Dixie State University’s weekly lecture series “Dixie Forum: A Window on the World” will kick off the 2016–17 academic year with a presentation by Ray Kuehne titled “The Origin and Significance of Utah’s Federally Managed Public Lands.”
Kuehne will offer the lecture from noon to 12:50 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 30, at the Dunford Auditorium in the Browning Resource Center on the DSU campus. The event is free and open to the public.
The Constitution’s Article IV gives Congress the authority to control the nation’s public land. After the U.S. declared independence in 1776, the formation of the first national government — the Articles of Confederation — was delayed for five years due to conflicting state claims to land west of the Allegheny Mountains. In the resolution of that conflict in 1781, the Confederation Congress was given control over the western public domain six years before the Constitution was written in 1787.
Kuehne’s Dixie Forum presentation will review western land issues during the colonial and revolutionary periods, why approval of the Articles of Confederation was delayed for five years, and how the 1781 resolution led to Article IV in the Constitution. The lecture will conclude with a discussion on the Supreme Court’s continued endorsement of Article IV’s authority.
Kuehne attended the University of Utah and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a bachelor’s degree in history. He also received a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Germany for one year, followed by a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at the University of Virginia.
After years of academic training, Kuehne joined the management-training program of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. After assignments in the areas of financial and contract management and congressional relations, he was appointed as the staff director for the National Diabetes Advisory Board. Soon thereafter, he was asked to provide the same staff services, simultaneously, for national advisory boards in the areas of kidney, arthritic, urologic, and digestive diseases.
Upon retirement, Kuehne and his wife, Genie, moved to St. George. In his spare time, Kuehne writes articles about constitutional origins and historical development of national public lands.
Next week, Dixie Forum will team up with the DOCUTAH International Documentary Film Festival for the premiere of this year’s filmmaker chats. Set for noon on Sept. 6, the opening day of the festival, the seminar will take place in the Robert N. and Peggy Sears Art Museum Gallery of the Delores Doré Eccles Fine Arts Center on the DSU campus and focus on the storytelling process of documentary films. The filmmaker chats will continue Sept. 6 through 9 at noon, 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. each day and discuss a variety of filmmaking topics.
More information on Dixie State University’s Dixie Forum series is available from DSU forum coordinator John Burns at (435) 879-4712 or burns@dixie.edu or at humanities.dixie.edu/the-dixie-forum.
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