Dr. Laura J. Arata is a Public Historian who specializes in the North American West with an emphasis on race, gender and ethnicity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She will present the Eiteljorg’s Gund Lecture in Western Art on her book, Race and the Wild West: Sarah Bickford, the Montana Vigilantes, and the Tourism of Decline, 1870-1930. Following the presentation, Dr. Arata will be providing a book signing for attendees.

Cash bar and light hors d’oeuvres. One drink ticket is included with purchase.

About Race and the Wild West:

Winner of the Western Writers of America “SPUR Award” and the Western Association of Women Historians “Gita Chaudhuri Prize!”

Born a slave in eastern Tennessee, Sarah Blair Bickford (1852–1931) made her way while still a teenager to Montana Territory, where she settled in the mining boomtown of Virginia City. Race and the Wild West is the first full-length biography of this remarkable woman, whose life story affords new insight into race and belonging in the American West around the turn of the twentieth century.

Bickford’s story offers a window into the dynamics of race in the rural West. Although her experiences defy easy categorization, what is clear is that her navigation of social norms and racial barriers did not hinge on exceptionalism or tokenism. Instead, she built a life that deserves to be understood on its own terms. Through exhaustive research and nuanced analysis, Laura J. Arata advances our understanding of a woman whose life embodied the contradictory intersections of hope and disappointment that characterized life in the early-twentieth-century American West for brave pioneers of many races.

Dr. Laura J. Arata is a Public Historian who specializes in the North American West, with an emphasis on race, gender and ethnicity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dr. Arata is particularly interested in the popular memory, material culture and heritage tourism of the “Wild West” and the American frontier. As a Public Historian, she works in the areas of historic preservation, museums, and oral history. Prior to joining the faculty at Oklahoma State University, she served as a consulting historian for the Montana Heritage Commission and co-principal investigator for the Hanford History Project. Her current public history projects include consulting work for historic Vernon AME Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and leading an interdisciplinary and community-engaged effort to save Stillwater’s historic Booker T. Washington School. Her first book, Race and the Wild West: Sarah Bickford, the Montana Vigilantes, and the Tourism of Decline, 1870 – 1930, a biography of the nation’s first African American female public utilities owner and heritage-tourism entrepreneur Sarah Bickford, won the 2021 Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best First Book and the 2021 Western Association of Women’s Historians Gita Chaudhuri Prize.

Sponsored by Buckingham Foundation