Main Library

As part of the library’s, “The West Where We Are” series, local historian, Tom Blanchard, will explore the role stories play in daily life that reinforce a sense of place and community identity using Idaho and local history as illustrations. Stories can be self-fulfilling prophesies that have unintended consequences, which cast shadows on our future.

Tom Blanchard received his graduate training in history with emphasis on U.S. and Western history at San Francisco State University. Since moving to Idaho in 1977, Blanchard has focused on Idaho history, doing projects and research in Idaho for the past thirty years. He taught U.S. and Idaho and the Pacific Northwest history for the College of Southern Idaho and served on the board of the Idaho Humanities Council. He currently is Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Idaho State Historical Society. In addition, Blanchard served three terms as County Commissioner from Blaine County and five years as a city administrator adding a very contemporary public policy perspective to historical issues which shade our lives.

Come and enjoy five evenings of creative interaction with free classes in November and December, exploring one’s inner poet and also enjoying many of the most spectacular poetry we have encountered. Participants may wish to write and perhaps share their own efforts of expression through this most intense and affective form of writing. The instructor is JoEllen Collins, a lifelong teacher and writer whose passion is communicating her love of poetry with others. Class members are encouraged to bring a few copies of their favorite poems to read with the rest of the class during the first session.

Dates: November 4, 11, 18 & December 2, 9
Time: 6 pm
Location: Large Conference Room

Please call Scott Burton at (208) 806-2621 for more information.

The Saving of Wallowa Lake Lodge

Speakers:  Dr. Diana Sharples (Wilde) and Judy (Hall-Griswald) Goodman

There are hundreds of lodges, inns and hotels in America’s West, but only a handful of historic Great Lodges.

Constructed from the turn of the century through the 1930’s, the list reads like a ‘who’s who’ of people and places from a bygone era.

Wallowa Lake Lodge has long served as a cornerstone in the community of Joseph, Oregon.

When placed on the market, a local grassroots effort formed Lake Wallowa Lodge LLC with the purpose of acquiring the venerable lodge and surrounding lands with the intent on maintaining its cultural and historical integrity. Join us for this remarkable journey to save one of our nations historic institutions!

Doors open at 3:00 p.m. for patrons wishing to participate in The Listening Project (audio postcards of the lodge) or to create a prayer flag in support of the proposed Conservation Easement protecting surrounding old growth forest and river wetland habitats & species.

 

 

As part of our “The West Where We Are” series, don’t miss Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Fenn lecture at The Community Library. Professor Fenn is the Walter and Lucienne Driskill Professor of Western American History at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her field of study is the early American West, focusing on epidemic disease, Native American, and environmental history. Her 2001 book Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82, unearthed the devastating effects of a smallpox epidemic that coursed across the North American continent during the years of the American Revolution.

In 2014, Fenn published Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People, which analyzes Mandan Indian history from 1100 to 1845. Fenn is now at work on an expansive biography of Sakagawea, using her life story to illuminate the wider history of the northern plains and Rockies. Fenn is also the coauthor, with Peter H. Wood, of Natives and Newcomers: The Way We Lived in North Carolina before 1770, a popular history of early North Carolina which appeared in 1983. In April 2015, she was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People.