The American West
The American West
In this new podcast, writer Dan Flores presents a big picture history of an American West you've never encountered. With the West's deep time, its grand natural world, and its wild animals as their focus, these episodes tell a fresh story of America's most fascinating region.Social links:
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Ep. 22: New West, Modern West, Public Lands West
The Frontier and the freedom it afforded was the shaping influence of the 19th century American West, but life in the Modern West has been formed just as powerfully by the presence of a public lands system American visionaries established a century ago. This is why they did it. Thank you to our sp…
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Ep. 21: How You Create a New West, and a New America
Teddy Roosevelt enjoyed a lifestyle and political career that made him the most important president in history for the creation of a West and a country centered on conservation. In the process his obsession with nature finally took the U.S. in a different policy direction than the countries of west…
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Ep. 20: Coyote - America’s Jackal and Its Roller-Coaster Ride Through History
Like no other western animal the coyote has been a central character in the Pleistocene West, the Native West, and the Frontier. One of the epic stories of the Modern West is how coyotes are transferring their own brand of western survivalism to the entire country. Despite a $500 million-dollar war…
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Ep. 19: Shadows of the Frontier
When the U.S. Census announced in 1890 that the Frontier was over, America was plunged into a period of anxiety. As evidenced by the grand Indian photographs of Edward Sheriff Curtis, western nostalgia became a dominant theme of art, film, and pop culture. Another artist of the age, though, showed …
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Ep. 18: From Safari American-Style to the Boone & Crockett Club
When the long-term market exploitation of wildlife was joined by a form of elite safari hunting known as “field sports,” a massive destruction of western animals threatened to destroy millions of years of North American evolution. Teddy Roosevelt’s and George Grinnell’s Boone & Crockett Club wasn’t…
50:54
Ep. 17: What Really Happened to America’s National Mammal?
America’s national mammal possesses a troubling story in western history. For a century writers have presented the fate of the buffalo as brought down by a federal conspiracy that plotted the animal’s demise to undermine Native cultures. With an animal this important to American and western history…
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Ep. 16: A Dream of Bison
Present on the continent for nearly half-a-million years, the American bison’s numbers and near perfect adaptation to the Great Plains made it one of the evolutionary marvels of Earth. For more than 10,000 years, Native people in the West had intertwined their lives with bison herds to create the l…
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Ep. 15: The Most Dangerous Beast? Or the God of the West?
Grizzly bears emerged in North America nearly two-hundred thousand years ago and became the Lord Beast of the American West. Native people regarded them as formidable animal gods. Europeans and Americans thought of them as wildlands monsters that needed to be eliminated. Saved before they disappear…
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Ep. 14: Wolf West
As a native family of American animals, for more than five million years wolves of various kinds have been keystone predators of western ecologies. Before humans arrived they shaped the West more than any other mammal species. Numerous, nearly tame, and admired by Native people, wolves continued th…
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Ep. 13: A Western Geography of Hope
Dramatic and inspirational western landscapes have been a powerful feature of western history throughout time. During and after the Civil War, a group of adventuring artists and photographers helped divert America’s gaze from the horrors of war by seeking out the most dramatic western landscapes an…
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