Tack & Ink is the newsletter of Jason Heppler, a historian of the North American West, Great Plains, and Canadian Prairies.

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. —Wallace Stegner

If there is a singular animating feature about the American West, it's the land.

Hello and welcome to Tack & Ink. This newsletter is primarily devoted to the history of public lands in the North American West and Great Plains. I am starting work on a new book project about the Sagebrush Rebellion and its impact not only on the Interior West but on the Northern Plains: how its ideology, legislative and legal efforts, and cultural facets came to express themselves in this region. This newsletter, then, will explore this movement broadly across public lands, the activities that take place on them, and, more broadly, agricultural history.

Along the way, we'll be exploring definitions of place and landscapes, questions that anchored my book on Silicon Valley and continues to shape how I understand historical currents at work across the region and that are grounded in environmental history.

What to Expect

There will be many topics and themes here. I'm not a journalist, so don't expect investigative pieces (that's not to say there won't be commentary about current events—we are, after all, interested in knowing the past's place in the present). But there will be histories, commentary, essays, photos, and fact-checking. I'll also often note things I'm reading. Unsurprisingly, I read a lot and I hope to model here the kind of reading, analyzing, and synthesizing historians do with texts. Sometimes that might just be a quick "here's something I read and you might like it, too," other times it will be a more in-depth reflection.

For the moment, the goal is to write once a month. I'll revisit this at some point.

About Jason

I am a lifelong resident of the American West and Great Plains and currently live on a 1914 homestead on the tall grass prairies of Nebraska. I am an award-winning historian with a focus on environmental and political history. Day-to-day I am the developer-scholar at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media where we're building the history web. I'm the author of Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2024), co-editor of Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy (Univ. of Cincinnati Press, 2020), and numerous book chapters and peer-reviewed articles. My writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Conversation, and Perspectives on History.