Expedition seminar Saturday at Meeteetse Museum

Join the Meeteetse Museums for a free seminar on the Powell Expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers on Saturday, Aug. 17 at 1 p.m. Wyoming has designated September as Archaeology Awareness Month. This year Archaeology Awareness Month celebrates the 150th anniversary of John Wesley Powell’s expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers. The expedition took place in 1869 and lasted from May until the end of August. During those three months, boats and supplies were lost, and crewmembers abandoned the expedition. Despite this, John Wesley Powell completed the expedition on August 30.

The Powell Expedition seminar will be led by author, Dr. Donald Worster. Distinguished Foreign Expert at Renmin University of China, Dr. Donald Worster is currently in China and cannot physically join us, so the session with him will be held over Skype.

From 1989 to 2012 Dr. Worster served as Hall Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Kansas. He earned a Ph.D. in American history and literature at Yale University in 1971. His principal areas of research and teaching have included North American and world environmental history, the history of the American West, and comparative & world history.

His honors include elected membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians. He has also won a number of prizes for his books, including the Bancroft Prize and the Scottish Book of the Year, various fellowships, including a Guggenheim, the presidencies of the Western History Association and the American Society for Environmental History. He also holds honorary doctoral degrees from Illinois Wesleyan University and Sterling University (Scotland).

Professor Worster’s most recent publication is Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance. Earlier, he published two recent prize-winning biographies, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell, along with eight other books, including: Rivers of Empire, which deals with the development of water resources in the West; Dust Bowl, a study of the Southern Plains in the “dirty thirties,” and Nature’s Economy, which traces the development of ecology from the eighteenth century to the present. His books have been translated into Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Czech, and Swedish.

For more information contact info@meeteetsemuseums.org or call (307) 868-2423. The Meeteetse Museums are located at 1947 State Street in Meeteetse.