The adoption of firearms by American Indians between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries marked a turning point in the history of North America’s indigenous peoples – a cultural earthquake so profound that its impact has yet to be adequately measured. This lecture, based upon the book Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America, explores how Native American’s embracing of firearms transformed their cultures and empowered them to pursue their interests and defend their political and economic autonomy for over two centuries.

America’s foundational text famously declares: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But what did these concepts mean to the people living at the time they were first written? How have they been understood over the centuries since? And today, do we still see these as “self-evident truths?” If so, have we realized the full potential of their promise?

From pumpkin pies to johnnycakes, maple syrup, roast turkey, and cornmeal cakes, the history of “traditional” New England cuisine is rooted in Indigenous knowledge and traditional foodways. Join us for a cooking demonstration and discussion that will place Indigenous ways of knowing and tradition-keeping into conversation with AAS archival materials to examine the lasting impact of settler colonialism in the Eastern Woodlands region.

Textual Editing and the Future of Scholarly Editions: A Conference on the Bicentennial of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy

Panel 3 - "Textual Editing Beyond the Print Edition of the Canonical Writer"

Chair and Keynote:

John Bryant (Professor Emeritus of English, Hofstra University)

In this program, poet David Mills will read from and reflect upon the research behind his recent collection, Boneyarn, the first-ever book of poems about slavery in New York City. The city holds the oldest and largest slave cemetery in the United States—the African Burial Ground—which was open from 1712 to 1795 and is located in Wall Street’s shadows. Fifteen thousand enslaved and free Blacks, some Native Americans, and poor whites are buried there. Mills creatively “excavates” the tragedies and triumphs of New York’s enslaved and free Black community.