Last time, we passed along the news that James Hulse had died. The longtime UNR history professor was ninety-two. And a good amount of what we know about Nevada history is the result of his work.
After a state history for middle schoolers, a history of Lincoln County, and a history of the university, Hulse published Forty Years in the Wilderness: Impressions of Nevada, 1940-1980, in 1986. It had elements of memoir, since it included some discussions of things he had been involved in. And let’s just say, he had no problem with getting involved. He was a longtime member of the American Civil Liberties Union. He served on the Nevada Commission for Equal Rights. He was a leader of Common Cause, a nationwide reform group committed to good government. He worked on behalf of nuclear test bans and against locating nuclear waste in Nevada.
But Forty Years in the Wilderness was also a history, detailing Nevada’s merits and problems from his perspective during a period of great change in the state. Not that Hulse approved of all of the changes. He disliked how reliant Nevada had become on a gaming and tourism economy. He believed in the need for economic diversification … which actually sounds like what the governor of the state was saying at the time! But he also voiced his concerns about the environment, both
physical and cultural, the history of exploitation of land resources and human resources. The book probably shouldn’t have been that controversial, but some people at the time felt that he was too liberal, or too anti-gaming, or too vocal.
Hulse followed that three years later with The Silver State: Nevada’s Heritage Reinterpreted. In 1973, his friend and teacher Russell Elliott had published the first major textbook on Nevada’s history in a generation or two; another UNR professor, William Rowley, helped Elliott update it in 1987. But Hulse and others felt the need for a more general, less academic history of the state. The Silver State joined Elliott’s and Rowley’s work describing and analyzing Nevada’s past from the beginning to the present. Hulse’s book gained a wide readership and went through three editions.
Meanwhile, Hulse continued to teach and write, and remained involved as a scholar and an activist. He published a history of Nevada’s libraries. Then came Nevada’s Environmental Legacy: Progress or Plunder. His final major book, in 2017, was A Great Basin Mosaic: The Cultures of Rural Nevada, which he, as a Pioche native, certainly knew something about.
Actually, Jim Hulse knew a lot about a lot of things. He also was a quiet, determined force for the causes he believed in. And if we may be permitted a more personal word, as Hulse got older and the university press hoped for a new textbook on Nevada, the author of Nevada Yesterdays took on the task. What he wrote didn’t replace Hulse’s The Silver State, but it certainly could have cut into its readership. Hulse’s response was to write a blurb for that new textbook. A lot of people wouldn’t have done that. Jim Hulse wasn’t like a lot of people. He was unique, and a true Nevadan, and we will miss him.
