OI Colloquium with Steve Hackel
This paper will present preliminary results from an analysis of fertility, mortality and marriage patterns among more than 89,000 Indigenous Californians and some 19,000 settlers or pobladores who lived in California’s 21 missions, 4 presidios, and 3 pueblos between 1769 and 1850. Studying these two populations side by side raises important questions about differential outcomes from common ailments, and it challenges reigning assumptions about the transmission of infectious diseases from pobladores to Natives.
Born and raised in California, Steve Hackel earned his B.A. at Stanford University and his PhD in American History from Cornell University with specializations in early America and the American West. From 1994 to 1996 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Omohundro Institute. He taught at Oregon State University from 1996 to 2007 and joined the faculty at UCR in the fall of 2007. Within the larger field of American history, his research specializes on the Spanish Borderlands and the California Missions. He is especially interested in Native responses to colonialism, the effects of disease on colonial encounters, and new ways of visualizing these processes through digital history. His publications include Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850 (OIEAHC, 2005), Father Junípero Serra: California’s Founding Father (Hill and Wang/FSG, 2013), numerous essays on Native California, an American History textbook, and two edited volumes on early California. He is the General Editor of the Early California Population Project and the Director of both the Early California Cultural Atlas and The Pobladores Project: A Database of Early California Families and Communities. He is co-chair of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute’s Seminar on the Spanish Borderlands. He is writing a population history of early California to 1850 with an emphasis on immigration to the region during the colonial period and the simultaneous collapse of the Native population and the rapid growth of Californio families, developments that cannot be disentangled from one another.
ABOUT OI COLLOQUIA
The OI’s Colloquium Series is an ongoing seminar for scholars to present their work in progress for graduate students and colleagues. Advanced registration is required. All participants read the pre-circulated paper and prepare to engage in generous and generative feedback.
When we meet in person we are limited by the size of the OI’s conference room; online we limit registration to 40 (a typical size for the colloquium). No recordings are made of the discussions and no tweeting or posting on other social media platforms during the event is permitted in order to encourage this intellectual community of trusted exchange.
COPIES OF THE COLLOQUIUM PAPER ARE AVAILABLE ONE WEEK IN ADVANCE.
Contact Beverly Smith for your copy.
WATCH HERE.
Join historian Claudio Saunt (University of Georgia) for an OI-sponsored session of the National History Center’s Washington History Seminar. Usually convened in person at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC, the event will take place online.
Join OI Executive Director Karin Wulf on Monday, January 25, at 4:00 pm EST as she and WHS co-chair Eric Arnesen discuss Professor Saunt’s award-winning work Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (W.W. Norton, 2020) with him.
A joint venture of the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the History and Public Policy Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Washington History Seminar meets each week, January to May and September to December. The Washington History Seminar aims to facilitate understanding of contemporary affairs in light of historical knowledge of all times and all places and from a variety of perspectives.
OI Colloquium with Michael Blaakman
U.S. governments began selling future rights to huge swaths of unceded and unconquered Indian country in the 1780s and 90s, creating a form of property claim that shaped the land business. Situating public finance, land policy, and speculation within transnational debates about sovereignty and territoriality, Professor Blaakman will trace how white Americans of the early national era sought to circumvent Native power and persistence by forging an abstract property regime in real estate that did not yet exist—except in the teleology of settler colonialism.
Michael Blaakman is an assistant professor of History at Princeton University. A historian of revolutionary and early national America, his scholarship focuses on politics, empires, and North American borderlands, and his interests extend to include gender history, the history of capitalism, and microhistory.
Professor Blaakman’s first book project, Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic, investigates the political and financial culture of a frenzied land rush that swept the new republic in its first quarter-century. The project received the 2017 Manuscript Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press. With Emily Conroy-Krutz, he is editing a collection of essays that explore the imperial dimensions of the early American republic.
ABOUT OI COLLOQUIA
The OI’s Colloquium Series is an ongoing seminar for scholars to present their work in progress for graduate students and colleagues. Advanced registration is required. All participants read the pre-circulated paper and prepare to engage in generous and generative feedback.
When we meet in person we are limited by the size of the OI’s conference room; online we limit registration to 40 (a typical size for the colloquium). No recordings are made of the discussions and no tweeting or posting on other social media platforms during the event is permitted in order to encourage this intellectual community of trusted exchange.
COPIES OF THE COLLOQUIUM PAPER ARE AVAILABLE ONE WEEK IN ADVANCE.
Contact Beverly Smith to receive your copy.
