The Extreme History Project: The Dirt on the Past

Black Montana with Anthony Wood

Join us as we talk with Anthony Wood about his new book, Black Montana: Settler Colonialism and the Erosion of the Racial Frontier, 1877-1930. Anthony talks with us about his work on the Montana African American Heritage Resources Project and how this inspired him to delve deeper into the history of Montana's Black communities. His book explores the entanglements of race, settler colonialism, and the emergence of state and regional identity in the American West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By producing conditions of social, cultural, and economic precarity that undermined Black Montanans’ networks of kinship, community, and financial security, the state of Montana, in its capacity as a settler colony, worked to exclude the Black community that began to form inside its borders after Reconstruction. We unpack this to better understand why Montana's Black community, and much of Montana's diverse early communities, left Montana before 1930. Anthony is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Michigan. He worked as a historian for the Montana Historical Society on Montana’s African American Heritage Places Project.

 

For further reading:

Black Montana: Settler Colonialism and the Erosion of the Racial Frontier, 1877 - 1930 by Anthony Wood

What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America by Peggy Pascoe

Montana’s African American Heritage Resources Project https://mhs.mt.gov/Shpo/AfricanAmericans/

Race and the Wild West: Sarah Bickford, the Montana Vigilantes, and the Tourism of Decline, 1870–1930

By Laura J. Arata

The Chastity Plot with Lisabeth During

Join us for our conversation with Lisabeth During about her recently published book, The Chastity Plot. During tells the story of chastity through time, how it has been honored and despised and how the obsession with chastity has played a powerful and disturbing role enforcing patriarchy’s double standards. Chastity is imbedded in Western culture, a myth of gender that has long been contested by feminists. We talk about how chastity has been portrayed through literature, religion, and cultural history from antiquity to the present and why it is relevant today. Find this book at The University of Chicago Press.  

 

The Chastity Plot https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo68652053.html#:~:text=In%20The%20Chastity%20Plot%2C%20Lisabeth,loved%2C%20honored%2C%20and%20despised.

Tomb Robbers, Art Police, and Patrimony in Italy with Fiona Greenland

Join us for a fascinating discussion with Fiona Greenland about her new book, "Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Robbers, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy." Greenland reveals the contemporary actors in this tale, taking a close look at the Art Squad and state archaeologists on one side and unauthorized excavators, thieves, and smugglers on the other. Control over its cultural heritage through a famously effective art-crime squad that has been the inspiration of novels, movies, and tv shows. In its efforts to bring their cultural artifacts home, Italy has entered into legal battles against some of the world’s major museums, including the Getty, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and the Louvre. It has turned heritage into patrimony capital—a powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics. 

 

Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Robbers, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo72232678.html

Indian Boarding Schools with Marsha Small

Join us as we talk with Marsha Small about her work to locate and document Indian boarding school cemeteries. Marsha leads the Indigenous Peoples' Day Montana movement and her work with the preservation and conservation of sacred sites and places using GPR, GPS, and GIS, specifically in boarding school cemeteries is internationally known. Marsha uses ground-penetrating radar to locate unmarked graves, including at the Chemawa Indian School cemetery in Salem, Oregon. Marsha has a master’s degree in Native American Studies from Montana State University and is currently working on a PhD. Marsha was the distinguished visiting Native American Studies professor in Anthropology at Willamette University in 2019. We discuss Marsha's work at the Chemawa Indian Boarding School cemetery, along with the work she has been doing to establish protocols to document boarding school cemeteries. This is hard history and very difficult to discuss. Our thanks to Marsha for her continued dedication to this work and her mission to locate and document the graves of these children. To follow Marsha on social media use #aVoicefortheChildrenInIndianBoardingSchoolCemeteries.

