Manifesting America in the Colorado Beet Fields

Environmental Humanities Colloquium

Pérez will use the history of the Colorado beet fields to explore the relationship between sugar, scientific agriculture and the intensification of settler colonialism at the turn of the 20th century. Beets powered the nation’s expansion after the Civil War and transatlantic sugar-beet culture offered a framework for “re-landscaping” the West. Pérez will discuss how experts attempted to resolve the frictions between settler fantasies and the failure, resistance and contingency they actually experienced on the Great Plains.