This is Democracy – Episode 147: American Borderlands

On this episode, Jeremi and Zachary, with guest Dr. Samuel Truett discuss their understanding of the controversies surrounding the US-Mexico border. Zachary sets the scene with his poem, "The Forest Next to the Trees". Samuel Truett received his Ph.D. at Yale University and is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Southwest at the University of New Mexico.  He is the author of Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (2006), the co-editor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History (2004), and writes broadly on borderlands, environmental, and Native American History in North American and global perspectives.  He has been a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Tampere (Finland) and a fellow at the Huntington Library, Newberry Library, John Carter Brown Library, and Institut d’Etudes Avancées (Institute for Advanced Study) in Nantes, France.  At the University of New Mexico he has led interdisciplinary efforts with the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies and Ted Turner’s New Mexico ranches.  His current work on border crossings in the nineteenth-century world reaches south across the hemisphere and west to imperial and Indigenous spaces in the Pacific basin, the Indian Ocean, and the greater China Seas.  He is also interested in cross-disciplinary ways of using history to rethink planetary crossings, entanglements, and futures of humans and their non-human kin in contexts of rapid social and environmental change.