2023 Lecture Series, “Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States”

Join the Frontier Culture Museum on Tuesday, November 14, 2023 for the final installment of our 2023 Lecture Series. This month’s lecture is “Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States” presented by Dr. Samantha Seeley from the University of Richmond. The lecture starts at 6:00 PM in the Dairy Barn Lecture Hall and is free and open to the public.

Who had the right to live within the newly united states of America? In the country’s founding decades, federal and state politicians debated which categories of people could remain and which should be subject to removal. The result was a white Republic, purposefully constructed through contentious legal, political, and diplomatic negotiation. But removal, like the right to remain, was a battle fought on multiple fronts. It encompassed Indigenous leaders’ determination to expel white settlers from Native lands and free African Americans’ legal maneuvers to remain within the states that sought to drive them out. In the middle states poised between the edges of slavery and freedom, removal was both warmly embraced and hotly contested.