George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Alaina E. Roberts studies the intersection of Black and Native American life from the Civil War tothe modern day. She is the author of I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land, which uses archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction, connecting debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, fora short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma Statehood in 1907.

I’ve Been Here All the While was awarded the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize and the Western History Association’s John C. Ewers Award and W. Turrentine Jackson Book Prize. The book also received an honorable mention for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prizeand was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.

Dr. Roberts has published academic essays in the Western Historical Quarterly, the Journal of the Civil War Era, American Indian Quarterly, Southern Cultures, and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and written for mainstream outlets like TIME magazine, the Washington Post, and High Country News. Her researchhas been featured in CNN, the New York Times, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic.

Dr. Roberts is currently an Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh.