Despite the roles women played in shaping most national park landscapes and uses, few of their stories are shared at the park sites. Now historians from UC Davis have made the stories of women previously missing from these narratives accessible to all for 64 National Park Service sites in the Pacific and Western United States, where the national parks began.
Two UC Davis historians have received funding from the National Park Service to address the educational gap in U.S. women’s history and role in the nation’s national parks. Professors Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor and Lisa Materson will craft 80 biographies of women involved in national parks in the western region of the United States, and, in a longer article, connect those women’s lives to the ongoing struggle for voting rights.
UC Davis history professor Gregory Downs has been awarded a 2018 UC Davis Academic Senate's Distinguished Scholarly Public Service Award for his leadership in establishing the nation’s first monument to Reconstruction.