George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Dr. Stephen Kantrowitz, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will deliver the 2018 Steven and Janice Brose Distinguished Lectures. The three lectures, entitled Citizenship and Civilization: A Ho-Chunk History of the Civil War Era, will take place on November 1, 2, and 3 in Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library, and are free and open to the public. This lecture series is sponsored by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State through the generosity of an endowment by Steven and Janice Brose.

Thursday, November 1, 6:00 p.m.:  Hiding in Plain Sight: Native Americans and the History of American Citizenship

Friday, November 2, 6:00pm: “The Habits and Customs of Civilization”: Citizenship and Belonging in the Ho-Chunk Diaspora

Saturday, November 3, 4:00 p.m.: Conquered Citizens: Ho-Chunks and Settlers in Post-Removal Teejop

This lecture series will ask, how did Native Americans shape the emergence of national citizenship in the 1860s, and how did national citizenship reshape Indian life? How were jurisdiction and allegiance in the Civil War era mediated by notions of “civilization”? Citizenship and Civilization explores these questions through the removal, diaspora, defiance, and creativity of Wisconsin’s Ho-Chunk people, the settlers who sought to displace them, and the officials and politicians who oversaw the confusing and often violent world of the mid-nineteenth-century Midwest.

Dr. Kantrowitz is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where his scholarship and teaching focus on race, politics, and citizenship in the nineteenth century. His publications include More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (Penguin, 2012), which was a finalist for both the Lincoln Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize; Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (UNC Press, 2000), which won several scholarly awards and was a New York Times Notable Book; articles in The Journal of American History, Boston Review, and other periodicals; and an edited collection on the history of African American Freemasonry, All Men Free and Brethren (Cornell University Press, 2013). He has been a Fulbright Distinguished Chair of American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and an OAH Distinguished Lecturer. He is currently a Senior Fellow at UW-Madison’s Institute for Research in the Humanities.