Tuskegee University

Department Member, History and Political Science

Other Affiliations: Auburn University, History

Doctoral candidate

Graduate School

About

My dissertation will use travelers’ accounts in English, German, and French to shed light on the Creek Indians’ struggle against forced removal from the American South. It’s currently titled, “The Vanishing Indian and the Creek Struggle to Survive in Georgia and Alabama, 1800-1835.”

In May 2009 I presented a conference paper on the 1813 Creek “Red Stick” delegation to Spanish Pensacola, and the subsequent Battle of Burnt Corn, the fight that started the Creek War of 1813-1814. An expanded version will appear as a chapter in <i>Tohopeka: Rethinking the Creek War and War of 1812</i>, ed. Kathryn E. Holland Braund (University of Alabama Press, pending).

For my dissertation, as well as future projects, I am studying the diaries of Lukas Vischer, a Swiss traveler in the United States, 1823-1828. His travels ranged from Canada to the Mississippi Valley. Of particular interest are his notes on Creek, Seneca, Kahnawake Mohawk, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, and Quebecois Huron Indians, as well as Indians living in cities.

Vischer’s papers (at the Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt, Basel, Switzerland, and in private hands) provide a valuable transatlantic perspective on many aspects of the “early republic” around the sesquicentennial year, 1826, as well as insight into migration and the meaning of “Amerika” for German-speaking Europeans at this time. I expect to be working with these documents for years to come, and would welcome collaboration. (Vischer is best known today for his career as an artifact collector in Mexico. His experience of “Indian antiquities” in the U.S. points toward his later activities in Mexico.)

I also have an abiding interest in the history of Brewton, Alabama (at the confluence of Burnt Corn Creek and Murder Creek), and intend to eventually publish something useful about this distinctive but easily overlooked district. I’ve spent some time with the McMillan family papers in Brewton and the Pace Library archive at the University of West Florida, Pensacola.

I'm also interested in the intersection of the African diaspora with the southeastern Indians, and hope to contribute in this area.

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