Guest Speaker: How the Real West was Lost: The Frontier Myth and the Erasure of U.S. Western History

Megan Kate Nelson is a celebrated historian of the U.S. Civil War and the American West. She is the author of multiple books, including The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, and Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Simon & Schuster, 2022), which won the Spur Award for historical non-fiction and was one of Smithsonian Magazine’s top 10 books of that year. Her most recent book, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier (Simon & Schuster, 2026) is an epic account of the creation of the American West that forces a rethinking of longstanding frontier myths.

Dr. Nelson has written for The New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic, Slate, and Smithsonian Magazine and is a regular guest on radio shows and TV documentaries about western history and popular culture. Come listen to her talk titled “How the Real West was Lost: The Frontier Myth and the Erasure of U.S. Western History” on March 19 at 5:30 pm.