030 - Janne Lahti - The American West and the World

Writing Westward Podcast

A conversation with Dr. Janne Lahti about his book The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (Routledge: 2019)

Dr. Janne Lahti teaches history at the University of Helsinki, is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow, and the editor of the journal American Studies in Scandinavia. Today we talk about his 2019 book The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). Rather than a project based in new archival work, this text is a useful synthetic overview of a variety of topics and drawing from a robust literature of recent scholarship. By offering a brief birds-eye view of ways in which the American West can be viewed through its transnational connections or comparative perspectives, Lahti asks us to take nearly every conceivable "Western" story we know and consider how it likely fit into global contexts that we often overlook. Viewing Western histories as unfolding in tight connection with global worlds promises new understandings of the past, and perhaps more importantly, better understandings of our present globalized Western lives.

Lahti is also the author or editor of:

• Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World in Film (Routledge, 2020)
• Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands, 1848-1886 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017)
• Wars for Empire: Apaches, the United States, and the Southwest Borderlands (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017)
• Cultural Construction of Empire: The U.S. Army in Arizona and New Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 2012)

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Podcast Notes:

• Host and Producer Brenden W. Rensink is Associate Director of the Redd Center, an Associate Professor of History at BYU, General Editor of the Intermountain Histories project, and author of the 2018 book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands. Links to other publications and projects here: https://linktr.ee/bwrensink
• Support provided by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University.
  
• Podcast Music was written and recorded by local Provo composer by Micah Dahl Anderson.
• Episodes are recorded via Skype or in person and amateurishly engineered and produced by Professor Rensink.
• To submit a book to be considered for a podcast episode, email [email protected].