Third Friday Presents: Why Chicago Matters to Early History with John Nelson

Friday, November 22nd at 7pm

John Nelson explored the critical importance of Chicago’s regional waterways in the centuries-long struggles between Indigenous peoples of the area and European colonizers. He outlined how local environments shaped collaboration and conflict along Chicago’s continental divide from the era of early contact into the 1830s. He discussed the way relations between Indigenous peoples, European empires, and settler states remained a contest over competing understandings of its landscapes and waterways. In this light, the eventual incorporation of Chicago as a space of US control can only be understood as a two-pronged conquest of both the local environment and the Native peoples who lived there.

John William Nelson, Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University, explores the ways ecology and geography shaped the terms of cross-cultural interaction between Native peoples and European colonizers, from first contact through the early republican era of the United States. He is the author of Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent, which explores how a particular local landscape along Chicago's continental divide influenced colonial encounters from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.