Translating Past to Present: Interpreters in the American West and Beyond - Paperback

by Andrew Offenburger (Editor), Patricia Nelson Limerick (Editor)

The act of interpretation has been central to Western American history. At every historical juncture, interpreters were active and present--conveying meaning between people speaking mutually unintelligible languages, bartering for goods and power along borders, and translating intentions from gestures, acts, and words. While research on interpreters within zones of cultural exchange has grown among scholars of early modern Europe and Asia, the historiography of interpreters of the American West remains deficient.

Author Biography

Andrew Offenburger is an associate professor of history at Miami University. He is the author of Frontiers in the Gilded Age: Adventure, Capitalism, and Dispossession from Southern Africa to the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, 1880-1917 and editor of The Aimless Life: Music, Mines, and Revolution from the Rocky Mountains to Mexico (Bison Books, 2021). Patricia Nelson Limerick is a professor of history and director of the Applied History Initiative at the University of Colorado. She is the author of Desert Passages: Encounters with the American Deserts, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, and Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West.