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.

  • Ivana Radovanovic
  • Amy Billings

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