front cover of A Scientific Peak
A Scientific Peak
How Boulder Became a World Center for Space and Atmospheric Science
Joseph P. Bassi
American Meteorological Society, 2015
Scroll through a list of the latest incredible scientific discoveries and you might find an unexpected commonality—Boulder, Colorado. Once a Wild West city tucked where the Rocky Mountains meet the Great Plains, it is now home to some of the biggest names in science. Research centers, including the National Center for Atmospheric Research, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, are based there, while IBM, Lockheed Martin, and Ball Aerospace would come to reside alongside a dynamic start-up community.

A Scientific Peak chronicles Boulder’s meteoric rise to eventually become “America’s Smartest City” and a leader in space and atmospheric sciences. In just two decades following World War II, a tenacious group of researchers, supported by groups from local citizenry to the State of Colorado, managed to convince the US government and some of the world’s scientific pioneers to make Boulder a center of the new space age. Joseph P. Bassi introduces us to the characters, from citizens to scientists, and the mix of politics, passion, and sheer luck at the start of Boulder’s transformation from “Scientific Siberia” to the research mecca it is today.
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front cover of Season of Terror
Season of Terror
The Espinosas in Central Colorado, March–October 1863
Charles F. Price
University Press of Colorado, 2013
Season of Terror is the first book-length treatment of the little-known true story of the Espinosas—serial murderers with a mission to kill every Anglo in Civil War–era Colorado Territory—and the men who brought them down.

For eight months during the spring and fall of 1863, brothers Felipe Nerio and José Vivián Espinosa and their young nephew, José Vincente, New Mexico–born Hispanos, killed and mutilated an estimated thirty-two victims before their rampage came to a bloody end. Their motives were obscure, although they were members of the Penitentes, a lay Catholic brotherhood devoted to self-torture in emulation of the sufferings of Christ, and some suppose they believed themselves inspired by the Virgin Mary to commit their slaughters.

Until now, the story of their rampage has been recounted as lurid melodrama or ignored by academic historians. Featuring a fascinating array of frontier characters, Season of Terror exposes this neglected truth about Colorado’s past and examines the ethnic, religious, political, military, and moral complexity of the controversy that began as a regional incident but eventually demanded the attention of President Lincoln.
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front cover of Sedentism and Mobility in a Social Landscape
Sedentism and Mobility in a Social Landscape
Mesa Verde and Beyond
Mark D. Varien
University of Arizona Press, 1999
Research on hunting and gathering peoples has given anthropologists a long-standing conceptual framework of sedentism and mobility based on seasonality and ecological constraints. This work challenges that position by arguing that mobility is a socially negotiated activity and that neither mobility nor sedentism can be understood outside of its social context. Drawing on research in the Mesa Verde region that focuses on communities and households, Mark Varien expands the social, spatial, and temporal scales of archaeological analysis to propose a new model for population movement. Rather than viewing sedentism and mobility as opposing concepts, he demonstrates that they were separate strategies that were simultaneously employed. Households moved relatively frequently--every one or two generations--but communities persisted in the same location for much longer. Varien shows that individuals and households negotiated their movements in a social landscape structured by these permanent communities. Varien's research clearly demonstrates the need to view agriculturalists from a perspective that differs from the hunter-gatherer model. This innovative study shows why current explanations for site abandonment cannot by themselves account for residential mobility and offers valuable insights into the archaeology of small-scale agriculture.
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front cover of Seeking The Center Place
Seeking The Center Place
Archaeology and Ancient Communities in the Mesa Verde Region
Edited by Mark D. Varien and Richard H. Wilshusen
University of Utah Press, 2016

The continuing work of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center has focused on community life in the northern Southwest during the Great Pueblo period (AD 1150– 1300). Researchers have been able to demonstrate that during the last Puebloan occupation of the area the majority of the population lived in dispersed communities and large villages of the Great Sage Plain, rather than at nearby Mesa Verde. The work at Sand Canyon Pueblo and more than sixty other large contemporary pueblos has examined reasons for population aggregation and why this strategy was ultimately forsaken in favor of a migration south of the San Juan River, leaving the area depopulated by 1290.

Contributors to this volume, many of whom are distinguished southwestern researchers, draw from a common database derived from extensive investigations at the 530-room Sand Canyon Pueblo, intensive test excavations at thirteen small sites and four large villages, a twenty-five square kilometer full-coverage survey, and an inventory of all known villages in the region. Topics include the context within which people moved into villages, how they dealt with climatic changes and increasing social conflict, and how they became increasingly isolated from the rest of the Southwest.

Seeking the Center Place is the most detailed view we have ever had of the last Pueblo communities in the Mesa Verde region and will provide a better understanding of the factors that precipitated the migration of thousands of people.

