News and Notes

In Memoriam

In February 2015 the Nebraska history community lost an invaluable member with the sudden death of noted western military historian Thomas R. Buecker. Nebraska native Buecker enjoyed a long career with the Nebraska State Historical Society most prominently serving as the curator of the Fort Robinson Museum in northwest Nebraska for more than twenty-five years. A prolific author, he published several articles and books on western military history and completed a book on the history of the Red Cloud Agency near Fort Robinson just before his death. It will be published by the Nebraska State Historical Society Press before 2017. He will be deeply missed.

Frederick C. Luebke Award

We are pleased to announce that the 2014 Frederick C. Luebke Award for outstanding regional scholarship has been awarded to Jay M. Price and Sue Abdinnour for their essay “Family Ethnic Entrepreneurship, and the Lebanese of Kansas” (Summer 2013, Vol. 33, No. 3). The prize, named for the founder of the journal, is given each year for the best article published in the Great Plains Quarterly. The Frederick C. Luebke Award includes a cash stipend of $250.00. Jay M. Price is the chair of the Public History Program at Wichita State University, and Sue Abdinnour is Omer Professor and Kansas Faculty of Distinction in the Barton School of Business at Wichita State University.

2015 Willa Cather Spring Conference

The sixtieth annual Willa Cather Spring Conference will be held in Red Cloud, Nebraska, June 5-7, 2015. This year’s conference is taking place in conjunction with the Fifteenth International Cather Seminar, themed: “Fragments of Desire: Cather and the Arts.” Highlights will include papers and panel discussions; guided town and country tours; an evening picnic on the prairie; a screening of the Nebraska Educational Telecommunications documentary Yours, Willa Cather, ceremonial groundbreaking for the National Willa Cather Center; and the premiere of Larksong, a theatrical retelling of The Song of the Lark. The keynote speaker will be Richard Norton Smith, director of the Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museums, as well as founding director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Additional information is available at www.willacather.org/conferences/spring-conference.

2015 Western History Association Conference

The Fifty-Fifth Annual Conference of the Western History Association will be held October 21-24, 2015, in Portland, Oregon. The theme of the 2015 conference is Thresholds, Walls, and Bridges. The conference will address questions related to what has divided and connected the many peoples who have traversed, sojourned, and settled the North American West and what might yet link their histories. A generation of new western histories has opened windows in the walls that separated histories of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation. New borderlands histories have mapped selectively porous borders: a fence at the US-Mexico border, a Peace Arch marking the Canada-US boundary. Walls, both physical and metaphorical, have divided the space our histories have explored: domestic and public workspaces; sites of exclusion and containment like reservations and reserves, internment camps, labor camps, barrios, and gated suburbs. Historians are often separated as well: many “new” histories remain isolated in subflelds of western history, and many scholars who research western pasts have not found professional homes in the wha. Histories of community, environment, and culture, of national and social boundaries, have brought us to the thresholds of new syntheses and narratives. Such thresholds can be challenging, even daunting, but they hold enormous possibility for realistically and compassionately connecting divided pasts. Additional information is available at: www.westernhistoryassociation.wildapricot.org/2015-Call-for-Papers.