"Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers", presented by Amy Kohout, associate professor of history, Colorado College. Faculty TUNK to follow. This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History, Museum Studies, and CORE Sciences.

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.