Greg Smoak on His Book “Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West” (S4 E14)

**Brad Westwood** (0:02)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history produced by the Utah Department of Culture and Community Engagement. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah, accessible to the widest audience. I hope that there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fixed.
I hope this is the place. My guest today is Dr. Gregory Smoak, Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah and Director of the American West Center, also located at the University of Utah.
Greg has been on Speak Your Piece before on April 19th, 2021 This was Season 3, Episode 1 We started that season with this very important episode.
At that time, he and Megan Van Frank were speaking about the Utah Humanities exhibit entitled Think Water Utah, a statewide collaboration and conversation on the history of water that includes Native American use, the history of irrigation, the Central Utah Project, and so much more. Today, we're speaking about Greg's edited volume of essays entitled Western Lands, Western Voices, Essays on Public History in the American West, published by the University of Utah Press in 2021 This gathering of essays was inspired by the 50th anniversary in 2014 of the American West Center, the oldest regional study center in the United States. That's something that we as Utahns ought to be very proud of, is that there are many others that have evolved since, but we're one of the earliest. Is that right?

**Gregory E. Smoak** (1:43)
Absolutely.

**Brad Westwood** (1:45)
In this, there are a collection of 13 essays rooted in the real life experience, specifically, regional public history.
We're going to talk about this idea, what's public history? Welcome, Greg.

**Gregory E. Smoak** (1:59)
I'm glad to be here, Brad. It's great to be back.
That's a question I get from a lot of my colleagues is, what is public history? It's sometimes in a very snarky manner, but not all of them. I think it's getting better. More people are understanding it in academia, what it is.

**Brad Westwood** (2:14)
I think your book does that. I mean, it sort of pulls the whole concept together and gives wonderful examples. Now, I know it's not comprehensive, it's not like a-

**Gregory E. Smoak** (2:26)
No, we couldn't make it comprehensive. There are big gaps here. There are aspects of public history in the American West we just simply didn't cover, depending on the contributors that we had. But I think we did a pretty good job of hitting some of the major highlights and it being guided by the work of the American West Center as well.

**Brad Westwood** (2:45)
And a lot of the personality and people weave through these books and these essays. And I think we'll talk about that today. Now this gathering of essays was inspired by that 50th anniversary of the American West Center.
Let's frame it up. What is the center? What's its purpose? And maybe some of its major projects in pursuit of the history of the American West.

**Gregory E. Smoak** (3:08)
Well, as you mentioned, the center is the oldest regional study center in the country, at least the best of my knowledge.
I attended a meeting of regional study centers hosted by the University of South Carolina back in 2013 And I was pretty surprised to find out that many of those southern study centers...

**Brad Westwood** (3:30)
Big regional identity.

**Gregory E. Smoak** (3:32)
Yeah, big. You think of region in the United States, you think of the south and you think of the west as these counterpoints to this larger national narrative. And this is where you have these distinctive histories. But the southern study centers at places like South Carolina or Ole Miss or Alabama don't go back as far.
Right? So it's a definitely a...
It was a surprise to me. I knew that the center was, you know, I always knew we were the oldest in the western study center, but that kind of surprised me. It could be regional.

**Brad Westwood** (4:03)
Also as well nationally. Yeah.
Well, so what's its beginning? What's its raison d'etre? What's the gig?

**Gregory E. Smoak** (4:10)
That's changed over the years. So, you know, the American West Center was founded in 1964 as the Western History Center within the history department at the University of Utah.
And it had a fairly narrow purpose at first, and it was founded by Russ Mortensen and Greg Crampton. They were the founding directors. And of course, they have a big place in Utah history. Mortensen is a former director of Utah or was a former director of the Utah State Historical Society.