Projects

Butte Parks Book

What does it say about a community when a copper magnate, whose smelters spew smoke smothering the streets of the city, opens a beautifully manicured pleasure garden for the masses? How about when that park closes to expand mining eighty years later? And what about now, when the fix for toxic waste contaminating soils turns out to be a greenbelt first imagined a century ago?

Based on my doctoral dissertation, this books asks who wanted parks in Butte, Montana throughout the last 150 years and why. The beloved Columbia Gardens amusement park was one example in the cultural and physical landscape of this copper mining city of the ways in which land, resources, public health, local politics, and identity sat at the center of decisions about what made the city economically, socially, and environmentally viable. This book uses municipal parks as windows into labor, leisure, and class history in the American West, when recent scholarship has focused on wilderness, large-scale land management, and national parks. City parks have witnessed history at a local and intimate level, where they have served as settings for childhood, adolescence, courtship, adulthood, and family life, across class lines and in more everyday moments than excursions beyond the places that people called home.

Public History Engagement – Missoula, Montana

As Summer 2019 Moon-Randolph Homestead Curation and Interpretation Intern, I studied homesteading, subsistence agriculture, mining, logging, education, conservation, and public lands in Western Montana. I designed interpretive displays for the restored Mining Shed, offered historical tours of the Homestead to the public and for group events, and offered historical education enrichment for Parks and Recreation Youth Homestead Camp.

Supervised by City of Missoula Historic Preservation Office, Division of City Planning, and Conservation Lands Management, Parks & Recreation Department, and North Missoula Community Development Corporation
Presented to Historic Preservation Commission
Presented at 2019 Rocky Mountain Interdisciplinary History Conference, CU Boulder
Contributor to Moon-Randolph site’s ArcGIS Map
Not Even Past Feature Article

Professional Sports, Protest, and Race

My undergraduate research centered on labor and race relations in Major League Baseball. I studied the advent of free agency in cultural context by focusing on Jim Bouton’s outspoken career and memoir Ball Four (1970) and Curt Flood’s lawsuit against Major League Baseball and his memoir I Never Had It Made (1971). Before graduate school, I worked in Major League Baseball as an administrative assistant to in-house counsel.

I have written about player protest for UT History’s public history blog, Not Even Past. I remain interested in issues about labor in entertainment and athletics, international recruitment in American professional sports, gender in the sports facility workplace, youth sports, and federal policy. I was an affiliate of the UT Center for Sports Communication and Media in the Moody College of Communication. I had two articles published in the ‘Made By History’ section of the Washington Post, detailing the history of labor disputes and work stoppages in Major League Baseball, following the December 2021 MLB lockout, and the unionization vote for Minor League Baseball.