Political History
10/25/17 – Dirty Water: Thoughts on John Wesley Powell, the Paria River, and Surveying the American West
For millennia, southwest Utah’s Paria River has carved its way through the coarse, multi-layered sandstone formations that comprise the Paunsaugunt plateau from which it descends. After a 75-mile journey through the wilderness of what is now the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the Paria, which means “dirty water,” descends through the Vermillion Cliffs for another twenty… Read the Rest »
7/19/17 – Teddy Roosevelt in a Forrest Gump Land
It is, perhaps, old hat to remark on the loss of a broader human story when we choose to memorialize a landscape in a particular way, but I was recently reminded of how prevalent this occurrence is in a place I least expected: downtown Washington D.C. As someone who studied environmental history, and especially wilderness… Read the Rest »
4/5/17 – Sacramento Dreaming
A recent research trip took the SHRA team to Sacramento, California. The project we were working on had us examining events during the very early days of California statehood, when San Francisco was by far the biggest and most influential city in the new state. As we sat at the State Library, looking out at… Read the Rest »
1/4/17 -The Legacy of Minidoka and the Work of Dr. Robert Sims
Editor’s Note: Today’s post is courtesy of guest blogger Dr. Cheryl Oestreicher, Head, Special Collections, Boise State University. You can read Dr. Oestreicher’s previous guest blog for SHRA here. As an archivist, I have a social responsibility to collect records that document all aspects of history, particularly underrepresented people, events, and organizations. Archival records serve to… Read the Rest »
4/6/16 – Santa Anita in the 1940s
Recently, the SHRA research team had the opportunity to visit Santa Anita Park, a horse racing venue in Arcadia, CA. They saw a statue of Seabiscuit, an unlikely champion thoroughbred whose last triumphant race was run there on March 2, 1940. The race, the Santa Anita Handicap, had a purse of $125,000 and Seabiscuit had… Read the Rest »
3/7/16 – The History of the U.S. Botanic Garden
It’s been mighty cold here in Boise and in an attempt to warm up I swiped through cell phone pictures from spring and summer. While doing so, I stumbled upon photographs I’d taken while at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington D.C. My sister, mother, and I vacationed in our nation’s capital over Memorial Day… Read the Rest »
12/9/15 – The History of the War Assets Administration
On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan’s naval and air forces of attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, a date that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt exclaimed “would live in infamy.”[1] He quite accurately anticipated that this event would mark a pivotal moment in American history. In commemoration of that date, this week’s blog… Read the Rest »
11/25/15 – Meatless Monday
“Meatless, Wheatless, and Sweetless!” It sounds more like a modern fad diet than something you would see in the archives. But alas, that is precisely where SHRA stumbled upon this intriguing statement. We found the phrase so compelling we had to dig deeper. As history would have it, the origins of the phrase can be… Read the Rest »
9/30/15 – Defining the Waters of the United States
This past summer the state of our country’s water resources came to a boiling point. As drought pervaded and fires scorched much of the American West, conflict also simmered in Washington D.C. over the Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) redefining of the phrase “waters of the United States” under… Read the Rest »
9/16/15 – A Quick Look at the Gas Tax
This summer I traveled extensively for work, and as a result I found myself shuttling to and from the airport at odd hours of the day (and night). And while each trip was somewhat of a blur, whether it was because of catching a 6:30am flight or arriving back home well past nightfall, there was… Read the Rest »