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front cover of Silver Saga
Silver Saga
The Story of Caribou, Colorado, Revised Edition
Duane A. Smith
University Press of Colorado, 2002
Revised and updated, Duane A. Smith's classic study of this important silver mining town is back in print.
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front cover of Sites of Insight
Sites of Insight
A Guide to Colorado Sacred Places
James Lough
University Press of Colorado, 2003
Co-Winner of the 2004 Colorado Endowment for the Humanities Publication Prize. In these eighteen illuminating essays, some of Colorado's most accomplished novelists, essayists, and poets write in intimate detail about their most poignant experiences in the Colorado wilderness. Readers are given access - both physically and spiritually - to settings that inspire reverence for and contemplation about one's relationship to the land. From above tree line in the Rawah Mountains down into the broad San Luis Valley, from the Western Slope to the high plains in the east, the reader is taken on a vivid journey through a rich assortment of Colorado's awe-inspiring landscapes. Essays by Tom Noel, Fred Baca, Kristen Iversen, and Reyes Garcia are historical in makeup, while those by Sangeeta Reddy, Merrill Gilfillan, and Amy England feature engaging spiritual and philosophical explorations, even epiphanies. Reg Saner and Nick Sutcliffe share experiences of pitting themselves against nature. And in the tradition of Thoreau, John Muir, and Annie Dillard, all of these essayists explore the intense and vibrant relationships people have with the wilderness. Sites of Insight belongs on the bookshelves of tourists, outdoor enthusiasts, and Coloradoans - both longtime residents and newcomers - who seek to apprehend something in nature that is larger than themselves.
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front cover of Spirit Lands of the Eagle and Bear
Spirit Lands of the Eagle and Bear
Numic Archaeology and Ethnohistory in the Rocky Mountains and Borderlands
Robert H. Brunswig
University Press of Colorado, 2020
Spirit Lands of the Eagle and Bear explores advances in the prehistory and early history of Numic hunter-gatherers in the Rocky Mountain West through the presentation and analysis of archaeological and historic research on the period from the earliest established presence in the Rockies and its borderlands more than a thousand years ago to the forced removal of Ute, Shoshone, and other tribes to reservations in the mid-nineteenth century.
 
New research into Numic archaeology, ethnohistory, and ethnography is significantly changing the understanding of migratory patterns, cultural interactions, chronology, and shared cultural-religious practices of regionally defined Numic branches and non-Numic populations of the American West. Contributors examine case studies of Ute and Shoshone material culture (ceramics, lithics, features and structures, trade and seasonal migration), chronology (dendrochronology, radiocarbon dating, thermoluminescence), and subsistence systems (hunting camps, game drives, faunal and botanical evidence of food sources). They also delineate different hunter-gatherer “ethnic groups” who co-occupied or interacted within one another’s territories through trade, raiding, or seasonal subsistence migrations, such as the Late Fremont/Ute and the Shoshone or the early Navajo/Ute and the Shoshone.
 
With a strong emphasis on diverse cases and new and original archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic lines of evidence, Spirit Lands of the Eagle and Bear interweaves anthropological theory and innovative applications of leading-edge scientific methodologies and technologies. The book presents a cross-section of field, laboratory, and ethnohistoric studies—including indigenous consultation—that explore past, recent, and ongoing developments in Numic cultural history and prehistory. It will be of interest to scholars of Southwestern archaeology, as well as private and government cultural resource specialists and museum staff.
 
Contributors:
Richard Adams, John Cater, Christine Chady, David Diggs, Rand Greubel, John Ives, Byron Loosle, Curtis Martin, Sally McBeth, Lindsay Montgomery, Bryon Schroeder, Matthew Stirn
 
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front cover of State of Change
State of Change
Colorado Politics in the Twenty-first Century
Courtenay W. Daum
University Press of Colorado, 2011
Colorado has recently been at the center of major shifts in American politics. Indeed, over the last several decades the political landscape has altered dramatically on both the state and national levels. State of Change traces the political and demographic factors that have transformed Colorado, looking beyond the major shift in the dominant political party from Republican to Democratic to greater long-term implications.

The increased use of direct democracy has resulted in the adoption of term limits, major reconstruction of fiscal policy, and many other changes in both statutory and constitutional law. Individual chapters address these changes within a range of contexts--electoral, political, partisan, and institutional--as well as their ramifications. Contributors also address the possible impacts of these changes on the state in the future, concluding that the current state of affairs is fated to be short-lived.

State of Change is the most up-to-date book on Colorado politics available and will be of value to undergraduate- and graduate-level students, academics, historians, and anyone involved with or interested in Colorado politics.

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front cover of Strangers to the Law
Strangers to the Law
Gay People on Trial
Lisa Keen and Suzanne B. Goldberg
University of Michigan Press, 2000
In 1992, the voters of Colorado passed a ballot initiative amending the state constitution to prevent the state or any local government from adopting any law or policy that protected a person with a homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual orientation from discrimination. This amendment was immediately challenged in the courts as a denial of equal protection of the laws under the United States Constitution. This litigation ultimately led to a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court invalidating the Colorado ballot initiative. Suzanne Goldberg, an attorney involved in the case from the beginning on behalf of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Lisa Keen, a journalist who covered the initiative campaign and litigation, tell the story of this case, providing an inside view of this complex and important litigation.
Starting with the background of the initiative, the authors tell us about the debates over strategy, the court proceedings, and the impact of each stage of the litigation on the parties involved. The authors explore the meaning of legal protection for gay people and the arguments for and against the Colorado initiative.
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of civil rights protections for gay people and the evolution of what it means to be gay in contemporary American society and politics. In addition, it is a rich story well told, and will be of interest to the general reader and scholars working on issues of civil rights, majority-minority relations, and the meaning of equal rights in a democratic society.
Suzanne Goldberg is an attorney with the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. Lisa Keen is Senior Editor at the Washington Blade newspaper.
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