Professional organizations such as the WHA, to which I have belonged since 1995, face extraordinary challenges.  Tenure-line positions in history have declined alongside undergraduate majors. The federal executive is prosecuting a campaign against higher education that threatens the research and graduate training that the WHA aims to sustain. Our responses to these challenges must protect the long-term success of the organization. It is essential that we continue to make the WHA inclusive in every way: our definition of western history must be expansive; we must make the WHA welcoming to western historians who work outside of tenure-line positions as professors of teaching or practice, lecturers, independent historians, public historians, archivists, or adjuncts.  Our approach to the uncertainties that current attacks on academic freedom have created must be steadfastness as we defend the mission of researchers, teachers, and public historians.

I have written four books [The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (Cambridge, 2000); Mining California: An Ecological History (Hill and Wang, 2005); Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life (Hill and Wang, 2013); and The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850 (North Carolina, 2025)]; and co-authored, with Jay Turner, a fifth, The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump (Harvard, 2018).  I have advised twenty doctoral dissertations.

Beyond my work as a scholar and teacher, I have long experience with professional historical organizations. Since 1999, I have served on and chaired over a dozen committees for the WHA, PCB-AHA, ASEH, and SHEAR. I chaired the department of history at Temple University for four years (before and after the financial crisis of 2008). As a WHA Council member, I hope that these experiences will assist me in helping the WHA navigate what are likely to be challenging years ahead.

I attended my first WHA in 1997, having traveled 12 hours to St. Paul in an overcrowded minivan. I found the WHA to be full of both creativity and generosity. Presenters were not only connecting topics as seemingly disparate as gender performance and hard rock mining, but well-known senior scholars were also willing to take the time to talk to and advise a first-year graduate student. Since that meeting, I have regarded the WHA as my intellectual home.

I am honored to be nominated for WHA Council. As an Associate Professor at New York University, I teach and write about the links between environmental history, urban history, Indigenous history, and energy history. Outside of the WHA, I usually have to explain the connections. Within it, I rarely need to. Throughout my scholarly career, I have narrated the unexpected and unnoticed connections that have made the 20th century West, whether those connections be the crucial role of coal from Hopi and Diné land in powering Phoenix’s air conditioners or the centrality of Indigenous peoples to western city-building.

Over the past fifteen years, I have held various roles with the WHA. I have served twice on the program committee. I have served on, and chaired, the book prize committees for the Caughey Western History, the Weber, and the Hal K. Rothman Prizes. I currently serve on the committee for the W. Turrentine Jackson Prize. I have also participated both in the Western History Dissertation Workshop and in multiple Graduate Student Lightning Rounds.

On the council, I would seek ways for the WHA to address two pressing crises that face the historical profession. First, institutional reductions in research funding make empirical research financially challenging. Second, the generalized attack on the humanities have increased the precarity of early career scholars. While the WHA cannot solve these crises on its own, I would dedicate my time on the council to thinking creatively about how the WHA can help reclaim higher education and historical scholarship as public goods. In particular, I would work to create more research grants for young scholars and to raise the endowments for additional prizes. In that way, I would seek to reinforce the combination of creativity and generosity that I have found at the WHA over the last 28 years.

I teach in the History Department and School of Environmental Sustainability at Loyola University Chicago.  Since my first year of graduate school, the WHA has been the most important venue for me in the profession, intellectually and professionally. We seem to be in good shape right now, attracting historians diverse in background, intellectual interests, and employment (museums, public history organizations, universities), and offering a welcoming environment.  I would be honored to do my best as a Council member to continue this success.

Most of my scholarship asks questions about the roles of borders, the environment, and regional identity in history.  Major publications are Revolution in Texas:  How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (2003); Bordertown:  The Odyssey of an American Place (Yale University Press, 2008); Escaping the Dark, Gray City:  Fear and Hope in Progressive Era Conservation (2017), and Texas: An American History (2025). I am a member of “Refusing to Forget”, a public history project devoted to commemorating the legacies of the border violence of the 1910s that has received awards from the WHA, AHA, OAH, and NCPH.  Helping to refine the work of other scholars has also been rewarding, and so I’ve done a stint as co-editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and currently co-edit the Journal of Texas History and the Weber Series in New Borderlands History at the University of North Carolina Press.  My past WHA experience includes co-chairing the program committee, serving on the 50th Anniversary Committee, the Nominating Committee, the Bolton-Cutter Committee, and the Autry Prize Committee.  Outside of the WHA, I’ve been a Council member for the Society of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and helped to get the Alliance for Texas History off the ground.

I am honored to be nominated to the WHA council. I attended my first meeting in 1995 as a graduate student and have watched WHA evolve, becoming more welcoming while elevating the quality of its members’ scholarship. WHA service allowed me to be part of some exciting changes. I have served twice on the WHQ editorial board. In addition to the Rothman Prize and Financial Advisory committees, I was elected to and chaired the nominating committee, submitting bylaw amendments to begin online voting. I served on the program committee twice, co-chairing the 2013 meeting and drafting guidelines for future chairs. I also have served on the sponsored session committee for the Coalition for Western Women’s History. WHA previously recognized me with the Award of Merit. These experiences have familiarized me with our governance structure, making me well prepared to serve on the council.

I hold the Travis Chair in American History at the University of Oklahoma. In addition to articles and book chapters, I have published seven books, including Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law and Environmental Change along the Front Range; City Dreams, Country Schemes: Community and Identity in the American West; The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region’s Environmental Histories; and Mapping Nature across the Americas. I am currently writing an environmental and labor history of Napa’s wine industry.

