The Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Announces 2014 Awards

The Charles Redd Center for Western Studies is pleased to announce multiple awards for 2014 that are available for scholars conducting research related to Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, or/and Wyoming. Please see the descriptions below. Follow the link to https://reddcenter.byu.edu/Pages/Apply-for-an-Award.aspx for further information and application instructions. Applications for 2014 are due by 11:59 p.m. MST on March 15.

The Redd Center offers the following awards:

Faculty Research Awards provide up to $3,000 to faculty members at any academic institution to conduct research on any topic related to Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, or Wyoming.  Research may be conducted at any location.

Independent Research and Creative Awards provide up to $1,500 to researchers who are not connected to an academic institution for studying Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, or Wyoming.  Research may be conducted at any location.

Summer Awards for Upper Division and Graduate Students at any academic institution provide up to $1,500 for research support for any topic related to Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, or Wyoming.  Research may be conducted at any location.

The Annaley Naegle Redd Student Award in Women's History provides up to $1,500 for research support concerning any aspect of women's history in the American West (not limited to the Intermountain West).  Applications not receiving the Redd Award but dealing with Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, or Wyoming will be considered for the Summer Awards for Upper Division and Graduate Student Awards, Research may be conducted at any location.

Public Programming Awards provide up to $3,000 to any organization planning a conference, museum exhibit or lecture series on a topic related to Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, or Wyoming.

Fellowship Awards in Western American History provide up to $3,500 in research support for scholars who travel to BYU to use the L. Tom Perry Special Collections in the Harold B. Lee Library.

Clarence Dixon Taylor Historical Research Awards provides up to $2,500 for completed works from researched based upon Utah, Carbon, and Wasatch Counties. Nominations can include theses, books, papers, monographs, articles, symposiums, dramatic presentations, lectures, etc. Students and faculty of Brigham Young University or other institutions or other recognized scholars are eligible.

Visiting Scholar Program enable university faculty of all ranks, independent scholars, freelance authors and other public intellectuals to visit and conduct research at BYU. It provides a stipend of $2,500 per month for 2-4 months, office facilities, a networked computer, a research assistant, a limited photocopying budget, and campus library and activity privileges.  Visiting Scholars participate in Center activities and deliver public and classroom presentations on their work.

Publications Grants to Presses provide up to $3,000 to assist in the publication of scholarly studies on Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, or Wyoming . The grants will be given to academic publishers to help offset the costs of publishing books and to lower the books’ selling price. The book should already have been accepted for publication by the press and be ready for publication. The Redd Center may honor authors whose books receive a publication grant with a public lecture and book signing at Brigham Young University. The Center will defray the author's travel and lodging expenses.

To apply for an award, visit the Redd Center website (http://reddcenter.byu.edu), and click on “Apply for an Award” on the right hand side of the homepage. You will then be taken to our awards application page. After you have completed your application, you will receive a message indicating that your application has been successfully submitted. In addition, you will receive an email confirmation at the email address you list on your application. If you have any questions about the application process or about submitting your application, please contact Amy Carlin at 801-422-4048 or  amy_carlin@byu.edu. If you have questions about the substance of your application, please contact Brian Q. Cannon, Redd Center, director, brian_cannon@byu.edu.


This announcement was originally emailed across the H-Amrel listserv on January 31. 

Church Signs on Hwy 371 in New Mexico

State Highway 371 in New Mexico, between Farmington and I-40, skirts right along the eastern edge of the Navajo/Diné Nation. I drove it this summer and stopped several times along the way to take pictures of church signs. Here are a few of them, for your casual Friday viewing pleasure.

Redd Center grants due March 15

The Charles Redd Center for Western Studies offers a number of awards, fellowships, and grant opportunities for folks doing research on topics related to the American West. There are awards for graduate students, faculty, independent researchers, visiting scholars, etc, and for specialized topics, such as women's history, local histories, creative projects, and the use of special collections at BYU. Grant applications are due next Friday, March 15. For details, click here.

Casual Friday: Built Miracles

The Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is known for its spiral staircase.