All That She Carried with Tiya Miles

Join us for this thoughtful conversation with Dr. Tiya Miles about her new book, All that She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, A Black Family Keepsake. Dr. Miles is a renowned historian who, in this book, traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft an extraordinary testament to people who are left out of the archives. We dive into the book, and why Tiya felt compelled to write about this significant object. All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and of love passed down through generations of women against steep odds. It honors the creativity and fierce resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties even when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today. We talk with Tiya about her process and why this story is important today as we, as a nation, struggle with how to understand our hard histories and reconcile our past in a way that can help us move forward together. Tiya Miles is professor of history and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Miles is the author of The Dawn of Detroit, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, among other honors, as well as the acclaimed books Ties That Bind, The House on Diamond Hill, The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts, and Tales from the Haunted South, a published lecture series. 

 

Butte America with Mary Murphy

Join us this week as we talk with Dr. Mary Murphy, a Distinguished Professor of History at Montana State University Bozeman and the Director of the Ivan Doig Center for the Study of the Lands and Peoples of the North American West.  She teaches courses in American history with a special focus on gender and the North American West.  Among her books are Hope in Hard Times: New Deal Photographs of Montana, 1936-1942 and Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914-41. We discuss how Mary came to history, and how her research interests landed in Butte, MT. We discuss her early research on women's leisure in Butte and her more recent work on the history of food, focusing in on the history of Chinese food in America. Join us for this fascinating conversation with our favorite professor and good friend, Dr. Mary Murphy.

 

The Extreme History Project with Marsha Fulton

This week Nancy interviews co-founders of The Extreme History Project, Marsha Fulton and Crystal Alegria. We discuss the origins of Extreme History, a public history organization dedicated to making history relevant. Marsha and Crystal talk about how Extreme History started and why. Marsha explains the early philosophy of the organization including founding projects and Crystal talks about where the organization is headed in the future. Join us for this conversation and learn more about The Extreme History Project!  

 

Feminism and Gender in Archaeology with Meg Conkey

Join us for a deep dive into gender and feminism in archaeology with archaeologist, Meg Conkey. Meg is professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and is known for introducing feminist perspectives into archaeology. We discuss her early work with Janet Spector, Joan Gero, and others to bring women and gender into the study of archaeology and what it means to do archaeology as a feminist.

To learn more:

Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory edited by Margaret Conkey and Joan Gero
What this Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village by Janet Spector
Archaeologies of the Heart by Kisha Supernant, Jane Eva Baxter, Natasha Lyons, and Sonya Atalay
Reindeer Moon by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Ridgeline: A Story of Justice with Michael Punke

Join us for our conversation with author Michael Punke on his new book, Ridgeline, a novel that details the story of the Fetterman fight or the Battle of One-Hundred-in-the-Hands. In 1866, with the country still reeling from the Civil War, the U.S. Army established Fort Phil Kearny in the home of the Lakota Nation. In his book, Punke tells the story of the months leading up to this battle between the U.S. Army and the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe. The result was what we now know as the Battle of One-Hundred-in-the-Hands. Michael talks with us about the book, his processes, the characters, the diversity of the west at this time, and why this story is still important today. Michael is the author of several books including The Revenant, a #1 New York Times bestseller and basis for the Academy Award–winning film. 

 

To Learn More:

We highly recommend Michael's other books including The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge, Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, The Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West, and Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917. 

Mudlarking with Lara Maiklem

Join us for this fascinating conversation with Lara Maiklem who is a mudlark. She searches for lost and forgotten objects on the foreshore of the river Thames in London. She has been mudlarking for almost 20 years, searching and finding lost items including Tudor shoes, medieval pins, Roman pots, Georgian wig curlers and modern wedding rings. We talk with Lara about objects she has found along with her collection, research, and curation processes. She has written, Mudlark: In Search of London's Past Along the River Thames and can be found on Facebook and Twitter (@LondonMudlark) and on Instagram (@London.Mudlark). Her book is now available in paperback with a color plate section and a gorgeous new cover!  

 

To learn more:

Mudlark: In Search of London's Past Along the River Thames https://wwnorton.com/books/mudlark?fbclid=IwAR1U_ExZnU7-W3g-ziM1n9q_-Y7bH7bTXuLMlFfPxNdm_s5y6nionnSk3QY