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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History
Episode: Erika Marie Bsumek, "The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau" (U Texas Press, 2023)
Description: The Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River provides electricity for some forty million people, and is one of the largest sources of water in the American West. It is also a testament to American settler colonialism, writes UT Austin history professor Erika Bsumek in The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau (U Texas Press, 2023). This region of the Southwest has been inhabited and irrigated by Indigenous societies since time immemorial, groups which were only recently (and partially) dispossessed by LDS Church settlers and by the US government. Bsumek argues that the structures, both...