Date: June 27, 2022 (Season 4, Episode 14: 59 minutes & 21 seconds long). For the entire show notes and additional resources for this episode Click Here. Are you interested in other episodes of Speak Your Piece? Click Here. This episode was co-produced by Brad Westwood and Chelsey Zamir, with help (sound engineering and post-production editing) from Jason Powers from the Utah State Library Recording Studio.

Dr. Gregory E. Smoak, longtime director of the American West Center (Univ. of Utah) and associate professor of history, discusses with SYP host Brad Westwood his 2021 book entitled, “Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West,” (The University of Utah Press). Smoak describes the U of U American West Center, and its 50 plus years of public facing history work. Smoak also defines, in this series of essays, what makes up “Public History.”

The essays explore the American West and the academic or formal interpretation of it. The book is a wonderful collection of defensible and peer-reviewed writing on public history. The collection aspires to address the questions most perplexing to Smoak’s history colleagues: what makes public history “public” and what makes a “public historian?”

Sometimes, public history is wrongly conflated with “popular history,” often reducing it to a matter of audience, and associating it with a “lesser” type of history. The essays address questions and ideas via collaboration with many historians’ contributions to the collection. This book, Smoak hopes, will educate the public on what public history really is in hopes of inspiring a positive effect on communities. 

What is the American West Center? Founded in 1964, it’s one of the oldest regional studies centers in the country in the pursuit of western history. It was founded by two professors Russ Mortensen and C. Gregory Crampton as a partnership with the Western History Association to produce a second journal/magazine on the American West. That endeavor only lasted for a couple of years, which left the American West Center (hereafter AWC) needing a solid reason for existing which was filled by the tobacco industry heiress, Doris Duke, who in 1967, gave sizable financial grants to several universities including the AWC, to conduct hundreds of oral histories with Native Americans across the Intermountain West. The AWC became the manager of this massive oral history undertaking, available here. Today, the AWC focuses on oral history projects; provides research assistantship positions to students during their masters and doctoral studies; and conducts contracted research projects related to Native American treaties, environmental, architectural and water rights history. Work completed by the AWC is available to the public via the Marriott Library, Special Collections Department. 

Bio: Dr. Gregory E. Smoak is an associate professor of history at the University of Utah, the director of the American West Center since 2012, and 2021 president of the National Council on Public History. Dr. Smoak focuses on public history, Native American history, and American West history with special interest on water rights. 

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