A woman and a child take in a view at Lassen Volcanic National Park. Thanks to research by UC Davis historians, national parks in the West and Pacific now have more information available online on women who played roles in establishing or maintaining 64 park sites. (Getty Images).
A woman and a child take in a view at Lassen Volcanic National Park. Thanks to research by UC Davis historians, national parks in the West and Pacific now have more information available online on women who played roles in establishing or maintaining 64 park sites. (Getty Images)

UC Davis Historians Bring Women’s Stories to National Parks of the Pacific, West

Narratives of 64 National Park Sites Accessible to All

  • by Karen Nikos-Rose

Visit most national parks, and you’ll see, read or hear about explorers, labor leaders or even some of the Native people whose homelands are part of park regions. But few of these stories, monuments or even trail signs feature women, especially Native women or other women of color, despite the roles women played in shaping the landscape and its uses.

Now historians from the University of California, Davis, have made the stories of the women previously missing from these narratives accessible to historians, park employees, resource centers and the general public for 64 National Park Service sites in the Pacific and Western United States, where the national parks began. The resources all are available online through National Park Service websites.

The perspective of the pandemic showed us how important it was to have this collaborative approach to research and publish women’s stories in a digital format,” said Lisa Materson, history professor, who worked on the project with another history professor, Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, and UC Davis history graduate students Faith Bennett, Emma Chapman, Ellie Kaplan and Charlotte Hansen Terry.

Read the rest of this article at UC Davis News.

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Society and Culture

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women National Parks Native Americans history