Center for the Study of the North American West

Our Mission

The Bill Lane Center for the West is dedicated to advancing scholarly and public understanding of the past, present, and future of western North America. The Center supports research, teaching, and reporting about western land and life in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Center News

Walk the Farm 2008: Stanford Waterways, April 26, 2008
Faculty and Researchers Evaluate Water Conservation on Stanford Land
On Saturday, April 26, 2008, Professors David Kennedy and Richard White of the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West led an intrepid group of 20 Stanford faculty, researchers, and students on a walk covering more than 20 miles of Stanford lands examining issues of water conservation and water resource management. Complete article

Q: What measures more than 336 by 208 feet but has one of the smallest “footprints” on campus?
A: The Bill Lane Center’s new home - The Jerry Yang & Akiko Yamazaki Environment & Energy (“Y2E2”) Building!
Here's why!
Directions

Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West Receives
$500,000 Endowment Gift from George and Mary Lou Shott

Faculty News
Bill Lane Center Co-Director David M. Kennedy
How the West Has Won - Can the West Lead Us to a Better Place?
An engine of change for 140 years, the region has more influence than ever. Its direction is important to all of us.
May/June Stanford Magazine
From the evergreen forests of the Pacific Northwest to the spires of the Rockies and the majesty of Monument Valley, the West has long been a land of legends. The region has bred countless fables, songs and stories. Yet the reality of the 21st-century West may well outshine even its own extravagant mythology.
Few of those legends are more fabulous than the saga of the Golden Spike. For six scandal-plagued years, crews of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads, lavishly subsidized by government loans and land grants, pick-axed and sledgehammered their way toward each other across mountain and prairie. On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah, they linked up at last to create the continent's first coast-to-coast rail line.

That morning a Central Pacific crew lowered onto the crusty desert soil the road's last tie, hewed from a California laurel logged off the shoulder of Mount Tamalpais and polished to a mirror finish by a San Francisco billiard-table maker. While a crowd of dignitaries, laborers and high-spirited spectators looked on, another Central Pacific crew, all Chinese, laid a section of rail across one end of the tie; an all-Irish Union Pacific work gang did the same on the other. The gleaming timber's predrilled holes were ready to receive not one but several ceremonial spikes. Among them was a 14-ounce fabrication of pure California gold, on which “The Last Spike” was elegantly inscribed—the very spike that has long been so richly celebrated in Stanford lore, and a replica of which can be viewed at the University's Cantor Arts Center.

Shortly after noon, Union Pacific locomotive No. 119 and the Central Pacific's No. 60, the Jupiter, chugged to within a few hand spans of each other. Central Pacific chieftain Leland Stanford stepped between the cowcatchers. The Golden Spike was gently inserted into its prepared hole. Stanford gingerly tapped it with a silver-plated maul... Complete article

Bill Lane Center Co-Director Richard White
Picture This: Spatial History Lab Opens New Windows on the Past
Stanford Magazine, Nov/Dec 2007 - Article by Ted Boscia, MA ’07
HISTORIAN RICHARD WHITE always cringed at the standard geographer’s lament that he and his colleagues approach history as if it occurred on the head of a pin. Now he’s trying to do something about it. Behind a $1.6 million award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, last summer White launched a spatial history lab at Stanford—a place to mash up centuries-old data and sophisticated, web-based mapping and animation technologies. Complete article
Explore the Spatial History Project
Blazing a New Trail for Nature Nature April 2008
Spatial History Project's Associate Director Jon Christensen reviews Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement by Neil M. Maher
Could the army of green workers who transformed the US landscape inspire today's ecological revolution? Imagine a government agency that transforms people's relationship with nature, creates millions of jobs and helps pull a nation out of an economic nadir. While political pundits on the left and right nit-pick, citizens embrace the agency's programme and forge a new constituency and political consensus that lasts for generations. The agency's work profoundly changes the physical landscape — parks, forests, farm fields, trails and roads — in ways that continue to remind people of the benefits of caring for nature within their communities. Such an agency existed, 70 years ago during the Great Depression in the United States. It lasted for less than a decade..Complete article

Reading and Resources

The Spatial History Project at Stanford is a part of the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West.
It is made possible by the generous funding of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project brings together scholars working on projects at the intersection of geography and history using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in their research. While enthusiastic about GIS, which offers a common framework for this research, the Spatial History Project is gearing up to move beyond GIS, to create tools to harvest useful information from large heterogeneous datasets of maps, images, and texts, and create dynamic, interactive digital visualizations for analyzing and representing change over space and time. The project involves three principal research projects directed by history professors Richard White and Zephyr Frank and PhD candidate Jon Christensen.
To visit The Spatial History Project , click the logo.
Recently in the News: Jon Christensen's Op-Ed "Who Moved My Glacier?" The New York Times December 23, 2007
"Spatial History Lab Opens New Windows on the Past" Stanford Report, Nov/Dec 2007

A Curricular Website for High School Teachers. The Center is pleased to present an online high-school curriculum committed to expanding and enriching students’ perceptions of the West. To visit Exploring the West , click the logo.

History Now: The American West
“The present American West is a creation of history rather than geography,” writes Center Co-Director Richard White in the latest edition of History Now, a quarterly journal published by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. “There has never been a single West; American Wests come and go.” Read the full article, and other essays by some of North America’s leading scholars of the West, by clicking here.

Conservation Now Outpaces Development in the West
Land trusts are now protecting more land than gets developed each year across the western United States, according to a new census by the Land Trust Alliance. But conservation is doing much better in some states than others. Jon Christensen analyzes the data and provides links to the sources and news accounts. Click here to read.

The Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West is dedicated to promoting understanding of the North American West's distinctive regional identity and enriching its social, economic, environmental, political, and cultural vitality.
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