Humanities on the High Plains
Humanities on the High Plains is a podcast focusing on humanities scholarship, with a special emphasis on topics relevant to the Texas Panhandle and the High Plains. Hosted by Ryan M. Brooks, Assistant Professor of English at West Texas A&M University, each episode features in-depth conversations with scholars exploring new ideas and methods in disciplines like literature, film studies, and cultural history.
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Ep. 18 For the Record
05/06/2024
Ep. 18 For the Record
In March 2023, The Canadian Record — the weekly newspaper of rural Canadian, TX, population 2,300 — suspended publication after 130 years in print. Ryan’s guests this episode are Laurie Ezzell Brown, longtime editor and publisher of The Record, and Heather Courtney, the award-winning director and producer of the 2023 documentary short For the Record, which streams from May 6th to July 31st as part of PBS’s “Reel South” series, as well as airing on Panhandle PBS at 1PM on Sunday, May 12th. Beginning in 2019 and ending in 2022, the film follows Brown, reporter Cathy Ricketts, business manager Mary Smithee, and other staff members as they hustle to keep the paper afloat during an oil bust, a global pandemic, and a contentious presidential election. Currently, The Record continues in a scaled-down form , but — as Brown and Courtney stress in the documentary and in these interviews — the print version’s demise reflects a broader trend, as the country has lost a of its newspapers in the past 20 years. Ryan speaks first with Laurie, who updates us on the status of The Record and her role in covering the March 2024 wildfires; describes her experience being in front of a documentarian’s camera; and reflects on the challenges of sustaining a family-owned business in the Panhandle (where young people are hard to attract and often eager to leave). She also shares her views on how distrust of journalists has been intensified by the erosion of the boundary between news and opinion, and discusses the causes, consequences, and possible solutions to the growing news deserts in rural America. Next Ryan speaks with Heather, who explains why her last two films (including 2023’s ) have focused on the work of reporters; discusses the difference between news-writing and documentary filmmaking; and describes the logistics of filming journalists in the middle of a pandemic and an election year. Finally, she discusses some of her artistic decisions in For the Record and why she has never made a “true vérité film.” At the end of the interview, Heather issues a call to action and describes how listeners and civic organizations can get involved in the broader effort to support community-oriented news.
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Ep. 17 George Saunders
03/26/2024
Ep. 17 George Saunders
Before he was a MacArthur Genius or a Booker Prize-winner, George Saunders was a songwriter, an oil-field worker, and a slaughterhouse “knuckle-puller,” not to mention an MA student at what was then West Texas State University. In this in-depth interview, Amarillo College’s Chris Hudson joins me, Ryan Brooks, as we speak with the author of Lincoln in the Bardo, Tenth of December, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and many other books. We chat with Saunders about his roots in the Texas Panhandle and how his fascination with Custer has stretched from his first published story (written in Amarillo) to his latest novella, “Liberation Day.” We also discuss his attitudes about work, capitalism, and ghosts; whether the Panhandle is best understood as Steinbeckian or Trumpian; his time as a young musician in the Amarillo Songwriters Association; which of his writing students we should be paying attention to next; Flannery O’Connor; Lucky Hank; and much more. At the end of the interview, Saunders describes the impact three WT English profs – Richard Moseley, Charmazel Dudt, and Sue Park – had on life and his career, including teaching him to have faith in his own responses to literature. Cover Image: Michael Tomlinson, George Saunders, Pat Pacino, mid-1970s. Photos courtesy of Buddy Squyres.
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Ep. 16 Shadow of the New Deal
12/05/2023
Ep. 16 Shadow of the New Deal
The history of public media is the history of fidelity to an idea: access to public education is “not only a service but a right.” On this episode we’re joined by Dr. Josh Shepperd, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting (University of Illinois Press, 2023). Josh describes how this democratic ideal evolved, clumsily, into the material and institutional practices we’ve come to associate with NPR, PBS, and other public media. We discuss how the Communications Act of 1934 fundamentally changed the trajectory of this movement, the impact of the Rockefeller Foundation and early communications research, and the pioneering role of Midwestern and Western university stations. We also chat about Josh’s work as director of the . Make sure to tune in to catch a special cameo by Theodor Adorno…
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Ep. 15 The Thirsty Llano Estacado
05/16/2023
Ep. 15 The Thirsty Llano Estacado
Ryan’s guests this episode are Dr. Timothy M. Foster, former WT prof and currently a Spanish teacher in Oskaloosa, Iowa, and Dr. John Beusterien, Professor of Spanish at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Tim and John come on the podcast to discuss their article, published in 2022 in The Great Plains Quarterly. This piece includes a thorough appendix of transcriptions, translations, and recordings — several of which can be heard in this episode — of the Nuevomexicano ballad of Manuel Maés, a real-life, twenty-one-year-old cibolero (buffalo hunter) who was killed while hunting in 1873 and buried somewhere in the Llano Estacado of Texas. Tim and John argue that examining the ballad’s environmental vision can shed light on the contemporary problem of water scarcity, awakening “the spirit of water as a force of renewal and, in so doing, raise consciousness toward ecologically sound and sustainable water practice.” After a brief introduction in Spanish, the interview covers topics like Priscilla Ybarra’s concept of Chicana/o “goodlife writing” and the challenge it represents to Anglo-American environmentalist movements rooted in settler colonialism; the role of groups like the comancheros, pastores, and ciboleros in the pre-Anglo history of the Llano; and the Maés song’s status as indita, corrido, and ballad, three complexly interrelated genres. We also discuss the thematic role of canyons, rivers, and water-collection points, and how the song functions as a kind of tombstone, not only for Maés but also for the Panhandle playa where he was likely buried, a lake that “is almost certainly plowed under, built over, or trenched for irrigation, unable to fulfill either its cultural or ecological function.” The Great Plains Quarterly Cover Image: The Killing of Manuel Maés, courtesy of the artist, Ronald Kil.
