Lecture Series
“Race,Removal and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States”
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.
The 2023 Lecture Series is sponsored by Virginia Humanities and the American Frontier Culture Foundation. Lee Enterprises is the exclusive media sponsor.