A working archive of an academic life.

I am Paula Petrik, Professor of History and Art History at George Mason University. My research has concentrated on the American West — particularly the nineteenth-century Rocky Mountain mining frontier — and on the practical questions of how academic historians can use the web responsibly for teaching, archiving, and citation.

My first book, No Step Backward: Women and Family on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier, Helena, Montana 1865–1900, was published in 1987. Subsequent work has moved between Western women's history, material culture, and the pedagogy of digital history.

This site is the working archive: course sites, research projects, and tutorials kept here since the late 1990s. The full table of contents is in the left rail; the highlights are below.