If elected to the council, I will work to advance WHA’s ongoing mission to promote inclusivity and scholarly excellence. Like most professional associations at this moment, WHA faces new challenges. Its leaders must act with maturity, discretion, and, most importantly, respect for diverse opinions. In addition to WHA service, my time as an attorney, as ASEH president, and as an elected member of the AHA nominating committee provides a wealth of experience to draw upon.

As an associate professor of Native history and the history of the American West at Macalester College – and as a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe – I’m honored to have been asked to stand for nomination to the WHA Council.

As a professor, public historian, and children’s book author, I aim to make the work we do within the academy legible for and accessible to the broader public. As a longtime member of the Western History Association, I see this conference – and the work we do outside the conference – as an annual reminder of the critical role we play in shaping these conversations and narratives.

I first became involved in the organization and governance of WHA when I served on the 2021 Program Committee. I’ve also served on and chaired the Nominating Committee, which offered insight into WHA governance structures and how the organization works to support scholars from multiple backgrounds and communities.

I’m in my first year serving on the Michael P. Malone Award committee, and I’ll serve on this committee for another two years. I’m a member of the Ad Hoc Indigenous Advisory Committee, and I’ve served as a mentor in the Indian Scholars Lunch steering committee’s pilot mentorship program, which matched graduate students with Indigenous scholars who have similar research interests to help build more robust networks of Indigenous scholars.

I’d be grateful for the opportunity to continue the work I’ve done in for the WHA on a broader scale. If elected to the WHA Council, I would ensure that WHA stays true to its mission of mutual respect and engaged curiosity, fostering an inclusive environment, and offering a place for historians, scholars, and community members to come together in the spirit of scholarship and collaboration.

Hello, WHA voters! For those of you who don’t know me, my research is at the intersection of Native American and African American history, focusing on the experiences and legacies of the Black and mixed-race people enslaved in the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations—women and men I am descended from.

My first Western History Association conference was Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota in 2016. I had received the Indian Student Conference Scholarship and the Trennert-Iverson Conference Scholarship and I felt so welcomed by the people I met that I’ve only missed a few conferences since.

One of the WHA’s greatest strengths is that its conference program always seems to offer something for everyone, and I’m happy to have taken part in 6 panels and roundtables so far.

I was a member of the planning committee for the 2023 WHA in Los Angeles and after I won the WHA’s Vicki Ruiz Award for best article on race in the North American West in 2021, I served on that award committee for three years.

My first book, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (2021), was also recognized by my WHA peers: it received the WHA’s John C. Ewers Award and the WHA’s W. Turrentine Jackson Book Prize. I’ve Been Here All the While connects Reconstruction-era debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land and frames Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) as an important space for understanding constructions of race, belonging, and national and tribal identity.

I have thrown my hat into the ring for council because I want to be more involved in the scholarly organization I feel closest to, the organization I feel perhaps most represents the dynamic, evolving, and diverse discipline of history.

Gwendolyn R. Lockman holds a PhD and an M.A. in U.S. History from the University of Texas at Austin, and a B.A. in American Studies from Georgetown University. She strives to make history accessible to the general public, students, and academics through a commitment to storytelling, teaching, and rigorous research. She has worked in museums, local historic preservation, classrooms in both public and private institutions, and has written for public and academic audiences in the Washington Post, The Metropole (Urban History Association) and Not Even Past (UT Austin), and at the History Colorado Center. Her book project, Greening a Copper City, details 150 years of mining land re-use for public recreation as a tool for social, economic, and environmental recovery in Butte, Montana.

Gwen currently works as a Senior Exhibition Developer and Historian at the History Colorado Center, the flagship museum of the State of Colorado and a division of the Colorado Department of Higher Education. Among her projects as team lead for exhibition development is History Colorado’s marquee exhibition Moments that Made US: Turning Points in American History, which is a Signature Initiative of the Colorado 150 - America 250 Commission.

Gwen has been a member of the WHA since 2019 and served as the Vice Chair of the Graduate Student Caucus from 2022-2023. Her service to the WHA has included GSC sponsored panels on graduate student labor and on early career development. She is honored to be nominated for election to the WHA Nominating Committee, particularly as an opportunity to represent public historians and museum workers to the body of the organization.

I am honored to be considered for a position on the Nominating Committee. I am a historian with the USDA Forest Service with roots in Western and public history, and am fortunate to be a product of the American West Center at the University of Utah. With a background in multiple modes of historical production, I have developed curricula and taught university classes; managed an oral history program; evaluated properties for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places; surveyed and placed in context far-flung military and forestry installations; and published peer-reviewed work, including forthcoming books with the Forest History Society Press and the University of Nebraska Press. My career is intertwined with and owes much to the WHA. I first attended WHA in Denver in 2012 as a graduate student volunteer at the urging of John Heaton, who lured me with the irresistible promise of free food. Little did I realize in 2012 that WHA would become a professional home for me and that I would spend all year, every year, waiting to attend the conference, professionalize, and see people who by now are old friends. Somehow that 2012 experience turned into years of conference volunteering, taking Council meeting notes, and even becoming involved in a WHA oral history project, along with presenting at several conferences and benefiting from initiatives like the first of the now-popular graduate student archival workshops hosted by Tamsen Hert, Greg Thompson, and other lights of the profession. In short, WHA has given me a great deal, and only recently have I been able to give back a little.

In 2022 I was given the chance to join the Membership Committee, where we worked hard to make the organization more welcoming to graduate students and teachers. In 2024 I was fortunate to join the Program Committee. Selection for the Nominating Committee would allow me to continue working to make the WHA a welcoming and inclusive place where academic and public historians, teachers, community activists and storytellers, and folks whose interest spans the gamut of the historical impulse can meet to advance the field and grow careers and relationships.

Thank you.