September 7, 2023 Christina Snyder

Evening Lecture 
Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson

Christina Snyder, Penn State

6 PM lecture followed by Q&A and booksigning
The Texana Room, Fondren Library, 6404 Robert S. Hyer Lane, SMU

Christina Snyder will speak about her book, Great Crossings: Indian Settlers & Slaves in the Age of Jackson (Oxford, 2017), which offers a new perspective on Jacksonian America. Great Crossings was an experimental community in Kentucky where America’s diverse peoples intersected and articulated new visions of the continent’s future. The town got its name the previous century, when bison habitually crossed Elkhorn Creek at that shallow spot. By the nineteenth century, the bison had disappeared, but Great Crossings became a different kind of meeting ground, home to the first federal American Indian school and a famous interracial family. The story of this community reflects, in microcosm, the large-scale forces shaping the continent between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, but the place itself animated some of those changes, profoundly impacting those involved and influencing national policies in the United States and in Indian country. This talk examines how U.S. imperialism during the era of Indian Removal reshaped the geography of American unfreedom, bringing conflicting ideologies of race and slavery into contact with one another, and the strategies that people developed to navigate the shifting terrain.

Christina Snyder is McCabe Greer Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of the award-winning Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America.

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