Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain - Virtual Lecture 2.25.24

For the first lecture in our program series, Migration and Removal: Documenting the Historically Underrepresented Voices of Westward Expansion, the Litchfield Historical Society is delighted to host historian and author Samantha Seeley for a virtual discussion on her book, Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States on Sunday, February 25th at 3:00 p.m. on Zoom.
Who had the right to live within the new United States of America? In the decades after the American Revolution, federal and state politicians debated which categories of people could remain and which should be subject to removal. The result was a white Republic, purposefully constructed through contentious legal, political, and diplomatic negotiation. But removal, like the right to remain, was a battle fought on multiple fronts. It encompassed Indigenous leaders’ determination to expel white settlers from Native lands and free African Americans’ legal maneuvers to remain within the states that sought to drive them out. In the middle states poised between the edges of slavery and freedom, removal was both warmly embraced and hotly contested.
Samantha Seeley is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Richmond where she specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century North American history and the early United States. Her book, Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States, was published in 2021 by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press. The book won the 2021 Merle Curti Prize and honorable mention for the James Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians as well as the 2021 Jon Gjerde Prize from the Midwestern History Association.
This program series is made possible through the generous support of the family of John Mayher.
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The mission of the Litchfield Historical Society is to illuminate the rich and nationally-significant history of Litchfield, enabling each of us to construct meaning from the past for the present and future. Located in Litchfield, Connecticut, we are home to the Litchfield History Museum and the Tapping Reeve House and the Litchfield Law School, America’s first law school.