FW: Cattle industry historian receives MSU’s 2022 Distinctive Collections Travel and Access Award

BOZEMAN — A historian examining the development and modernization of the beef industry will visit the Montana State University Library this summer to conduct research after receiving a travel and access award.

Daniel T. Gresham, professor in the Department of Humanities at St. Mary’s College in Kansas, received MSU’s Distinctive Collections Travel and Access Award. The $2,500 award, which is being awarded for the second time, will help fund his travel to Bozeman this summer.

Gresham will use the MSU Library’s substantial agricultural holdings to provide ranchers’ and university scientists’ perspectives for a book he is writing that explores the development and modernization of the beef industry from World War I to 1933. The book, “Cattle Cartel: How Big Cattlemen and Packers Harnessed the Meat Industry, 1916-1933,” will be published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The award is a collaborative effort of the MSU Ivan Doig Center for the Study of the Lands and Peoples of the North American West, the Archives and Special Collections department of the MSU Library and the Friends of MSU Library. The Distinctive Collections Travel and Access Award is traditionally jointly funded by the Friends of MSU Library and the Doig Center. This year, due to rising travel costs, the Friends of MSU Library contributed additional funds. The award will be offered annually through at least 2025, according to Jodi Allison-Bunnell, head of the MSU Library’s Archives and Special Collections.

“We are so pleased that Dr. Gresham will be using our many agricultural collections to explore this important topic,” said Allison-Bunnell. “He has identified a wonderful variety of collections, and I’m aware of others that I look forward to bringing to his attention.”

“Dr. Gresham’s work is exactly the kind of thoughtful project about the North American West that the Doig Center likes to support,” said Mary Murphy, the center’s director.

The MSU Library, which serves the institution’s students and faculty, as well as Montana citizens, is home to the Merrill G. Burlingame Archives and Special Collections, which houses manuscript collections on the West and the Greater Yellowstone region, with particular strengths in agricultural history; the world’s most comprehensive collection of trout and salmonid books; select records of Montana State University; area-focused books; and a substantial collection of angling oral histories. For more information, see lib.montana.edu/archives/.

Named for author Ivan Doig, the Ivan Doig Center for the Study of the Lands and Peoples of the North American West aims to develop connections throughout the humanities, arts and sciences, while fostering the study of the North American West. More information is available at montana.edu/doig/.

Founded in 1994, Friends of Montana State University Library supports the MSU Library by helping to develop the its collections, spaces, programs and community presence. For more information, see lib.montana.edu/about/friends/index.html.

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This story is available on the web at: http://www.montana.edu/news/22086