Meanwhile, back in Gotham City...

Please excuse the self-indulgence --it is the internet after all; what else is it good for?--but I wanted to give an update on my other life as an historian. I am currently writing my dissertation on American Indian politics in the Trans-Missouri West in the first half of the nineteenth-century. For those interested in Native American history and 19th-century history in general, an article I wrote a few years ago has just come out in Ethnohistory and since I have a soapbox already in place, I thought I would use it.

http://www.ethnohistory.org/sections/journal/current_issue.php

And here is the abstract.

The historical legacy of the eastern prairies between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in the 1830s is dominated by a series of violent confrontations between Indians and the U.S. Army. Though the "Black Hawk Wars" involved just a few of the Indians living along the Mississippi River watershed, these conflicts epitomize commonly held understandings of Indian-white relations in the region: a violent clash of cultures in which Indians valiantly, but unsuccessfully, fought against American expansion. Contradicting this binary, Iowa Indian leaders understood that their communities had potentially much to gain from aspects of white expansion. The primary purpose of this article is to look beyond circumscribed definitions of Indian-white relations and to illustrate how the Iowa used an assortment of political, economic, and social tactics to help shape their rapidly changing world. Confronting declining wildlife resources, the Iowa began reshaping their economies toward what they hoped would be a more stable agricultural future while initiating diplomatic relations with American agents to help mitigate recurring and more immediate tensions with powerful Indian adversaries.

I believe you can access my article without signing up by clicking first on the article and then on the "get pdf" link to the right. I would recommend reading the introductions and commentary first to give you some context, but you may have to sign up for those.