2011-2012 C. Ruth and Calvin P. Horn Lecture

The Center for the Southwest announces the 2011-2012 C. Ruth and Calvin P. Horn Lecture in Western History and Culture. Dr. Martha Sandweiss, Professor of History, Princeton University, will present “Lost Tales, Forgotten Women, and the Violence of Everyday Life in the Nineteenth Century West,” on Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 6:00 p.m. in the Student Union Building, Lobo A/B.

Martha A. Sandweiss is professor of history at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in history from Yale University and began her career as a photography curator at the Amon Carter Museum in Ft. Worth, Texas. She later taught American studies and history at Amherst College for twenty years.

The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Beinecke Library at Yale University, Sandweiss is the author or editor of numerous books on American history and photography. Her publications include Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (2009), and Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (2002), winner of the Organization of American Historians' Ray Allen Billington Award for the best book in American frontier history and the William P. Clements Award. Her other works include Laura Gilpin: An Enduring Grace, winner of the George Wittenborn Award for outstanding art book of 1987, and the co-edited volume The Oxford History of the American West (1994), recipient of the Western Heritage Award and the Caughey Western History Association prize for the year's outstanding book in western history.

This event is FREE and open to the public. A reception will follow the lecture

The Center for the Southwest is an institution devoted to the study of the region spanning the vast Mexican territories that became part of the United States by 1853.  The Southwest is a terrain with deep and multiple histories, a complicated and volatile present, and remarkable potential.  This region, comprising the whole of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, and Nevada, and parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming, has for millennia been home to shifting and contentious array of indigenous peoples.  Between 1528 and 1821, it was traversed and claimed, sometimes with vigor, in many places only tenuously, in the name of the Spanish empire in the New World.  Between 1821 and 1848, the newly independent nation of Mexico struggled to retain control of its northern provinces.  U.S.-backed rebels in Texas and California launched successful revolts against Mexico, in anticipation of joining the United States.  The military defeat of Mexico, and a subsequent purchase, put the entire territory in American hands by 1853.  Texas would secede from that country, and for four years fly yet a different flag, but by 1865, Texas was once again U.S. territory.  Not until 1912 were all the lands in the region finally organized and admitted as full-fledged states of the United States.



The Center for the Southwest recognizes this contested, layered past, linked with the larger histories of the Americas and the peoples who have survived, adapted to, and shaped repeated political upheavals.  At the same time, we also recognize that the region has, for nearly a century and a half, belonged to the United States, and now encompasses the most dynamic, fastest growing part of that nation.  We also seek to understand this region in the context of globalizing forces that at once disrupt and reinforce regional differences. 

The Southwest is a place of hybridity and boundary, of border that the Center for the Southwest treats more as zones of contestation and subjects of investigation than self-evident frames.  The Southwest is both a unit worthy of study, and a diverse and fractured place.  We approach this regional always understanding the ways in which the United States developed in tandem, in tension and in interaction with people and places across the Mexican border.  We want to understand not only events, but the material, social, political, economic, and cultural relationships that connect and divide.

The Center for the Southwest seeks:

• To act as a home and clearninghouse for a community of scholars at the University of New Mexico, across department, disciplines and colleges, engaged in research on the region.
• To introduce specialists on the region and their work to each other, and to a broader local, state, and regional public.
• To foster innovative and public-spirited research, and to disseminate that research.
• To sponsor public programs on the history, prehistory, cultural accommodation and resistance, politics, economy, environment and creative energy of the region, and to address the challenges and prospects facing the Southwest.