The American West has long loomed large in the cultural imagination, depicted by artists from poets to filmmakers as a symbol of innovation and limitless possibility.

In his opening lecture of the spring quarter interdisciplinary course The American West, Stanford historian David Kennedy shared some iconic representations of the American West, with a warning.

“One of the things to remember about the artistic or imaginative rendering of this region is that things are not necessarily what they look like, or the way we think they are,” Kennedy said to a packed lecture hall in History Corner. He showed some famous historical images, including landscape paintings by Albert Bierstadt and photographs by Ansel Adams, that portray the American West as a vast, pristine expanse ready to be molded by ambition. “People for centuries have projected certain ideas and constructs onto the character of this region, some of which actually are explanatory of real life and some of which are fantasies of aspiration and ambition that tell us more about ourselves than about the region itself,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy co-teaches The American West with political science Professor Bruce Cain, English Professor Shelley Fishkin, and civil and environmental engineering Professor David Freyberg. Each brings their disciplinary lens to bear on guiding students toward a deeper understanding of the region. While Kennedy looks at the historical forces at play, Cain examines how regional politics, particularly how decisions in the past, continue to influence policy in the present.

Fishkin’s lectures focus on the varied cultural and literary representations of the West in the work of American writers, including Mark Twain and the Chicana feminist scholar, Gloria Anzaldúa. Freyberg explores the unique challenges presented by the region’s landscape, climate, and access to water.

The American West is the flagship course for the Bill Lane Center for the American West, which Kennedy co-founded in 2005 with the historian Richard White to study the region in all its dimensions. The center is named for Bill Lane, ’42, the long-time publisher of Sunset magazine, which helped shape a Western identity and lifestyle in postwar America. The course introduces students to many of the topics the center studies.

Over the past two decades, the Bill Lane Center for the American West has grown into a thriving community of interdisciplinary scholars dedicated to examining the region’s unique history, art, and culture; environmental challenges; and policy and governance. In the years since Cain was appointed director in 2013, the center has expanded its programming to include research internships, conferences, and other forums designed to engage students and scholars on issues related to the American West.

How do you define the American West?

An understanding of the region, Kennedy told students, must include its distinctive cultural, environmental, economic, historical, and political dimensions.

The West, commonly delineated by the 100th meridian, is topographically vast and diverse: Its mountain ranges, arid deserts, fertile valleys, and rugged coastline are some of its most defining natural characteristics. The region’s unique geography and climate are the source of some of its most significant challenges.

As Cain explained, it has led to political conflicts over water scarcity and allocation rights and has fueled the red-blue divide between interior western state economies based on fossil fuel extraction and tourism versus coastal states that lean more heavily on high-tech and service industries.

One of the early surprises for students taking The American West course was the role the federal government has played in shaping the region. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the federal government made considerable investments in infrastructure, such as railroads, turnpikes, canals, dams, and ports, which transformed the American frontier into an economic powerhouse for the entire country.

The federal government remains the region’s largest landowner, making issues surrounding federal versus state authority a key aspect of understanding the West.

Learning by doing

For students who want to deepen their understanding of the American West, the center sponsors a variety of fellowships and internships offered through Cardinal Quarter.

“Our goal is to take students outside of the classroom so they can experience firsthand how complicated the region’s issues are,” Kennedy said. 

In the summer of 2005, Kennedy helped send its first interns to Yellowstone National Park. Since then, the center has placed some 250 students with organizations throughout the West, where students have engaged in issues ranging from conservation to energy, ecology, land use, resource management, and more.

The center also offers immersive learning experiences through Sophomore College (SoCo). Students have traveled to Washington and Montana to learn about tribal resource management, indigenous sovereignty, and cultural heritage preservation. Another year, students traveled the Columbia River to learn about water resource management, which was also a topic of the center’s biennial State of the West Symposia, a convening of scholars and policymakers for a discussion about the economic and fiscal health of the region.

This year, rising sophomores will travel to Hawaii to study climate resilience and energy.

Under Cain’s leadership, the center has expanded its research on western water and energy issues, working collaboratively with the Precourt Institute for Energy and the Woods Institute for the Environment. The Lane Center also helped establish, teach, and fund the Schultz Energy Fellowship program that supports undergraduate and graduate summer internships with the Western region’s top water and energy agencies.

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Addressing the Colorado River crisis

The future of water in the Southwest was top of mind for participants and attendees at the 10th Annual Eccles Family Rural West Conference.

In 2009, the center launched the Rural West initiative to study issues that are often overlooked in wider, regional discussions. Every year, the center sponsors a conference in a different western state to explore the problems facing rural communities, such as deteriorating air quality and obstacles to health care delivery. The initiative produced a collection of essays, Bridging the Distance: Common Issues of the Rural West (University of Utah Press, 2015), edited by the historian David Danbom.

The center’s ArtsWest program has helped to surface underrepresented histories in the region, including the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project led by Fishkin and historian Gordon Chang. The multi-year effort documented the lives of the thousands of Chinese migrants who built the First Transcontinental Railroad between 1865 and 1869, and the devastating human cost of building the American frontier. The center has also sponsored programs on such topics as “Women Who Transformed Art in the West” and “Art and Culture on the US-Mexico Border,” and runs regular Western history seminars.

Most recently, the Bill Lane Center partnered with Stanford Libraries to acquire the California Historical Society’s archives – one of the largest collections of California and Western history. The collection is currently being digitized to ensure future generations of scholars and students have access to primary sources that illuminate the many facets of the American West.

Starting Sept. 1, Cain will be stepping down and Stanford historian Zephyr Frank will become the center’s next faculty director.