Linford Fisher, Brown Univeristy
December 9, time TBD
Location TBD

As we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, it is important to ask what this moment meant for different non-white populations. This public presentation investigates some of the hidden undersides of the Revolutionary War experienced by Native peoples. Some were already enslaved and sought their freedom through court cases and by running away. Others found their freedom by fighting either for or against the Americans. Still other nations found themselves in the crosshairs of an expansive American colonialism that sought to push them out of the homelands. Drawing from fifteen years of research and Fisher’s recently-published book, Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History, these stories us to consider a more complex and complicated legacy of the American Revolution.

Linford D. Fisher is Professor of History at Brown University and a specialist in early American and Native American history. He is the author of The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (2012), the co-author of two edited collections on Roger Williams, and has published a dozen academic essays. He is also the Principal Investigator of a tribal collaborative database project titled Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas (www.stolenrelations.org). His new book is Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History (Liveright, 2026).