Doctoral Diss. Research Imp. Grant: Chasing the Climate Cure in the American West: Geographies of Health and Nation in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Culture

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Health seeking is typically associated with specific climates and landscapes; in the history of the United States, it has been most closely identified with the unique environments of the West. This project explores both scientific and lay discourses about medical climatology, meteorology, and health that are associated with the American West; it aims to understand how they intersect and interact with popular culture. In addition to assessing these broader intellectual trends, it is also concerned with the lived experience of health seekers from the indigent settlers of transient tent colonies to the wealthy tourists at fashionable health resorts. In doing so, it places these health seekers in the framework of contested racial, class, and gender ideologies informing turn-of-the-century society. It also seeks to establish whether and in what ways efforts to promote intangible qualities of health and climate helped to justify and encourage internal expansion in the American West, as well as the social and natural impacts of health seeking. Though perceptions of aridity, altitude, temperature, and sunshine often motivated western development and shaped its narratives, attitudes about health and landscape have been largely neglected in previous historical treatments of the settlement of this region. This project draws from the methodologies and perspectives of environmental history, history of science, and social and cultural history. It utilizes archival and organizational records of various booster organizations and health colonies, personal and family papers, popular periodicals, as well as journals, monographs, and records of medical and scientific groups, particularly in the field of medical climatology. It places these varied sources in dialogue with one another across three uniquely western landscapes?the desert Southwest, Rocky Mountains, and Southern California Coast. The resulting dissertation will establish why multiple discourses depicted certain western environments as healthful and beneficial to the body, and how these beliefs were shaped by diverse populations and contributed to fashioning an American identity.