Results by title

Examines how settler colonial and sexist infrastructures and narratives order a resource boom

Over the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled U.S. energy landscapes and imaginaries. Settling the Boom studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms.

This collection reveals the results of sustained research in Williston, North Dakota, the epicenter of the “Bakken Boom.” While the boom brought a rapid influx of capital and workers, the book questions simple timelines of before and after. Instead, Settling the Boom demonstrates how the unsettling forces of an oil play resolve through normative narratives and material and affective infrastructures that support settler colonialism’s violent extension and its gendered orders of time and space. Considering a wide range of evidence, from urban and regional policy, interviews with city officials, media, photography, and film, these essays analyze the ongoing material, aesthetic, and narrative ways of life and land in the Bakken.

Contributors: Morgan Adamson, Macalester College; Kai Bosworth, Virginia Commonwealth U; Thomas S. Davis, Ohio State U; Jessica Lehman, Durham U.

The Role of Indigenous People in the Founding of America's First Major Border Towns
In 1811, while escorting members of John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company up the Columbia River, their Chinookan guide refused to advance beyond a particular point that marked a boundary between his people and another indigenous group. Long before European contact, Native Americans created and maintained recognized borders, ranging from family hunting and fishing properties to larger tribal territories to vast river valley regions. Within the confines of these respective borders, the native population often established permanent settlements that acted as the venues for the major political, economic, and social activities that took place in virtually every part of precolonial North America. It was the location of these native settlements that played a major role in the establishment of the first European, and later, American frontier towns.
In Settling the Frontier: Urban Development in America’s Borderlands, 1600–1830, historian Joseph P. Alessi examines how the Pecos, Mohawk, Ohioan, and Chinook tribal communities aided Europeans and Americans in the founding of five of America’s earliest border towns—Santa Fe (New Mexico), Fort Amsterdam (New York City), Fort Orange (Albany, New York), Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), and Fort Astoria (Portland, Oregon). Filling a void in scholarship about the role of Native American communities in  the settlement of North America, Alessi reveals that, although often resistant to European and American progress or abused by it, Indians played an integral role in motivating and assisting Europeans with the establishment of frontier towns. In addition to the location of these towns, the native population was often crucial to the survival of the settlers in unfamiliar and unforgiving environments. As a result, these new towns became the logistical and economic vanguards for even greater development and exploitation of North America. 

A history of courage and collective action inside the most powerful newsrooms in America

In 1971, Susan Smith, a young researcher at Reader’s Digest, dared to imagine herself as an editor. Her ambition was swiftly dismissed by a hiring manager who told her, “Single girls just don’t do well in this job.” Crushed—and then furious—Smith sought out Harriet Rabb, the attorney who had successfully sued Newsweek for sex discrimination just a year earlier. Their meeting helped spark a class-action lawsuit that ultimately united two thousand women at the magazine and became part of a broader revolt inside American newsrooms. Smith’s experience was far from unique. For much of American history, journalism has been rigidly segregated by gender, with women confined to research, clerical work, or the “women’s pages,” while men dominated reporting, editing, and leadership. That system began to crack in the 1970s, as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the women’s liberation movement emboldened newswomen to challenge daily discrimination. Yet this development has remained largely hidden, buried by editors reluctant to document inequities within their own institutions. Settling recovers this lost story.

Tracing class-action sex discrimination lawsuits at some of the most powerful news organizations in the United States—including The Washington Post, the Associated Press, The New York Times, and Time—Ashley Walter draws on oral histories and long-forgotten documents to reconstruct legal battles at eight major outlets. She argues that meaningful change came not from institutional goodwill but from the courage of women who organized, testified, and risked their careers to demand equality. Their victories reshaped journalism itself. As women assumed reporting and editorial roles, they broadened the scope of who counted as newsworthy, covering women as workers, political leaders, and authoritative sources. With this new illumination of women’s full participation in public life, newswomen shifted social norms and helped build women’s power across American society. By recovering these accounts, Settling reveals how newsroom struggles for gender equality transformed both journalism and the nation, offering urgent lessons for our present moment.