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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 and is the Assistant Director of the American Society for Environmental History.

NBN Episodes hosted by Stephen:

American West December 10, 2023

Urban Homelands

Writing the Native City from Oklahoma

Lindsey Claire Smith

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
What do Tulsa, Santa Fe, and New Orleans have in common? When viewed from the perspective of Indigenous arts and culture, the answer is quite a bit. In Urban Homelands: Writing the Native City …
American West November 24, 2023

Black Rodeo

A History of the African American Western

Mia Mask

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
Did you know Sidney Poitier was a western icon? In a genre best known for John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, African American actors and directors have played an important role in both …
American West November 23, 2023

Illusions of Empire

The Civil War and Reconstruction in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

William S. Kiser

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
The 19th-century Mexican-American borderlands were a complicated place. By the 1860s, Confederates, Americans, Mexicans, French, and various Native societies were all scheming and vying for control of the region bifurcated by …
American West October 22, 2023

Big Bend National Park

Mexico, the United States, and a Borderland Ecosystem

Michael Welsh

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
National Parks are sites where politics, cultures, and ecology converge. University of Northern Colorado historian Michael Welsh argues that, at Big Bend National Park in West Texas, a fourth dynamic …
American West October 11, 2023

Both Sides Now

Writing the Edges of the North American West

Sheila McManus

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
Listen:
Are borders real? This is the question at the center of Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the North American West (Texas A&M UP, 2022) by Lethbridge University history …
American West September 26, 2023

Cow Talk

Work, Ecology, and Range Cattle Ranchers in the Postwar Mountain West

Michelle K. Berry

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
Listen:
How did ranching become an identity? University of Arizona historian Michelle Berry explains in Cow Talk: Work, Ecology, and Western Ranchers in the Postwar Mountain West (U Oklahoma Press, 2023). During the …
American West September 11, 2023

Oriental, Black, and White

The Formation of Racial Habits in American Theater

Josephine Lee

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
Listen:
The history of race in American theater is more complicated than you might think, writes Dr. Josephine Lee in Oriental, Black, and White: The Formation of Racial Habits in American Theater (UNC …
American West August 18, 2023

Peace and Friendship

An Alternative History of the American West

Stephen Aron

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
Listen:
The history of the American West has typically been told in one of two ways: as triumph, or as tragedy. Stephen Aron, accomplished scholar of the West, Professor Emeritus at UCLA, and …
American West August 6, 2023

The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam

Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau

Erika Marie Bsumek

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
The Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River provides electricity for some forty million people, and is one of the largest sources of water in the American West. It is also …
American West July 24, 2023

The Mobilized American West, 1940-2000

John M. Findlay

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
Listen:
At the end of the 1930s, the West was in peril. A cultural and economic backwater, the Great Depression had all-but wiped out the extractive industries which had fueled the region's …
American West July 14, 2023

Mud, Blood, and Ghosts

Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West

Julie Carr

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
Listen:
In Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West (U Nebraska Press, 2023), University of Colorado poet and English professor Julie Carr uses family legend and lore to tell …
American West June 20, 2023

Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America

Rethinking Finnish Experiences in Transnational Spaces

Rani-Henrik Andersson and Janne Lahti

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
Listen:
Finns tell a story about themselves as a people exempt from European colonialism. Not so, argue the contributors to Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America: Rethinking Finnish Experiences in Transnational Spaces (Helsinki …
American West June 14, 2023

Menace to Empire

Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State

Moon-Ho Jung

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
Listen:
As the American imperial project in the Pacific World grew at the end of the nineteenth century, so too did the American security and intelligence state, argues Dr. Moon-Ho Jung …
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 …