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Ep. 14 The ERA in the West
03/13/2023
Ep. 14 The ERA in the West
Our guest this episode is WT history professor Dr. Chelsea Ball, author of “‘I Oppose the ERA, but I Do Approve of Equal Rights for Women’: Gender and Politics in the Aftermath of the Equal Rights Amendment Campaign in the U.S. West.” This piece can be found in The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (2022), edited by Brenden W. Rensink and published by the University of Nebraska Press. In our talk, Ball explains how the ERA came to symbolize more than just “equality” and how this symbolism prompted resistance among ‘70s-era conservatives, especially in the West. She also describes the aftermath of the ERA’s defeat in 1982, when the broader backlash against feminism intensified and Western activists turned their attention to state- and city-level equality campaigns. Finally, we discuss the current, uncertain status of the drive to ratify the ERA — recently reignited in states like Arizona, Oklahoma, and Nevada — and how studying these developments can help us rethink traditional histories of both Western women and contemporary feminism.
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Ep. 13 Dirty Knowledge
12/14/2022
Ep. 13 Dirty Knowledge
Ryan’s guest on this episode is Dr. Julia Schleck, Associate Professor and Vice Chair of the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Schleck joins us to discuss her book, Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism, published in January 2022 as part of the University of Nebraska Press’s “Provocations” series. The book critiques traditional defenses of academic freedom, which tend to be based on the idea that universities serve the public good by being separate from the public, producing knowledge that is therefore “clean,” or, other words, apolitical. In reality, Schleck contends, the university is a place where what counts as public good gets debated and contested, and therefore knowledge is always “dirty.” By virtue of these very debates, she argues, universities can serve as a “seed bank” for potential future public needs, and academic freedom should be defended, materially and ideologically, in order to ensure the “biodiversity” of this seed bank. Our interview covers these arguments and a range of topics, including: how the book was inspired by the termination of a UNL lecturer who went viral while protesting a conservative group on campus; the rise of “academic capitalism” and its impact on the notion that universities serve the common good; the contemporary tendency to define academic freedom in terms of free-speech rights, and why this is a problem; why faculty unions are necessary but not sufficient when it comes to defending academic freedom; how recent events like the COVID-19 pandemic have underscored the importance of historical knowledge produced in the humanities; and the possibility of solidarity between academics and other kinds of workers. Schleck also describes how her approach, which stresses the importance of ideological diversity, may serve to build bridges with conservative critics of the academy. For more coverage of her work, see this and this , which appeared in the Lincoln Journal Star; for a review of Schleck’s book and two other recent books on academic freedom, see this in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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Ep. 12 You Will Never Be One of Us
10/22/2022
Ep. 12 You Will Never Be One of Us
In this episode, Ryan speaks with his WT colleague Dr. Timothy Paul Bowman, historian and author of You Will Never Be One of Us: A Teacher, a Texas Town, and the Rural Roots of Radical Conservativism, published in 2022 by the University of Oklahoma Press. Bowman’s book tells the story of Wayne Woodward, who in 1975 was fired from his job as an English teacher at La Plata Junior High in Hereford, Texas for founding a local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Bowman argues that Woodward was fired because both he and the ACLU — with its reputation for fighting for workers’ rights — were seen as threats by the Anglo power structure in Hereford. The book also traces the historical roots of Panhandle conservativism, which, Bowman argues, run deeper than is often assumed in conservative historiography. The interview also touches on what the rural version of this ideology contributed to the rise of the New Right more generally, as well as what Woodward’s decades-old legal battle has to tell us about contemporary political polarization.
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Ep. 11 Running Out
05/13/2022
Ep. 11 Running Out
On this episode, Ryan is joined by two of his WT colleagues — Dr. Nathan Howell, Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering, and Dr. Erik Crosman, Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences — and Dr. Darryl Birkenfeld, executive director of the nonprofit organization, Ogallala Commons. We discuss anthropologist Lucas Bessire’s Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains, a National Book Award finalist published in 2021. Running Out concerns the High Plains’s most important source of water, the Ogallala Aquifer, which for decades has been depleted by agricultural irrigation at a rate faster than it can be replenished. To explore the causes and consequences of this depletion, Bessire returns home to his family farm in southwest Kansas, and his account mixes memoir, history, and ethnography. Our panel discussion touches on a range of topics, including: the politics (and aesthetics) of depletion; what it means to think of water as something other than a commodity; the relationship between depletion and global warming; the importance of democratizing groundwater management; and the role of humanities scholarship in responding to ecological crises. For more information on this topic, see also the Ogallala Commons ; the USDA’s ; and the website for WT’s , which includes a link to the proceedings for the 2020 conference on local groundwater.
