The Vermont Historical Society will host “Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England” with Jean M. O’Brien, a virtual program on Wednesday, January 19th.
Drawing on more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island written between 1820 and 1880, O’Brien explores how these narratives inculcated the myth of Indian extinction, a myth that has stubbornly remained in the American consciousness.
O’Brien argues that local histories became a primary means by which European Americans asserted their own modernity while denying it to Indian peoples. [Read more…] about Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence