Hailing from Washington and Arizona but living in Nebraska and Utah for the past two decades, my family has, by necessity, become bona fide road warriors. Coupled with our love of the outdoors and endless western locales to visit, we clock a lot of miles. Our system of snacks, entertainment, and gas-station stops is fine-tuned. We get a thrill after shaving mere minutes off our fastest-known times on repeated routes. The prospect of a fifteen-hour drive causes little concern. We are an efficient, well-oiled, road-tripping machine. This is all well and good, but it necessitates making painful decisions that haunt me as a historian—namely, what of the many roadside historical markers we pass? I am ashamed to confess that we rarely stop. I assuage my guilt by having whoever is in the passenger seat use their phone to dig up and read aloud historical information, but the shame persists. When...
Intermountain Histories and the Promises and Perils of Collaborative Projects: A Public History Report from the Field
BRENDEN W. RENSINK is associate director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and associate professor of history at Brigham Young University. His recent books include the award-winning Native but Foreign (2018) and Essays on American Indian and Mormon History (2019), and The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (2022). As a public historian, Rensink manages and edits Intermountain Histories and is the host and producer of the Writing Westward podcast.
Brenden W. Rensink; Intermountain Histories and the Promises and Perils of Collaborative Projects: A Public History Report from the Field. Utah Historical Quarterly 1 July 2023; 91 (3): 239–243. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/26428652.91.3.06
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