An Interview with Dr. Frances Levine

Writing from Both Sides

An Interview with Dr. Frances Levine by Kate Nelson

October 22 | 5:30pm
New Mexico History Museum Auditorium
113 Lincoln Avenue, Santa Fe, NM

Reception at event with pass hors d’oeuvres and alcoholic beverages

Ticket options are $50 for general admission, or $75 including signed copy of book.

ABOUT THE EVENT

This event is co-sponsored by HSFF, SAR, and NMHM.

The Santa Fe Trail can be viewed as a nation-changing east-to-west trade corridor, but a deeper history lies along its path. In recent and ongoing research, Dr. Frances Levine details the long-overlooked stories of women and children who also traveled the trail. They were teachers and nuns, African Americans and Jewish, captives and orphans, diarists and writers, Army and merchants’ wives. Through marriages, businesses, and educational institutions, they forged a living link between Santa Fe and St. Louis.

In this special program, Dr. Frances Levine, author of Crossings: Women on the Santa Fe Trail, and writer and editor Kate Nelson will highlight the stories of a few of these remarkable women and their contributions to a shared history. In ways both tragic and triumphant, their stories reveal how the Trail transformed the histories of New Mexico and Missouri. The book just won the Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá award from the NM Historical Society.

Illustrated left: The cover of Dr. Levine’s new book Crossings: Women on the Santa fe Trail.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Levine has had a distinguished career as a museum executive leader at both ends of the trail. She is a resident of St. Louis and has lived in Santa Fe since 1976. She began her career in Santa Fe as an archaeologist for the National Park Service followed by three years at the Bureau of Land Management in Santa Fe. She served as Division Head for Arts and Sciences at Santa Fe Community College until 2002, and then as Director of the Palace of the Governors/ New Mexico History Museum from then until she moved to St. Louis in 2014. Dr. Levine was the President and CEO of the Missouri Historical Society and Missouri History Museum from spring 2014 until summer 2022. Then spent a year as the Interim Executive Director of the Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum until November 2023. A native of Connecticut, Frances received her B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

Dr. Levine is the author, co-editor or contributor to several award-winning books including Our Prayers Are in This Place: Pecos Pueblo Identity over the Centuries (1999, UNM Press), Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe (2008 MNM Press, with MaryAnne Redding and Krista Elrick), and Telling New Mexico: A New History (2009 MNM Press, with Marta Weigle and Louise Stiver) as well as a chapter in All Trails Lead to Santa Fe (2010 with Gerald Gonzalez, Sunstone Press), Frontier Battles and Massacres: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives. (With Ron Wetherington, editors, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2014) and Doña Teresa Confronts the Spanish Inquisition: A Seventeenth Century New Mexican Drama (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2016) which won a Southwest Book Award by the Border Regional Library Association. Crossings just won the NM Book award in History.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Kansas native Kate Nelson attended a grade school built right next to the Santa Fe Trail. Her teachers said you could still see the wagon ruts, but even at a young age, she could divine the distance between legend and fact. That skill suited her well in a journalism career initially focused on politics, community, and justice; more recently on history, art, and culture. When Frances Levine hired her as the New Mexico History Museum’s marketing director, neither could predict they would become fast friends and occasional writing partners. Most recently, they collaborated on a time-traveling feature story for New Mexico Magazine that visited women past and present along the trail. (You can read it here: Uncovering Women's Stories on the Santa Fe Trail)

Kate recently retired as managing editor of New Mexico Magazine, a post she held earlier at The Albuquerque Tribune. She was also the longtime host of KNME’s In Focus and wrote the artist biography Helen Hardin: A Straight Line Curved. She lives at the end of a dirt road in Placitas, where she enjoys hiking, gardening, and staring at birds she still can’t positively ID.

This event is in conjunction with School for Advanced research and the New Mexico History Museum, with additional thanks to Barbara and Larry Good