Project MUSE®: Nevada Historical Society Q - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/864
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Nevada Historical Society Q.daily12026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 66 (2023) through current issueLatest Articles: Nevada Historical Society QTWOProject MUSE®Nevada Historical Society Q2992-930X0047-9462Latest articles in Nevada Historical Society Q. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Pink Water Pollution and Rocketdyne: Space Rocket Testing in Northern Nevada
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978429
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In the early 1970s Bob Younghans purchased a sagebrush acreage in Palomino Valley, north of the Reno-Sparks urban complex. The property included a blast-proof “block house.” The cement structure had been constructed in the 1960s to observe rocket engine tests conducted by Rocketdyne, a rocket engine design and production company with government contracts to develop engines for an American moon landing by the end of the decade. Younghans then converted the block house into his home, doing the laborious process of cutting windows into the several-inch-thick concrete walls. When asked by a close friend if he was worried about pollution from the former test site, he reassured his friend that the land was clean and the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/864/image/coversmallPink Water Pollution and Rocketdyne: Space Rocket Testing in Northern Nevada2025-12-20text/htmlen-USPink Water Pollution and Rocketdyne: Space Rocket Testing in Northern Nevada2025-12-202025TWOProject MUSE®760602026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-12-20A Goldrusher’s Calamitous 1849 Detour into the Deserts Southwest of Salt Lake City
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978430
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What follows is a true adventure of a young gold seeker misled by a mountain man’s sketch-map that promised to cut 500 miles off his trip to the California gold fields. It happened in the unexplored, unmapped desert region of what would become south-central Nevada about sixty miles north of Las Vegas. The story is part of William Lorton’s diary of his trip from Illinois to California in 1849. We provide some background and explanation so you can follow his footsteps using Lorton’s own map (included herein) or via Google earth or atlas or four-wheel drive or by walking the tortuous route yourself. This is not a forgiving land.William B. Lorton was twenty-one as he left Salt Lake City on the second leg of his journey
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/864/image/coversmallA Goldrusher’s Calamitous 1849 Detour into the Deserts Southwest of Salt Lake City2025-12-20text/htmlen-USA Goldrusher’s Calamitous 1849 Detour into the Deserts Southwest of Salt Lake City2025-12-202025TWOProject MUSE®711722026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-12-20Word Trapper: A Conversation with Thierry Veyrié Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe Language Program Director McDermitt, Nevada
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978431
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Reprinted from OregonDesertLandTrust.org, published August 2025We don’t often stop to consider the origin and evolution of the words we casually use daily, or how the structure of a sentence might offer clues as to how we respect one another, or how our words shape our perception of the natural world. There are approximately 7,000 different languages in use today. But that doesn’t include all those that have been lost due to the death of native speakers and the failure to preserve these windows into ancient, intricate cultures and histories.The Northern Paiute language, vocabulary and sentence structure reflect a cultural belief predicated on a deep respect for community that includes nature. As linguistic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/864/image/coversmallWord Trapper: A Conversation with Thierry Veyrié Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe Language Program Director McDermitt, Nevada2025-12-20text/htmlen-USWord Trapper: A Conversation with Thierry Veyrié Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe Language Program Director McDermitt, Nevada2025-12-202025TWOProject MUSE®159972026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-12-20Convicting the Mormons: The Mountain Meadows Massacre in American Culture by Janiece Johnson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978432
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Who bears the guilt for committing a horrific atrocity? The perpetrators or the cultural group they belong to? In Convicting the Mormons, Janiece Johnson shows that the trial to convict John D. Lee for the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre was much more than an attempt to punish Lee for his leading role in brutally murdering the men, women, and older children of the Baker-Fancher wagon train. It was part of a larger effort to prove that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and their prophet Brigham Young were guilty of savagery, unmanliness, and religious depravity.In 1857, with high tensions between Latter-day Saints and the federal government during the summer of the Utah War, Lee and Isaac C.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/864/image/coversmallConvicting the Mormons: The Mountain Meadows Massacre in American Culture by Janiece Johnson (review)2025-12-20text/htmlen-USConvicting the Mormons: The Mountain Meadows Massacre in American Culture by Janiece Johnson (review)2025-12-202025TWOProject MUSE®61212026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-12-20Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by Nicola Twilley (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978433
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Nicolla Twilley is a health and food reporter who has published many articles in The New Yorker and is the cohost of a popular podcast called Gastropod. Through an eclectic blend of science, technology, and history, she offers a detailed explanation of the “cold chain,” which is a label to describe the refrigerated preservation, storage, and transportation of food products. In the process Twilley successfully makes the case that refrigeration profoundly changed and continues to change life on the planet.While Twilley draws upon an impressive array of secondary and primary sources, including many interviews with experts on aspects of the “cold chain,” her book often follows the work of Jonathan Rees in his
