The Bridge to A Land Apart

How does the Southwest connect to the nation? A Land Apart traces how indigenous peoples, Hispanics, Mexicans, and Anglos negotiated tourism, the New Deal, the nuclear age, and water scarcity in New Mexico and Arizona. In this talk, Historian Flannery Burke charts the challenges and rewards of bringing the Southwest into the national fold.

Flannery Burke is an associate professor in the Department of History at Saint Louis University. She is the author of From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s as well as several articles in the history of the American West, environmental history, and women’s history. She is an advocate for the field of history teaching and learning, serves on the board of the Missouri Council for History Education, and spent a year as a Fulbright Roving Scholar in Norway.

Flannery grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and can trace her ancestry to Spanish colonists who arrived in the area in the early seventeenth century. She attended the United World College of the American West in Montezuma, NM and then left the Southwest to attend college and graduate school. She has been homesick ever since. Her upbringing drew her attention to the racial politics of an indigenous Southwest colonized by first the Spanish and then the United States and the legacy of that colonization in the twentieth century. These themes appear in her most recent book, A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century.