Barbara Krauthamer is an associate professor of history and an associate dean of the graduate school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She teaches courses on nineteenth-century African American history, including the history of black women's lives in the Americas. She is the author of Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (2013) and a coauthor, with Deborah Willis, of Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (2012), which received an honorable mention in nonfiction from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, was named a Choice Top 25 outstanding academic book, and received the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in nonfiction. In 2007 Krauthamer received the Association of Black Women Historians' Letitia Brown Memorial Prize. She has also received awards and funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Stanford University, Yale University, the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is currently working on a book about enslaved women's resistance and mobility in the era of the American Revolution.
This talk focuses on the unique history of emancipation and Reconstruction in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations, and also addresses emancipation in the Cherokee and Creek nations. The Choctaw and Chickasaw nations did not abolish slavery and emancipate Black people from bondage until the spring of 1866. This talk explores the Indian-U.S. diplomatic relations and the federal policies of the United States that allowed slavery to persist for a full year after the Civil War had ended. This talk highlights U.S. efforts to extend federal Reconstruction policies over the sovereign Indian nations and also discusses the intersecting histories of the post-Civil War South and West.