Photo by Quincy D. Newell

Specifically, this is a spiral staircase built, apparently, in answer to a prayer by nuns. Built by a mysterious stranger who rode into town, built the staircase, and disappeared. Built in such a way that it still stands, even though the laws of engineering seem to indicate that it should have collapsed long ago.

In the West, it seems the focus is often on the natural landscape and the ways people find the divine in it. But people also see the divine in the built environment (as attested by the number of tourists who visit Loretto Chapel every day)!

Religion and the Public School System: Why the West Matters

by Tisa Wenger

I recently had the good fortune to read Kathleen Holscher’s forthcoming book Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captured Schools Crisis in New Mexico, scheduled to appear very soon from Oxford University Press. This is a book that I think deserves a lot of attention, and I thought I’d give the readers of this blog a little sampling of what it might bring to our conversation.

Religious Lessons tells the story of Zellers v. Huff, also known as the “Dixon case,” decided by New Mexico’s Supreme Court in 1949. The case challenged the legality of Catholic sisters teaching in the state’s public schools, as well as the arrangements that had allowed former Catholic parochial schools to become the local public schools in many districts in the state. Upset by such an arrangement in their town, Protestant parents in the town of Dixon filed suit in district court so that their children would not be taught by Catholic sisters in a building that had been a parochial school, with many religious items in the classrooms. The case raised a variety of questions connected to the legal principle of the separation of church and state. Could teachers who were also Catholic nuns wear their religious habits during school hours? What sorts of religious objects and artwork were permissible on school grounds, and where? Was it legal for teachers to provide religious education to Catholic students outside of regular school hours?

This case is not very well remembered today, even by historians, and it is not usually included in the corpus of key First Amendment cases from the mid-twentieth century. But in the late 1940s it sparked a gigantic public outcry across the country, and as Holscher says, “its litigation and the extra-judicial hubbub that accompanied it said more about the relation of church and state within the lives and imaginations of midcentury Americans than precedent-setting cases from the period ever did.” This was the case that motivated the formation of the group Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (POAU), with the primary agenda of challenging all Catholic incursions into the public schools. The Dixon schools inspired the moniker “captive schools,” suggesting a sinister Catholic plan to take over America’s schools, and through them the nation.

Public school children in Blanco, NM, 1942.  From the collection of Kathleen Holscher.

Holscher provides a finely-grained study of the many different players involved in this case, and the complex and contradictory ways in which they understood the issues involved. Local context makes all the difference here. New Mexico, of course, had a very long Catholic history, and there were compelling reasons for many of its school boards to form cooperative arrangements with the church to make public schools possible in their districts. Most local people, who were predominantly Hispanic and Catholic, had few if any reservations about these schools, although as Holscher points out their interests could be quite different from those of the church. Holscher also shows how the sisters who taught in these schools attempted, in a variety of ways, to honor the “nonsectarian” public school standard and to keep specifically Catholic religious teachings and practices apart from their classrooms. But the situation looked very different to the Protestant minority, both Hispanic and Anglo, that had developed in some parts of the state. And from the court’s perspective such schools almost inevitably violated the “nonsectarian” public school standard—which in most of the nation had assumed a generically Protestant religious identity, and had been imported into New Mexico—along with the newer “separationist” standard that advocated a complete removal of any and all religious practice from the public schools.

So, what does this case and this book offer to our ongoing conversation on this blog about religion in the American west? My first thought here is that Holscher places a very western story at the center of a pivotal national debate. Protestant-Catholic tensions and efforts at dialogue in mid-twentieth-century America would have looked very different without the Dixon case and the consequent trope of the “captive schools.” POAU and its allies generalized that story to make it appear that Catholics were taking over schools all over America. Similar public-parochial arrangements did exist elsewhere in the country, especially in cities like Detroit that had significant Catholic populations, but nowhere were they as prevalent as they were in New Mexico. The events Holscher recounts are very specifically rooted in the cultural and religious history of New Mexico—a quintessentially western story. She clearly shows the importance of this story to national debates over church-state separation that are not generally associated with the west. And in so doing she illustrates one of our favorite talking points: just how important it is for historians of American religion to pay attention to the west.