Please join us for Alyssa Kreikemeier, assistant professor of environmental history at the University of Idaho, book talk titled, “Aerial Empire: Contested Sovereignties and the American West.”

New claims, legislation, and technologies changed the atmosphere in revolutionary ways over the twentieth century. Aerial Empire examines how the U.S. settler state expanded through different kinds of atmospheric infrastructures—from the arrival of the railroad to the expansion of airspace and air pollution controls by the close of the twentieth century. By 1986, one-quarter of the nation lay under a military zone. Yet the ways aerial empire structured relationships between Americans on the ground and federal agencies grew increasingly complex. What happened in the air didn’t stay there, and efforts to control the atmosphere produced uneven and unpredictable consequences.

Kreikemeier’s book will appear in the University of Nebraska Press’s “Many Wests” series, which is edited by Penn State faculty members Mary E. Mendoza and Christina Snyder, along with Julie Reed, Thomas Andrews and Ari Kelman.

This talk is free and open to the public.