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Center in the News
April 2008 A great deal of the day's route was on privately held by leaseholders and they graciously shared their love of the ranching and farming life that keeps them close to the land. Rancher George Parker met the hikers on horseback along the trail to talk about managing a herd of cattle. David Murdoch of Glenoaks Equestrian Center, Giselle Turchett of Deer Creek Pastures, Tom Hubbard of Webb Ranch, and Kevin Chambers of Portola Valley Equestrian Facility offered rest stops and insights into the challenges of managing an equestrian facility. Portola Valley Mayor Maryann Moise Derwin and Menlo Park Mayor Andrew Cohen joined the group as they hiked through the hills of Portola Valley. Jasper Ridge Administrative Director Philippe Cohen and Stanford Civil & Environmental Engineering Professor David Freyberg offered unique and extremely valuable guided tours of the restricted Jasper Ridge Biological Reserve and Searsville Dam. Ryan Navratil of the San Francisquito Watershed Council provided ongoing commentary on the environmental factors involved in water use, conservation and management. Stanford Archivist Maggie Kimball shared from her vast store of facts about the important Stanford sites along the way. Tom Zigterman and Marty Laporte of Stanford Utilities were essential guides showing the group historic and current wells, the Fish Ladder, the Cardinal Cogenerator Facility and their impact on the use of water on campus. Ted Tucholski shared the University's current and future plans for irrigating campus. Mark Twain once said, "In the West, whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over." The "2008 Walk the Farm" event provided a peaceful way for people to link their many different perspectives, needs, and plans for using and conserving the water throughout Stanford's Waterways. San Francisco Chronicle Palo Alto Weekly Stanford Daily   
March 2008 Bill Lane Center receives $500,000 Endowment Gift from George and Mary Lou Shott George B. and Mary Lou Shott have made an endowment gift of $500,000 to the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West at Stanford University.
David M. Kennedy, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Co-Director of the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West, expressed gratitude on behalf of the Bill Lane Center and noted the Shotts’ deep connection to life in the western United States: "We appreciate not only George and Mary Lou's generosity, but even more, we value their vote of confidence in the Bill Lane Center and its mission. As native Westerners, they are especially sensitive to the importance of understanding this region, and to Stanford's obligation to be a leading regional citizen.” George was born in northwest Nebraska and raised in Birmingham, Iowa. Mary Lou Shott was born and raised in North Dakota, where her family still owns and operates a farm. The gift is unrestricted, but will be used for the foreseeable future to endow the George and Mary Lou Shott Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Study of the North American West. The Fellowship will support research and teaching by a recent PhD in the social sciences or humanities whose research concerns the western United States, western Canada, or Mexico. "WHO MOVED MY GLACIER?" December 2007 November 2007 Lane Center Co-Director David Kennedy Selected as Australian American Leadership Dialogue Scholar Professor Kennedy delivered a series of lectures entitled “The Emerging Dominance of the American West in the Economy, Culture & Politics of the United States." He will also be the keynote speaker at the West Coast Leadership Dialogue held at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, January 17-18, 2008. Professor Kennedy toured several Australian institutions, making appearances at Melbourne University, the University of Western Australia in Perth, the State Library in Adelaide, University of Technology, Sydney, and Bond University, Gold Coast, to share his insights about the emerging dominance of the West in America’s economy, politics, and culture, and the implications for Australia and Asia.At University of Technology, Sydney, Kennedy made a joint appearance with the Honorable Bob Carr, former Premier of New South Wales (1995-2005) and the inaugural Leadership Dialogue Scholar. During his visit to Australia, Professor Kennedy was interviewed by ABC Radio National, and the tour was covered by Australia’s major daily newspapers, including The Australian and The Age. Kennedy’s tour of Australia was sponsored by Qantas and American Express Business Travel. Please contact Sue Purdy Pelosi for more information. Lane Center Co-Director Richard White 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. He envisions the lab as a way to illuminate new patterns within historical data and generate fresh questions. “We’re talking about something well beyond a fancy map,” White says. “We’re giving people a view of the past they otherwise wouldn’t have. We’ll be able to answer questions we otherwise couldn’t answer.” One afternoon in late August, two of White’s student assistants feed pages of railroad rate tables from the 1880s into an oversized scanner on the top floor of Wallenberg Hall, the site of the new lab. They are trying to stay apace with the boxes of archival material sent in by the California State Archives. For 12 years, White has been working on a history of U.S. railroads. Nearly finished with the book, he’s now augmenting his research with a spatial history treatment. He expects the archival data, once inputted, to render a striking representation of how the reach of U.S. railroads—and what they charged to ship freight—distorted perceptions of time and space among 19th- century Americans. “The railroads made the far near, but they also made the near far. Local farmers were angered and manipulated by the rates put in place by the railroads that often made it more costly to ship things locally. Because of this, people’s lives and businesses were under great control by large corporations.” White offers a simple analogy for his concept of distorted space: “We know that Palo Alto and San Francisco are the same mileage apart at 7 a.m. and 2 p.m. But we also know that the cities are closer together at 2 p.m., when it takes less time to get there.” The Mellon Foundation selected White and three other American professors for its annual Distinguished Achievement Award in December 2006. White doesn’t see a dollar of the prize, all of which goes to Stanford. But, he says, “I get to say how it’s spent. And it’s really hard for a historian to spend $1.6 million.” Collaborating with White are Zephyr Frank, a professor of Latin American history, and Jon Christensen, a doctoral student and associate director of the spatial history lab.Frank has partnered with researchers in Brazil to reconstruct, block by block, Rio de Janeiro circa 1850. He and his assistants have overlaid a painstakingly detailed map of the city with the locations and demographic information of residents afflicted with yellow fever during that time. They then developed a Flash animation that re-creates the march of the disease through Rio’s neighborhoods better than most written accounts.“This is something you can’t do in books,” Frank says. “The historical reports tell you that the yellow fever spread like a fire or a flood. With these tools, you can see for yourself how it progressed through the city.” At a bank of computers across from Frank, Christensen searches for clues about the gradual disappearance of the Bay checkerspot butterfly, an indigenous California species that’s been threatened since 1987. He uses years of U.S. Geological Survey statistics and charts to create a composite map that shows how urbanization, shifting soil compositions, and other changes in the butterfly’s habitat might have contributed to its decline during the last century. Christensen has an emerging theory that earlier conservation efforts failed and actually may have precipitated the species’ downfall. White and his colleagues know they’ll face an audience of skeptics with their unusual presentation of history—even within their own department. But they’re also convinced their efforts will catch on. “I’ve been writing narrative history for a long time, but I want to move beyond that to a history that can be visualized, navigated, re-created and manipulated right before our eyes,” White says. “If we succeed in this, we’ll be utterly forgotten. It’ll just be picked up and spread.” Explore the Spatial History ProjectFall 2007 KQED Radio Quest Series Special Report: Climate Change and California Water Fall 2007 August 2007 RISSER PRIZE AWARDED to LA Times journalist Judy Pasternak April 2007 WALKING THE FARM Inter-Action: HOW THE NORTH AMERICAN WEST IS ONE |