Rosenberry Lecture: Democracy’s Mountain: Longs Peak and the Unfulfilled Promises of America’s National Parks

Professor of History Emerita at Colorado State University, Ruth Alexander, will discuss her newest book, Democracy’s Mountain: Longs Peak and the Unfulfilled Promises of America’s National Parks. In an engaging lecture, Alexander will explore the history of climbing on Longs and the peak’s connections to a larger story of America’s national parks and their obligations in a democracy. Alexander will use climbers’ stories of extraordinary risk and achievement on Longs to uncover Rocky’s troubled efforts to protect climbers and the alpine environment they love from harm. Simultaneously, she will use the story of Longs to disclose patterns of racial exclusion and Native American displacement in Rocky that are only beginning to change.

A book signing will follow the talk.

Ruth M. Alexander is a Professor of History Emerita at CSU. She specializes in women’s history, race, society, politics in the United States, American environmental history, and national parks. Alexander has researched Rocky Mountain National Park, Shenandoah National Park, Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, and Scotts Bluff National Monument. She is the author of The ‘Girl Problem’: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York 1900-1930 and co-editor of Major Problems in American Women’s History: Documents and Essays. Her articles, essays, and book chapters have appeared in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Women’s History, American Quarterly, Small Worlds: Childhood and Adolescence in America 1850-1950, and Sexual Borderlands.