Myths and Belonging in the American West with Megan Kate Nelson
Procrastinator Theater, Montana Staet University
Community Events
February 18, 2026 @ 5:30pm - 8:00pm
The Ivan Doig Center for the Lands and Peoples of the North American West is pleased to announce "Myths and Belonging in the American West with Megan Kate Nelson" on February 18 as part of the Doig Center's Perspectives on the American West Speaker Series. The event will take place in the Procrastinator Theater in the Strand Union Building at MSU from 5:30-8:00pm, with doors opening at 5:00pm. Light refreshments will be served.
Dr. Nelson will offer remarks based on her forthcoming book, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier. She will then be joined by Doig Center Director Dr. Daniel Grant for a public conversation about her work and its relevance to our time and place. Dr. Grant says, We're eager to welcome Dr. Nelson, as her evocative, action-packed, and historically insightful narratives about the complexities of western pasts resonate with so many essential questions about our present and future.
Born and raised in Colorado, Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer based in Boston, with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of five books, including The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist in History) and Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (winner of the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Nonfiction). Her new book, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier, will be published by Scribner in March 2026.
Dr. Nelson writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Slate, and Time. She is an elected member of the prestigious Society of American Historians and was the 2024-2025 Rogers Distinguished Fellow in Nineteenth-Century American History at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
