William Howard & Hazel Butler Peters Lecture
Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers
Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) traces the ways US soldiers made sense of the landscapes of their service in both the US West and the Philippines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this talk, Professor Kohout will share how an unexpected archive of birds transformed the shape of this project and helped her to use the lived experiences of soldiers to connect places—and wars—often studied separately. Soldiers, she suggests, through their writing, their labor, and all they collected, demonstrate the critical role they played in shaping American ideas about both nature and empire, ideas that persist to the present.
Amy Kohout
Amy Kohout is Associate Professor of History and Co-Chair of the Environmental Studies and Science Program at Colorado College. She works on U.S. cultural and environmental history, and her research and teaching interests include the U.S. West, American empire, museum studies, and the history of natural history. She earned her B.A. in history from Yale University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Cornell University. Amy’s first book, Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers (University of Nebraska, 2023), received two awards from the Western History Association in 2024: the Hal K. Rothman Book Prize, awarded annually for the best book in western environmental history, and the Robert M. Utley Book Prize, awarded annually for the best book on the military history of the frontier and western North America.
Students in the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences gain Experience Points for attending this lecture. Learn more about Experience Points.