The American Studies Major at Ramapo College

Carter Jones Meyer Associate Professor of History

Office:		B 234
Campus Phone:		(201) 684-7474
Email:		cmeyer@ramapo.edu
Web Page:

Educational background : B.A. in American Studies, Skidmore College; A.M. and Ph.D. in American Civilization, Brown University.

Arrived at Ramapo: 1992

Areas of specialization : Late nineteenth and early twentieth century American history, history of the American West, American Indian history.

Courses regularly taught: Introduction to U.S. History II, Turn of the Century America, The American West, America Between the Wars, 1919-1941, Native Americans, History Seminar, Native Americans in the Post-Columbian World (MALS Program).

Scholarship: Co-editor with Diana Royer, Selling the Indian: Commercializing and Appropriating American Indian Cultures (University of Arizona Press, 2001). I've also published on American Indians and the history of the West in Western Historical Quarterly, New Mexico Historical Review and American Indian Quarterly . I am currently working on a book-length study of Edgar L. Hewett, an archaeologist and educator who founded the School of American Research and Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe and who played an instrumental role in constructing a regional identity for the Southwest early in the twentieth century.

Points of interest: I have always been interested in how cultures interact with one another in the United States, and so the West, where a particularly diverse group of people have met and interacted over time, has been a fruitful “laboratory” for my work. I am especially interested in relations between Indians and Whites in the history of the West, and I also explore the ways regional identity was constructed in the Southwest, where power and authority were situated in the process, how "authentic" culture was determined, and then how it was promoted and among whom. Art, music, literature and film provide an important interdisciplinary dimension to this work, a dimension that also informs my teaching in the History and American Studies programs at Ramapo.