Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon

“A Historian Walks into a Bar…”
Fugitive Archives, ed. Martin Breuckner and Sandy Isenstadt
(University of Delaware Press, forthcoming 2020)

“Making Sense of Urban Gardens”
Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies (August 2015)

“Object Analysis of the Giant Pumpkin”
Environmental History 15 (4) (2010)

“Why Lewis and Clark Matter: History, Landscape and Regional Identity”
Historical Geography 35 (2007)

“Visions in Wood: Four Twentieth-Century Wood Sculptors”
Archives of American Art Journal (2003)

Parkman Bar, Parkman, WY. A good but unlikely place to discover an historical archive. Photo by Cindy Ott 

“A Historian Walks into a Bar…”
Fugitive Archives, ed. Martin Breuckner and Sandy Isenstadt
(University of Delaware Press, forthcoming 2020)

Howard Dill sits in a patch of Atlantic Giants, the variety he developed in the 1960s, ca. 1990. Credit: Don Langevin and GiantPumpkin.com.

“Object Analysis of the Giant Pumpkin”
Environmental History 15 (4)
(2010)

Lewis & Clark Motel, Bozeman, MT, 2004.  Photo by Cindy Ott

“Visions in Wood: Four Twentieth-Century Wood Sculptors”
Archives of American Art Journal
(2003)

I’ve been drawing since I was a kid. Over the years, I have worked as an illustrator, especially for archeologists, but also for the National Park Service. I have drawn 3,000-year-old jade creatures in Honduras; stone-ground tools from an ancient tin manufacturing site in central Anatolia, Turkey; and pots used for the daily payment of grain as well as a human burial at the 5,000-year-old site Tel Leihan in northeastern Syria. In recent years, I started doing colored pencil drawings of everyday life – no pencil, no eraser. I hope they offer a fun and compassionate view of human and animal natures.

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