Redrawing History: 2019 Teacher Seminar

Native Peoples, Settlers, and European Empires in North America, 1600–1840

July 28–August 3, 2019

In summer 2019, the Library Company of Philadelphia will partner with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History to offer a special institute for teachers interested in innovative methods to teaching colonial history. The institute, supported in part by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, will present new ways for middle school and high school students to understand the multicultural origins of the United States.

Led by Daniel K. Richter, Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania, “Native Peoples, Settlers, and European Empires in North America, 1600–1840” will examine American colonization as a many-sided contest between empires, during which dozens of rivalrous Native peoples contended with equally rivalrous English, French, Dutch, and Spanish empires. The kaleidoscopic struggles came to a head in the era of the American Revolution, in which settler colonists simultaneously rebelled against British imperial rule and fought with Native Americans for dominance in the trans-Appalachian west. That contest continued through the period of the War of 1812 and the era of Indian Removal in the 1830s, which saw the aggressively expansionist new nation that settlers had created seemingly triumph over both its indigenous and imperial rivals.

The institute will be held at the University of Pennsylvania between July 28 and August 3, 2019. Participants will be provided with meals and accommodations for the duration of the institute and reimbursed up to $400 for travel expenses. To learn more or apply for this exciting opportunity visit the 2019 Teacher Seminars page at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

Daniel Richter, Professor of American History and Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Daniel Richter, Professor of American History and Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania Dr. Daniel K. Richter is the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Prior to joining the Penn faculty, he taught at Dickinson College and the University of East Anglia. In 2016, Daniel received the Provost’s Award for Distinguished PhD Teaching and Mentoring from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2017-18 he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and was named the Robert C. Ritchie Distinguished Fellow in Early American History at The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino California.

His most recent book is Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). He is also author of Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Harvard University Press, 2011), which was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the ten best non-fiction books of 2011; Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Harvard University Press, 2001), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History and won the Louis Gottschalk Prize in Eighteenth-Century History; and The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), which received both the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians.

He is currently working on a book tentatively titled The Lords Proprietors: Land and Power in Seventeenth-Century America, under contract with Harvard University Press.

Redrawing History: Indigenous Perspectives on Colonial America has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.