Thursday, March 18, 2021 12pm to 1:30pm
About this Event
Resident Fellows Speaker Series
Andrew Isenberg, Hall Distinguished Professor of American History
The Experimental Empire: Indians, Squatters, and Slaves in the North American Borderlands
THU MAR 18, 12:00 - 1:30 PM, via Zoom, please register HERE.
Experimental Empire challenges the popular notion that expansion of the United States across North America in the early nineteenth century was a foregone conclusion. Instead, it argues that the U.S. presence in its borderlands was tenuous. Native groups maintained their autonomy; landless whites settled on unregulated lands; and enslaved people fled to the borderlands. American critics of a market-oriented, expansionist, slave-holding society saw the borderlands as a grand laboratory, where, free of the constraints of the dominant culture, under the protection of Native groups or one of America’s imperial competitors, they could experiment with their particular visions for society. Those experiments included vaccinating Indigenous people against smallpox, helping them to establish autonomous enclaves, and resettling freed slaves in the borderlands. In the first part of the nineteenth century, borderlands were characterized by experimentation, political accommodation, cultural malleability, and the empowerment of Indians, squatters, and slaves.