I suppose I should start this page with a link to my book:
Contributor Works
Now these are works I’ve contributed chapters or articles to over the years. I don’t make a nickel off of these books when they sell, so believe me when I tell you that you won’t just want them for my own contributions.
Edited collections are the scholarly equivalent of what soundtracks and mixtapes used to be back in the 1990s . . . the diverse array of authors and perspectives they bring together make them greater than the sum of their parts.
“‘Nebraska is, at the very least, not a Desert: Land Sales, False Promises, and Real Estate Borderlands on the Great Plains,” p.76- 90.
Unpublished Papers
This is a small selection of some of the more presentable things I’ve written that have not been published for one reason or another. They are rough and largely unedited . . . I don’t know if that makes me punk, or lazy, or both, but here they are. That being said, if you are an editor or a colleague and you think there might be something in one of these, please let me know.
“‘The Widening of the Horizon:’ Gender, the Body, and ‘Women’s Work’ at the Harvard Observatory, 1880 – 1925”
I wrote this seminar paper in Dr. Mary Terrell’s History of the Body seminar at UCLA in 2009. It is dated, but I had a lot of fun writing it (I got to do some of the research at Harvard). If it’s still relevant and/or useful I would not mind returning to this someday.
“The Sight of a Place Affords So Much More Pleasure:”
Robert Vance, the Illustrated Press, and Images of the San Francisco
Vigilance Committee of 1856
This is another seminar paper from 2009. Although I believe that this paper would require more work on my part to rehabilitate, it comes a lot closer to my interests in the American West, the history of popular culture, and histories of extralegal violence. It also addresses another passion of mine, photography, by looking at one of California’s premiere daguerreotypists, Robert Vance. I would love to turn this into an article someday, or perhaps expand this into some kind of book project if I can find additional material to fold into it.
The Horse Separators: Conflict, Crime, and the Making of the Midwest, 1854 – 1917
Last but not least (for now, anyway), here is a copy of my original dissertation prospectus. Of the three papers here, it is both the most polished and the most historiographically rigorous. It is also, as those of you who are familiar with my dissertation or my book would probably guess, nothing at all like what I ended up writing about.
I am posting this here for two reasons. First, I still believe that anti-horse thief societies are a poorly understood and too-little researched phenomenon across the Midwest. Although I wrote an article about them for Wisconsin History back in 2008 and briefly addressed the topic in Never Caught Twice, there just isn’t a whole lot out there. The closest we can get to a book-length study is John Burchill’s Bullets, Badges, and Bridles: Horse Thieves and the Societies that Pursued Them, but it tends to value sensationalism over rigor (not unlike most other “Western history” book outside of the academy).
Once I finished Never Caught Twice, I swore that I was sick to death of writing about horse thieves, and I have had little motivation to return to the subject. However, the second half of this prospectus—a history of anti-horse thief societies in Missouri—is becoming more interesting to me as both I and my parents get older. It would be a good excuse to spend a few months in St. Louis and Columbia, no?
As for the second reason, I am posting this here for anyone out there who is in the middle of a dissertation project and has decided for whatever reason to course-correct and, well, to borrow a western idiom, “change their horse midstream.” If that is you, take a look at the prospectus below, then download my dissertation from ProQuest. Afterwards, you can then take a look at my book project. You’ll note that the paper below only vaguely resembles the book I ultimately wrote and published. And you know what? That’s fine. It all worked out in the end.
Only half of all students beginning a PhD program will end up finishing it. At least those were the numbers back when I was in graduate school and there were still a handful of jobs out there, as well as fewer systemic attacks on college institutions as a whole (and a President who was more sympathetic towards higher education in general). Although you could scratch and claw your way towards finishing a dissertation that you hate or that you realize early on will not work, most people won’t have that level of ferocious and self-flagellating commitment in them (including me). Trust me when I say that you will finish your project more quickly when you love and believe in what you are writing.
And by the way, for all those people who told me some 15 years ago that “The Horse Separators” made them think of someone dismembering a horse, well . . . having forgotten what the prospectus title was until about 15 minutes ago, I have to admit that you’re right. Now I need to go get that image out of my head.
Caveats, Disclaimers, and Notes
If you’re going to read or download these files, please take note of the following:
- I retain the copyright over all of the works shared above, and none of them may be cited or used without my permission. To obtain it, just send me a note on the Contact Page and we will talk.
- All files are read-only.
- I do not consent to the use or inclusion of these works or of any material on my website into any A.I. models, aggregators, algorithms, or whatever.
- I reserve the right to take one or more of these papers down at the drop of a hat, and will do so if they are being edited for formal publication. Which, again, is another reason why you should contact me beforehand if you wish to cite them.