Dr. Michael Amundson

I’ll be teaching US Sports History in the fall, which although not a new class, is one that I don’t teach very often.

HIS 369: The US West Transformed because it most aligns with my research interests and so I not only know a lot about the subject matter but also have some fun things to share with students like 3D images and music. Another favorite is the co-convened HIS 420 and HIS 502 Public History courses. I like these because they introduce history majors and graduate students to another way of thinking about history–for the public–and I’m always delighted to see students learn that there are actual jobs in history besides teaching public school or going on for a PhD. I also enjoy taking students to meet working history professionals in the field at archives, museums, and national parks.

My most recent book–my 7th– is a biography of an artist who sketched bird’s eye view drawings of towns, ranches, mines, and other landscapes in Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and Washington state between 1891 and 1915. I started on this project as an undergrad at the University of Wyoming in 1988 and published an article about him in 1994. Then, in 2018, I was invited to give a talk about him at a small museum in Wyoming and started researching him again only to find that this thing called the internet made a wealth of information available that wasn’t possible back in the early 1990s. My other books focus on the history of photography in the West, cowboy music played on Edison cylinders before the invention of radio, and the atomic West. I’ve also published articles on the history of elk in Arizona and on Mars in Arizonan’s imaginations.

I plan to get back to an ongoing research project focusing on the biography of a heretofore unknown photographer who traveled the country in 1940 making unique color three dimensional photographs of western national parks, the two world’s fairs, and views in cities from Miami to Boston and Tacoma to San Antonio. As part of this work, I’ve been rephotographing his shots using paired digital cameras so that I can make modern 3D digital images of the same locations. I plan to do some fieldwork on this in Los Angeles this year.

As the Graduate Director and Public History director, I advise students interested in those two areas as well as undergraduates interested in the 4+1 accelerated MA program.

We love to take our dog Jewel for walks in the forest, go mountain biking, skiing/snowshoeing, and playing with my model trains.