Bozeman Magazine

Montana State University's Department of History invites you to an evening with Sarah Keyes as she discusses her new book, American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail on February 7th at 6pm in the Procrastinator Theater in MSU's Strand Union Building. In this talk, Sarah Keyes will trace the major arguments of her first book, American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail. Her work places death at the center of the history of the Overland Trail and, in doing so, offers a sweeping and long overdue reinterpretation of this historic touchstone. Sarah Keyes is a historian of the United States. She specializes in the 19th century and the history of the U.S. West with a focus on the environment and intercultural interactions between Indigenous peoples and non-Native settlers. Her current work explores these topics along the overland trails to Oregon and California in the mid-19th century. Her first book, American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in October 2023. Keyes has also begun work on her second project, a study of women’s suffrage in the U.S. West, for which she was recently awarded a Mellon-Schlesinger Summer Research Grant from the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. This event is free and open to the public.