seeking their fortune during the gold rush of the 1840s and early 1850s, they encountered a place with few existing legal systems. Recently acquired from …
American West January 22, 2023

Taking the Field

Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers

Amy Kohout

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
The US military didn't just conquer its way across the US West and the Pacific - it also collected and categorized across these spaces too. In Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature …
American West January 3, 2023

Imperial Zions

Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific

Amanda Hendrix-Komoto

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has always been globally situated, argues Montana State history professor Amanda Hendrix-Komoto in Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the …
American West December 22, 2022

Defending the Arctic Refuge

A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice

Finis Dunaway

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
In far northeastern Alaska lies one of the most remarkable, and contested, places in North America: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This coastal arctic region is a place of great natural …
American West December 2, 2022

West Side Rising

How San Antonio's 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement

Char Miller

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
On September 9, 1921, a tropical storm raged above San Antonio, Texas. The rain that night flooded the city's many waterways, distributing unequal destruction throughout its many neighborhoods. For the whiter …
American West November 22, 2022

Country of the Cursed and the Driven

Slavery and the Texas Borderlands

Paul Barba

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
Most of what people think they know about Texas history is wrong, argues Bucknell University history professor Paul Barba in Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery in the Texas …
American West November 15, 2022

Seattle from the Margins

Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City

Megan Asaka

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
Seattle has a reputation as a city of Progressive values, but as Megan Asaka argues in Seattle From the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City (U Washington Press …
American West October 26, 2022

West of Jim Crow

The Fight Against California's Color Line

Lynn M. Hudson

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
California was born "under the shadow of slavery," writes Lynn Hudson, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California's Color Line (U …
American West October 19, 2022

Crush

The Triumph of California Wine

John Briscoe

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
In 1910, the future of California wine looked dim. Beset by crises ranging from earthquakes to insect infestations, and with momentum moving toward prohibition, the nascent industry seemed dead on …
American West September 20, 2022

You Will Never Be One of Us

A Teacher, a Texas Town, and the Rural Roots of Radical Conservatism

Timothy Paul Bowman

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
As the 1974 school year began, Wayne Woodward was a beloved high school teacher in a rural Texas town. By the following spring, he was embroiled in a local political …
American West September 6, 2022

Brewing a Boycott

How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism

Allyson P. Brantley

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
Before the craft beer revolution, Coors was a hot commodity. Impossible to find outside a few states in the West, the beer had a level of "cool" that only comes …
American West August 24, 2022

From Back Alley to the Border

Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969

Alicia Gutierrez-Romine

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
Before 1973's landmark Roe v. Wade decision, abortion in California was illegal for both doctors performing and women seeking the procedure. In From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in …
American West August 10, 2022

Visions of Nature

How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism

Jarrod Hore

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
During the early years of photography, settlers around the Pacific World were fascinated with the landscapes of the places they conquered. According to Dr. Jarrod Hore, a postdoctoral researcher and …
American West July 20, 2022

Pioneering Death

The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-Of-the-Century Oregon

Peter Boag

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
On November 19, 1895, eighteen year old Lloyd Montgomery murdered his parents and their neighbor at his home in rural Linn County, Oregon. In Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century …
American West July 4, 2022

The Chinese Question

The Gold Rushes, Chinese Migration, and Global Politics

Mae Ngai

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
Between 1848 and 1899, miners extracted more gold from the earth than in the previous 3,000 years of human history combined. Each gold rush in this period, from the Sierra …
American West June 14, 2022

Refusing Death

Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA

Nadia Y. Kim

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
The air in Los Angeles can be lethal, and nobody knows this better than the city’s Latinx and Asian immigrants, argues Dr. Nadia Kim in Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and …
American West June 13, 2022

Making a Modern U.S. West

The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898-1940

Sarah Deutsch

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
In less than half a century, the American West changed dramatically from a region of dynamic borders, politics, and identities to a more fixed zone of borders and demarcations …