Main Library

August 20, 2019

Watch the Recording

In conjunction with The Community Library’s Center for Regional History and its “West Where We Are” initiative, please join Pulitzer Prize winner Dr. David Kennedy, Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, for his talk, “How the West Was Won, and What It Has to Lose.”

David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus, at Stanford University. His teaching has included courses in the history of the twentieth-century United States, American political and social thought, American foreign policy, national security strategies, American literature, and the comparative development of democracy in Europe and America.

Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Kennedy’s scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history, and for its attention to the concept of the American national character. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women’s history. Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980) used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999) recounts the history of the American people in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II, and was awarded the Pulitzer and Francis Parkman Prizes in 2000. With Thomas A. Bailey and Lizabeth Cohen, Kennedy is also the co-author of a textbook in American history, The American Pageant, now in its sixteenth edition. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, and other publications and media outlets.

Join Western Watersheds Project for a free, public screening of Montana filmmaker Jamie Drysdale’s documentary film, Lethal Control.

The film takes an up close and personal look at the impacts of lethal predator control focusing on the use by the federal government of M-44 cyanide ejector devices. M-44s are currently used by the federal government on both public and private land in 14 states, including Montana.  These “cyanide bombs” have caused serious injuries to unsuspecting people and the deaths of beloved family pets, and other non-target animals.

The film screening will be accompanied by a panel discussion led by Drysdale, WWP’s Executive Director Erik Molvar, Brooks Fahy of Predator Defense, and members of the Mansfield family, whose child and dog were sprayed by cyanide from an M-44 set by Wildlife Services outside Pocatello in 2017.

The film was Drysdale’s final project while getting his Masters of Environmental Journalism from the University of Montana. The documentary, slated to air on Montana PBS, provides penetrating insights into the costs and consequences of USDA Wildlife Services’ use of M-44 ‘cyanide bombs’ to kill native predators at the behest of the livestock industry.

Drysdale traveled to Washington, D.C., to present the documentary at a congressionally-sponsored screening on Capitol Hill organized by Predator Defense and the International Fund for Animal Welfare on April 2nd of this year. The film was introduced by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) who is sponsoring federal legislation to make the use of M-44s — by federal agencies or anyone else — a criminal offense nationwide.

As part of the Regional History Museum’s exhibit Who Writes History:  Frontier Voice, Native Realities, as well as in conjunction with the Sun Valley Center for the Arts Big Idea project, Unraveling: Reimagining the Colonization in the Americas, join The Community Library for this special program.  Shoshone Nation Chairman, Darren Parry, will give a talk about the Bear River Massacre and his efforts to build an interpretive center on the site of this  historical, yet not often talked about or understood, event in American History.

Darren will also be meeting with classes at both Wood River High School and The Sage School prior to his talk at the Library.