I’m an historian of place, parks, and pollution in the American West.
My book project looks at 150 years of how people made their homes and community in Butte, while the industry sustaining the city extracted more and more from the earth beneath it. From transforming a dud claim into the city’s most beloved park in the 1890s, to cleaning up a federal waste site to make a greenbelt in the 2020s, I show how parks have been central to the city’s biggest questions for more than a century.
