Celebrating Dr. Gary Stein

Dr. Gary Stein completed his appointment as Postdoctoral Researcher for the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW) in December. Over the duration of the appointment, he served as the ICW liaison connecting with the Center for the Study of Guns and Society (CSGS) at Wesleyan University. Plans for collaboration, including a joint conference in Los Angeles, are underway. Dr. Stein also served as a researcher on the CSGS project looking at historical laws and practices of firearm use in the U.S. Stein’s research focused on California, one of the five states being examined, post statehood. He analyzed sources such as codes, laws, and ordinances, 1850-1923, ranging from state to municipal. The laws consisted of prohibitions or requirements for a permit to carry, conceal, discharge a firearm. The compiled results, in a spreadsheet Stein created, is now part of the CSGS database.

Dr. Stein submitted an article to the Great Plains Quarterly journal, which is currently under review. He transformed a dissertation chapter into the article, titled, “Lost Means and Blighted Hopes”: Communal Experiments and the Public Land Grid on the Plains of Kansas, 1850–1912. Set in Kansas, the essay investigates the U.S. Public Land Survey System and its “gridding” of the Public Domain, still conspicuous across the Great Plains. Stein analyzes the efforts of intentionally independent societies that sought to live self-sufficiently outside the rigid structures of mainstream American society. Focusing on several communities in Kansas, the essay explores how they resisted the apparatus of the grid, posing a direct challenge to the established system. These groups expressed or practiced these challenges through the shapes they built and spaces they inhabited. But they consistently encountered opposition to the formation and existence of their collective experiments. Dr. Stein’s essay works to uncover some of the persistent obstacles faced in the struggle for freedom and equality, and the innovative attempts to achieve this elusive American dream.