This program will be held virtually on Zoom. Please register for free in advance here.
Join us for a virtual talk with Kathleen DuVal, whose book Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution tells a story as rich and significant as that of the Founding Fathers: the history of the Revolutionary Era as experienced by enslaved people, Native Americans, women, and British loyalists living on the Gulf Coast, from Florida to New Orleans.
While the thirteen rebelling colonies came to blows with the British Empire over tariffs and parliamentary representation, Spanish forces clashed with Britain’s strained army to carve up the Gulf Coast, as both sides competed for allegiances with the powerful Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek nations who inhabited the region. Meanwhile, enslaved African Americans had little control over their own lives, but some individuals found opportunities to expand their freedoms during the war.
Independence Lost is winner of the Deep South Book Prize, the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New Jersey History Prize, and the Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award, as well as a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. It is available for purchase online through the Newberry's Rosenberg Bookshop.
About the speaker:
Kathleen DuVal is Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on cross cultural relations on North American borderlands from the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries. In addition to Independence Lost, DuVal’s books include Interpreting a Continent: Voices from Colonial America, co-edited with John DuVal, and The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. DuVal has received the Guggenheim Fellowship in the Humanities, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The Colonial History Lecture Series is cosponsored by the Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Illinois, in partnership with the History Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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