Why do humans need ghosts? And what do ghosts have to teach us? In her new book "This Haunted Land: Reckoning with Ghosts and the Stories that Shape America," Betsy Gaines Quammen takes us on a journey into haunted towns, forgotten lives, and abandoned places. From a once-booming uranium mining community in Colorado to a fort on the coast of Florida that predates the United States itself, this exploration of memory, mourning, folklore, and social anxiety shows that politicized efforts to rewrite history can only be defeated by bearing witness to the specters of the past.
Betsy Gaines Quammen is a historian and writer, whose books include "This Haunted Land," "American Zion," and "True West." She collects stories of haunted histories and wild landscapes to make sense of a place shaped by colonization, extraction, rebellion, myth, beauty, and nature. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Daily News, and History News Network. She received a Ph.D. in history from Montana State University, a MS in environmental studies from University of Montana, and a BA in English from Colorado College. She lives in Bozeman, Montana, with her spouse, writer David Quammen.
