Lecture time with Patty Limerick

On Monday night we attended a lecture with Patty Limerick, the Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, where she’s also a Professor of History. Limerick has dedicated her career to bridging the gap between academics and the general public and to demonstrating the benefits of applying historical perspective to contemporary dilemmas and conflicts. Her presentation was a bit disjointed (she's a typical, bright academic, not a great public speaker,) her diction hard to follow and the bottom line was that the session was more work than fun. Because I had to stay intensely focused on what she said, the lecture wasn't a total waste of my time as I went away with a couple of good ideas, regarding the West in particular and history in general. She had an interesting approach to break history in “drafts” like the 19th century as Draft Nr. 1, the 20th century as Draft Nr. 2 and this century as Draft Nr. 3, making it look as if history was really a work in progress (which I guess it must be.) She also projected a ray of hope over the West, saying that the region was constantly “re-inventing” itself, from an “extracting economy” to “lifestyle communities” as it appears to have become these days under the “New West” moniker. She also reminded us that the human spirit, mostly through our little-sung engineers, was extremely resourceful and able to turn awful things (like pollution and overpopulation) into better outcome through ingenious solutions, provided we had some patience left in us to wait for these better results. At the end, I got my time investment back; I had once more learned something new…