Presentation for the American Historical Association Conference (3-6 January 2020, Philadelphia, PA) Abstract: In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American and French settler colonial metropoles installed new governments, laws, and people in the hereditary lands of Native Americans and autochthonous Algerians, but they never successfully replaced all Indigenous…
Tag: Indigenous People
History of the Old Northwest
Posted in Digital Humanities, and Percolating Ideas
A work-in-progress timeline by DGHM 150: Digital Humanities Studio students to make sense of the complicated history of what is now the American Midwest from 1754 to 1795:
Between 1776 and 1783, the newly formed United States was fighting for its life against Great Britain while at the same time settlers advanced into the frontier west and north, inciting Indian opposition and occasional reprisals as squatters encroached on Native lands. In 1777, George Rogers Clark, a surveyor and…
Introductory Text Analysis with Google’s ngram Viewer
Posted in Digital Humanities, and Percolating Ideas
Simple curiosity motivated the creation of these few graphs, but they will also be used in a graduate text analysis for humanists class as examples of the kinds of questions we can ask and answer with simple and accessible tools. Is there a correlation between uses of the words “frontier,”…
In the years prior to the American Revolution, the Ohio and Wabash Valleys, along with the Illinois Country, was a world of interconnected villages characterized by face-to-face interactions. In the eighteenth century, this territory was home to semi-nomadic and agricultural Native communities, including (from east to west) Delaware, Shawnee, Wyandot,…
Settler Colonialism in the US and French Algeria: A Comparative Overview
Posted in Percolating Ideas
I am not the first to make the remarkable comparison between the colonization of French Algeria and that of United States’ territories. Rather, mid-nineteenth century French statesmen conscientiously used the United States as a benchmark of progress in their Algerian endeavor. This may account for at least some of the…
Settler Colonialism Uncovered: A New DH Project on the Horizon
Posted in Digital Humanities, and News and Notes
As a Cultural Heritage Informatics fellow, I am taking the first step toward making information about two prototypes of settler colonization – the United States and French Algeria – available for high school and undergraduate students and educators, as well as early-stage researchers and the general public through a website,…
Setting up a Comparison: Settler Colonization in the American Midwest and French Algeria
Posted in Percolating Ideas
Why do a comparative study? Why choose these two very different and seemingly unrelated regions? I’ve received these questions often enough that they merit an explanation. Please bear with me as my response is a little lengthy. This is a complex project! I’ve added subheadings to make navigating this post…
Very briefly, this post will summarize scholars’ current understanding of what settler colonialism is and characteristics of settler colonies. Examples will be drawn from the two case studies I examine in my comparative research on the development of settler colonies in the American Midwest and French colonial Algeria. Please Note:…