Please join us for the next History Workshop featuring Marsha Weisiger:

“Danger River: Narrating Adventure Down the Great River of the Southwest”

Tuesday, February 12, 2019
3:30–5:00 p.m.
375 McKenzie Hall

Danger River explores the ways that men and women experienced adventure down the Green and Colorado Rivers, from John Wesley Powell’s pioneering trip through unmapped territory in through Edward Abbey’s trip in for Playboy magazine roughly a century later. Drawing on the journals and stories written by more than 150 men and women who boated these rivers between 1869 and 1977, this paper explores how adventure narratives shaped the ways in which subsequent adventurers experienced the river and imagined themselves as pioneers in a landscape they claimed as their own. These adventurers structured stories that pitted the landscape as a formidable opponent in a heroic struggle for survival. This study also examines these adventures through the lens of gender and tourism studies.

Marsha Weisiger is an associate professor with the University of Oregon Department of History and the Julie and Rocky Dixon Chair of Western History. Her work focuses on conservation policy and environmental and social justice in an effort to create usable histories that foster more sustainable places. Her most recent book, Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country (University of Washington Press) is now available in paperback.