Pennsylvania illustrates the most effective way for them to achieve more autonomy over their land, security, and diplomacy in a time of great uncertainty. Violence along the frontier after General Edward Braddock’s defeat outside Fort Duquesne at the outset of the Seven Years’ War, reveals the successful strategies employed by the Delaware to resist, deform, and restructure the imperial and colonial institutions that were created to control them. Historians often equate violence on the frontier with racial, ethnic, or cultural conflict between natives and white settlers or as a romantic struggle of independent frontier families against savage Indian warriors who were bent on destruction, murder, and kidnapping. Instead, Delaware performative violence was a way to reorder the world in which they lived by reshaping settlement, initiating negotiations for loyalty, and redefining frontier political relationships.
Dr. Brandon Downing is Associate Professor of History at Marietta College. His research focuses on early American history, particularly native-white relations along the frontier. He teaches courses in Colonial America, American Revolutionary Era, Native American History, and Public History. His current book manuscript is “‘Barbarous Tribes of Savages’: Violence and Conflict on the Periphery of Empire in the Colonial Mid-Atlantic, 1750-1776.” As a member of the Ohio Humanities Speakers Bureau, he gives talks on the Northwest Territory, the War of 1812, and the role Marietta played in the development of the new nation. He is also working with scholars across Ohio to celebrate the state’s contributions to the United States over the past 250 years.
This event is sponsored by the Washington County Public Library, and is FREE and open to the public.
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