[Sci-tech-public] MIT Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History, April 6, 2007

[Margo Collett]

MIT Seminar on Environmental
and Agricultural History

Patricia Limerick
Professor of History, University of Colorado
“How the “Real West” Became – and Stayed – the 
Rural West: Literature, Open Spaces, and the Eclipse of the City”

The Jeffersonian Agrarian Dream lives in multiple 
regions, yet the American West seems to live with 
the most culturally reinforced, cemented, and 
glued idea that the "Real West" is rural, and the 
true Westerner is a cowboy or (less likely) a 
plucky Plains farmer.  Even as the region has led 
the nation in measures of urbanization and 
suburbanization, and even as many rural Western 
economic enterprises have declined or become very 
closely tied to the recreational enthusiasms of 
city-and-suburb-dwellers, the rural image of the 
"Real West" holds its ground. In much of our work 
in "applied history" at the University of 
Colorado's Center of the American West, we are in 
constant contact with this habit of mind, 
watching while a romanticized and 
over-generalized idea of Western rurality blocks 
the road to a realistic reckoning with both urban 
and rural dilemmas (not to mention suburban and 
exurban challenges).  Patricia Nelson Limerick 
will appraise and analyze the origins of and the 
powers of persistence of this long-lasting 
association of the West with the rural.

Friday, April 6, 2007
2:30 to 4:30 pm
Building E51 Room 095

Sponsored by MIT’s History Faculty and the 
Program in Science, Technology, and Society
For more information or to be put on the mailing 
list, please contact Margo Collett at <mailto:mcollet at mit.edu>mcollett at mit.edu
Free and open to the public.  For location visit http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg
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