Dr. Aaron Hyams, a visiting assistant professor of history at Sam Houston State University, will speak at Henderson State University Oct. 30 about the struggles of native peoples during the nation’s reconstruction era.
His presentation is entitled “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, and Dispossessed Indians: Native Peoples and the Fuller Ramifications of the Republican Vision.”
Hyams’ teaching and research interests include 19th and 20th Century Native Americans, Trans-Missouri American West, American far-left political traditions and American social and cultural movements.
“Reconstruction attempted to radically reshape American notions of citizenship and challenged the construction of the United States as an Anglo-American ethno-state,” Hyams said. “Yet, as the freemen expressed their franchise for the first time in the late 1860s, in Indian Country death and destruction prevailed from Apacheria to the Powder River.”
Sponsored by Henderson State’s History Club, Hyams’ presentation will start at 7 p.m. in the Garrison Center Lecture Hall.