Don’t miss hearing from the recently announced Pulitzer Prize–winning author Kathleen DuVal about her book Native Nations, “a magisterial overview of a thousand years of Native American history” (The New York Review of Books), exploring the rise of ancient cities around 1000 CE through to the challenges of sovereignty in this millennium. DuVal and fellow Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Nicole Eustace will bring to life the history of these lands and Native peoples, offering a powerful and deeply informed conversation.

Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations. North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged with egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies. When Europeans showed up in the sixteenth century, they encountered societies they did not understand. For centuries after, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand, using the Europeans in pursuit of their own interests: the Mohawks closely controlled trade with the Dutch and influenced global markets; the Quapaws manipulated French colonists; and, even after the American Revolution, Indigenous people commanded much of the continent’s land and resources, especially Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the Cherokees and Kiowas who regulated the passage of white settlers across their territory.

An important addition to the growing tradition of North American history centered on Indigenous nations, Native Nations shows how the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remained a constant.  Don’t miss hearing from author Kathleen DuVal and her discussion with fellow historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Nicole Eustace in the days before Indigenous People’s Day.

Kathleen DuVal is a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian. She is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches early American and American Indian history. Her previous work includes Independence Lost, which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize, and The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. She is a coauthor of Give Me Liberty! and coeditor of Interpreting a Continent: Voices from Colonial America.

Nicole Eustace is Julius Silver Family Professor of History at New York University, where she directs the NYU Atlantic History Workshop. Her most recent book, Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America, won the Pulitzer Prize in History and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians.  It was a finalist for the National Book Award and was named Best Book the Year by TIME,  Smithsonian, Boston Globe, and Kirkus Reviews. She is also the author of 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism and Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution. She is currently a Guggenheim fellow.

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Our special thanks to American Inspiration Series Sponsors Susan K. and John D. Thompson.