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Ep. 10 Chicana/o Uprising
03/15/2022
Ep. 10 Chicana/o Uprising
In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dr. Joel Zapata to discuss his essay “The South-by-Southwest Borderlands’ Chicana/o Uprising: the Brown Berets, Black and Brown Alliances, and the Fight against Police Brutality in West Texas.” The piece emerged out of Zapata’s involvement with the groundbreaking and appears in Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas, published in 2021 by the University of Texas Press. The interview covers a range of topics, including: the social contradictions of the Jim Crow and Juan Crow systems in West Texas (as exemplified by the public cemetery in Lubbock); the role of police brutality in sparking the Chicana/o movement in Lubbock, Odessa, and Midland; the 1971 “March of Faith” and the 1978 beating death of Larry Ortega Lozano, both crucial turning points in the history of this movement; how these events helped lead to collaborations between Black and Brown social-justice organizations in the region; and the police brutality experienced by members of the white working-class in Amarillo in the 1970s. Zapata also discusses his other research in Mexican-American history, including his digital history project, “,” which maps the events described in the article and outlines the role of student organizers at places like Texas Tech in and West Texas State (now West Texas A&M) in .
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Ep. 9 The Great Cowboy Strike
01/18/2022
Ep. 9 The Great Cowboy Strike
On this episode, Ryan is joined by Mark. A. Lause, Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati and author of The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, and Class Conflicts in the American West (Verso, 2017). Taking its title from a major strike led by ranch hands in the Texas Panhandle in 1883, the book traces the broader history of post-Civil War labor radicalism and third-party insurgency in the American West.
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Ep. 8 Three Women Artists
11/30/2021
Ep. 8 Three Women Artists
Ryan sits down with two of his WT colleagues, Dr. Amy Von Lintel, Professor of Art History, and Dr. Bonnie Roos, Professor of English, who join him to discuss their new book, Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West, forthcoming in February 2022 from Texas A&M University Press.
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Ep. 7 The Vanishing Frame
09/16/2021
Ep. 7 The Vanishing Frame
In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dr. Eugenio Di Stefano, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Di Stefano is the author of The Vanishing Frame: Latin American Culture and Theory in the Postdictatorial Era, published in 2018 by the University of Texas Press.
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Ep. 6 Modern Socratic Dialogue
04/22/2021
Ep. 6 Modern Socratic Dialogue
In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dr. Laura J. Mueller, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at West Texas A&M University and author of “Modern Socratic Dialogue and Resilient Democracy: Creating the Clearing for an American Bildung."
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Ep. 5 History of the Gold Sox
11/13/2020
Ep. 5 History of the Gold Sox
Before the Sod Poodles, there were the Gold Sox, whose history exemplifies the complex interplay between postwar urban development and minor-league ball. An interview with Brian M. Ingrassia, author of “The Yellow City’s Tenuous Hold on the Gold Sox: Affiliated Texas League Baseball in Amarillo, 1959–1982.”
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Ep. 4 Gunslinging Justice
08/03/2020
Ep. 4 Gunslinging Justice
For this episode, Ryan is joined by Justin A. Joyce, author of Gunslinging Justice: The American Culture of Gun Violence in Westerns and the Law, now available in paperback from Manchester University Press. Gunslinging Justice argues that Westerns work together with legal discourse to legitimate certain forms of gun violence, establishing norms for who is allowed to engage in this violence – and why – and thereby helping to construct Anglo masculinity.
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Episode 3: Heartland
06/18/2020
Episode 3: Heartland
In this episode, Ryan is joined by four of his WT colleagues: Dr. Alex Hunt, Dr. Tim Bowman, Dr. Ashley Pinkham, and Dr. Christopher Macaulay. Together we discuss Sarah Smarsh’s bestselling 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.
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Episode 2: Latin American Textualities
05/13/2020
Episode 2: Latin American Textualities
Ryan's guests for this episode are Heather J. Allen, Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Mississippi, and Andrew R. Reynolds, associate professor of Spanish at West Texas A&M University. Allen and Reynolds are co-editors of the collection Latin American Textualities: History, Materiality, and Digital Media, published in December 2018 by the University of Arizona Press.
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Episode 1: No Longer Newsworthy
04/12/2020
Episode 1: No Longer Newsworthy
In this episode, Ryan speaks with Christopher R. Martin, Professor of Communication Studies and Digital Journalism at the University of Northern Iowa. Martin is the author of No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class (Cornell University Press /ILR Press), named one of Choice magazine’s Outstanding Academic Titles of 2019.
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