Stephen Hausmann

(Travel Fellow, 2017-18)

Stephen Hausmann

Travel Fellow

White Water: Race and Environment in Rapid City, 1875-1992

Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University in Philadelphia where he studies the history of the American West, environmental history and the history of Native Americans in North America. He has published articles in The Public Historian and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Mr. Haussmann’s dissertation is about the Black Hills region of the upper Great Plains from the mid-nineteenth century until the late twentieth century and argues that inherent to the process of American conquest was the racialization of space between “White Country” and “Indian Country” which in turn had important implications for regional ecologies.

At the Linda Hall Library, Mr. Hausmann is examining mining records from the late nineteenth and twentieth century in the Black Hills, particularly reports from miner’s union meetings and local irrigation maps. Moreover, Linda Hall’s collections hold many official reports published by the United States Geological Survey from before and after the 1972 Rapid City flood which devastated the city and left over two hundred dead and created particular hardships for the region’s Native American community.