“Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley”

Prof. Kopp is an Environmental historian of the American West in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. His first book Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley (Berkeley, 2016) won the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association’s Book Award in 2017.

Kopp is Associate Professor of History and Director of Public History at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

“Why are Abraham’s Children Fighting”

Wed, April 4, 4pm, Todd 216

Free & Open to the Public

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are the three primary religious traditions of the western world. All three trace their roots back to Abraham, so how can they be so different from each other? And why has there been such a history of animosity between followers of these religious traditions? This discussion begins with the story of Abraham himself, because the seeds of dissent and rivalry are sown there. After considering the historical perspective, we will then consider how a better understanding of religious narratives can empower us to be more thoughtful and responsible citizens of our contemporary world.

“Narrative and Counter – Narrative in Commemorative Performance: Native American Powwow Dancing and African American Stepping”

Tuesday, 27 March 2017

4:00 to 5:00 p.m., Elson S. Floyd Cultural Center

Historian and filmmaker Dee Garceau discusses and presents clips from her two documentaries “We Sing” and “Stepping: Beyond the Line,” exploring powwow dances and songs of Blackfeet and Salish people in Montana, an intertribal drum in Idaho Falls, and African-American stepping, a percussive dance invented in the twentieth century by black fraternities and sororities. Both African-American and Native American dances and songs commemorate historic identities in ways that differ from conventional historical narratives about each group. In the process, they broaden audience perceptions about their cultures in the American West. In discussing her work, Prof. Garceau also looks introspectively, commenting on the challenges of her role as a white filmmaker who examines cultures to which she is an outsider. The program is open to the university community and the general public.

In addition to the documentary films noted here, Dee Garceau, Professor of History, Emerita, Rhodes College, and formerly chair of the Women’s Studies Program at Rhodes, is author of Creating Family: Cohabitation in the Intermountain West, 1890-1959 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming) and The Important Things of Life: Women, Work and Family in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 1880-1929 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). She has also co-edited Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West (New York: Routledge, 2001). By the way, Dr. Garceau earned her M.A. in history at WSU in 1981.