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/864/image/coversmallFrostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by Nicola Twilley (review)2025-12-20text/htmlen-USFrostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by Nicola Twilley (review)2025-12-202025TWOProject MUSE®53812026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-12-20Nevada’s Hot County Seat Wars by Stanley W. Paher (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978434
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I have a disclosure. I have known Stanley Paher since 1983 when I began working at the Nevada Library and Archives and we are members of the Never Sweats, an informal collective of Nevada historians, writers, and former newspaper reporters that meet once a month and discuss our latest projects. I presented a paper at the Nevada Historical Society about Nevada’s counties, and he was there. I mentioned reading his thesis work on county seat wars, and he told me he always wanted to publish it as a book and wanted me to read the updated manuscript for errors. I did. He added newer information and sources, as well as fifty photographs. Before this book, county seat changes were only five pages in the 2016 edition of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/864/image/coversmallNevada’s Hot County Seat Wars by Stanley W. Paher (review)2025-12-20text/htmlen-USNevada’s Hot County Seat Wars by Stanley W. Paher (review)2025-12-202025TWOProject MUSE®58062026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-12-20Roots and Resilience: California Ranchers in Their Own Words by Susan Edinger Marshall et al (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978435
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This book is a collection of short essays and poems authored by California ranchers. Lead editor Edinger Marshall is an emerita professor of ranchland resources and wildland soils at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. The stories shared in Roots and Resilience are important because ranching in the Golden State is rapidly declining and because of the contemporary lack of knowledge about food sources.Seventeen California ranchers contributed to Roots and Resilience, but despite the number of authors the book is very thin. The diverse places the authors write about stretch from Los Angeles County to Modoc County and from the Central Valley to the Sierra Nevada and Coast Ranges all of which are
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/864/image/coversmallRoots and Resilience: California Ranchers in Their Own Words by Susan Edinger Marshall et al (review)2025-12-20text/htmlen-USRoots and Resilience: California Ranchers in Their Own Words by Susan Edinger Marshall et al (review)2025-12-202025TWOProject MUSE®62972026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-12-20Gambling with Lives: A History of Occupational Health in Greater Las Vegas by Michelle Follette Turk (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978436
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Michelle Follette Turk has authored an important book, one that will help readers understand the complex relationships among workers, employers, and the government in Nevada from the early twentieth century into the current century. In a revised and expanded edition of an earlier volume, Turk, a historian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, advances a clear argument: “For the most part, Nevada consistently failed to protect its workers throughout the century and continuously suffered large-scale workplace disasters” (p.18).Turk offers an intriguing and persuasive approach, one that is topical while being comprehensive. She includes chapters dealing with the hazards facing workers on the San Pedro, Los Angeles
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/864/image/coversmallGambling with Lives: A History of Occupational Health in Greater Las Vegas by Michelle Follette Turk (review)2025-12-20text/htmlen-USGambling with Lives: A History of Occupational Health in Greater Las Vegas by Michelle Follette Turk (review)2025-12-202025TWOProject MUSE®51232026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-12-20Reconsidering Regions in an Era of New Nationalism ed. by Alexander Finkelstein and Anne F. Hyde (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978437
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Regions are key to how most of us understand the past and present of a place. But who gets to decide and why? Historians have had long-standing debates about space, identity, and politics and how all three play out in local, everyday ways as well as on a larger scale. A regional approach to the past can offer organizing principles for telling complex stories, but it also risks flattening historical relationships and the lived experiences of peoples.In their engaging anthology, historians Alexander Finkelstein and Anne Hyde edit a collection of essays on region that trace its porous distinctions in both recent and distant pasts. Both editors make clear that these contributions are not meant to “propose final answers
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/864/image/coversmallReconsidering Regions in an Era of New Nationalism ed. by Alexander Finkelstein and Anne F. Hyde (review)2025-12-20text/htmlen-USReconsidering Regions in an Era of New Nationalism ed. by Alexander Finkelstein and Anne F. Hyde (review)2025-12-202025TWOProject MUSE®74182026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-12-20More Than Sheepherders: The American Basques of Elko County, Nevada by Joxe K. Mallea-Olaetxe (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978438
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Some books seek to rewrite history; others want to remember it before it disappears. More Than Sheepherders: The American Basques of Elko County, Nevada, is rooted in collective memory and the kinds of stories that often disappear with the people who lived them. Joxe K. Mallea-Olaetxe offers an in-depth exploration of the Basques of Elko, blending historical narrative with personal memoir. Written in a folksy, conversational tone, it reads like someone reminiscing with old friends, blurring the lines between memoir and local history.For Mallea-Olaetxe, “Elko County is unquestionably at the heart of mainstream western history” (p. xv). While Elko, and northern Nevada in general, feature prominently in the history of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/864/image/coversmallMore Than Sheepherders: The American Basques of Elko County, Nevada by Joxe K. Mallea-Olaetxe (review)2025-12-20text/htmlen-USMore Than Sheepherders: The American Basques of Elko County, Nevada by Joxe K. Mallea-Olaetxe (review)2025-12-202025TWOProject MUSE®116272026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-12-20