Dan Herman:
CLASS OF 1979
Central High SchoolClass of 1979
Phoenix, AZ
Pitzer CollegeClass of 1983
Claremont, CA
Clarendon Middle SchoolClass of 1975
Phoenix, AZ
Encanto Primary SchoolClass of 1971
Phoenix, AZ
Sunrise Drive Elementary SchoolClass of 1970
Tucson, AZ
Dan's Story
Life
Newest: I have now been married for a year and have nothing bad to report. I took a sabbatical year to write my book, during which I'm getting to know Dallas. Southern Methodist University kindly gave me a six-month residency to produce the book.
Sabbatical is NOT vacation (whatever you may think) but I use weekends to good effect by cruising thrift stores and antique stores. My wife and I have furnished our Dallas apartment (nicely!) for $500.
My wife, Greta, is an artist, though not a practicing one ... nonetheless she scouts the thrift stores for odd little boxes, mostly jewelry boxes, that she's going to make into art. This is not everyone's idea of fun, but she's recruited me in the search for boxes and I enjoy it. She has also got me reading all the scandal sheets in the checkout line at the supermarket.
Texans are strange people, very paranoid that someone or something is going to "mess" with them. They were invaded 170 years ago, and that has left a bad taste in their mouths. Once you get invaded, you tend to be touchy about threats, which may explain why they gave us GWB. But I think they are legitimately sorry for that, and I forgive them.
My book, in case you are interested--which you will not be, in all probability, unless you're another history professor--explores how the honor culture of the South was transformed in a Western context. I'm focusing on Arizona's Rim Country, which was settled in the 1870s and 1880s by immigrants from, well, Texas. Long story, but it involves the conquest of the Western Apache, conflict between Mormons and non-Mormons, the Pleasant Valley War, Indian-white interactions in the rez era, the love life ...Expand for more
of Arizona's first state governor, and the way that pop novelist Zane Grey "remembered" the region's history in his fiction.
The book is contracted with Yale University Press and should be out by next spring (2009). In other words, I still have to write it. I have three chapters done, out of about 12-15 planned.
Previous new bio: getting married (June 24, 2006), got tenure, bought 1912 craftsman house, and have become addicted to gardening.
Old bio from like 2001: Wasted seven years of my life (mostly in San Francisco) pretending that I would become a writer of fiction. In that seven years, however, I did manage to live for a year in New York while attending Columbia University's Grad. School of Journalism. Then I went to New Zealand on a Rotary Scholarship. And somewhere in there I spent a year in Washington, D.C., as a legislative correspondent for an Arizona Congressman.
At 34, I got my PhD in history from Cal/Berkeley, something I shoulda done at 24. Then I bobbed up and down on the job market for three years, during which I taught part-time at CSU/Hayward and full-time at Colorado College. In 1999, I got a tenure-track job at Central Washington University, just over the hill from Seattle.
Teaching is the best of all possible careers, plus you get to write books. My first and only book so far as a cultural history of hunting (not a celebration of hunting, but a study of how Americans have thought about hunting since 1607). It's titled _Hunting and the American Imagination_, published by the Smithsonian Institution Press, and now available for probably like $2 through Amazon. I'm working on a second book but it won't be out for a few more years.
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