A conversation with historian James Tejani about their book

A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth:

The Making of the Port of Los Angeles—and America

(W. W. Norton, 2024)

James Tejani is associate professor of history at California Polytechnic State University. He holds a BAs in history and political science from the University of California, San Diego, and a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. His first book, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles—and America (W. W. Norton, 2024). A decade ago he published two articles from this project, both of which won awards. His Southern California Quarterly article, “Dredging the Future: The Destruction of Coastal Estuaries and the Creation of Metropolitan Los Angeles, 1858-1913,” won the Doyce B. Nunis Jr. Award from the Historical Society of Southern California and the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Western History Association, and his Western Historical Quarterly article, “Harbor Lines: Connecting the Histories of Borderlands and Pacific Imperialism in the Making of the Port of Los Angeles, 1858-1908,” earned an honorable mention for the Alice Hamilton Prize from the American Society for Environmental History.

The Writing Westward Podcast is produced and hosted by Prof. Brenden W. Rensink (www.bwrensink.org) for the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University (reddcenter.byu.edu). Subscribe to the Writing Westward Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, and other podcast distribution apps and platforms. Follow the BYU Redd Center and the Writing Westward Podcast on Facebook or Twitter or get more information @ https://www.writingwestward.org. Theme music by Micah Dahl Anderson @ www.micahdahlanderson.com

A conversation with historian Holly Miowak Guise about her book, Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II (University of Washington Press, Indigenous Confluences Series, 2024).

Dr. Guise is Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Mexico and holds a BA in Native American Studies from Stanford University and an MA and PhD in History from Yale University. She is the author of multiple books chapters and a 2022 article in the WHQ, “Who is Doctor Bauer?: Rematriating a Censored Story on Internment, Wardship, and Sexual Violence in Wartime Alaska, 1941-1944, " which won the Western History Association's Arrell M. Gibson Award for the best essay of the year on the history of Native Americans, Jensen-Miller Award for the best article in the field of women and gender in the North American West, Vicki L. Ruiz Award for best article on race in the North American West, and Oscar O. Winther Award for best article published in the Western Historical Quarterly (2023), and the Western Association of Women Historians Judith Lee Ridge Prize for best article in the field of history (2024). In 2022 she received both an American Council of Learned Societies and Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to aid in her research that culminated in her book. Check out the book's companion website, ww2alaska.com to sample some of the oral history interviews that formed a foundation for her work.

The Writing Westward Podcast is produced and hosted by Prof. Brenden W. Rensink (www.bwrensink.org) for the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University and hosted by. Subscribe to the Writing Westward Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, and other podcast distribution apps and platforms. Follow the BYU Redd Center and the Writing Westward Podcast on Facebook or Twitter or get more information @ https://www.writingwestward.org. Theme music by Micah Dahl Anderson @ www.micahdahlanderson.com

A conversation with historian Brent M. Rogers their book Buffalo Bill and the Mormons (Bison Books / University of Nebraska Press, 2024).

Brent M. Rogers is the Managing Historian of the LDS Church History Department in Salt Lake City. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, an M.A. in Public History from the California State University - Sacramento, and BA in history from San Diego State University. One of his first publications, a 2014 Utah Historical Quarterly article on Mormons and Federal Indian Policy won the WHA's Arrington-Prucha Prize for the Best Article on the History of Religion in the West. His first book, Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory (NU 2017) won the 2018 Best First Book Award from the Mormon History Association, 2018 Francis Armstrong Madsen Best Book Award from the Utah State Historical Society, and the Charles Redd Center Phi Alpha Theta Book Award for the Best Book on the American West. He has authored and edited numerous other pieces, book chapters, and volumes, and is an editor on 6 volumes of the Joseph Smith Papers, many of which have also won awards.

The Writing Westward Podcast is produced and hosted by Prof. Brenden W. Rensink (https://www.bwrensink.org) for the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University (reddcenter.byu.edu). Subscribe to the Writing Westward Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, and other podcast distribution apps and platforms. Follow the BYU Redd Center and the Writing Westward Podcast on Facebook or Twitter or get more information @ https://www.writingwestward.org.

Theme music by Micah Dahl Anderson @ www.micahdahlanderson.com