“‘The Land in Controversy’: Indians, Colonists, and the Battle for the Hudson Valley in the 1760s,” lecture by Dr. James Merrell

In the summer of 1766 farmers on the east side of the Hudson River opened fire on British redcoats. Meanwhile, on the east side of the Atlantic Ocean, the Wappinger Indian leader Daniel Nimham met with British officials to get his people’s homeland back. “The Land in Controversy”–as some at the time called these disputes–sheds light on a strange, forgotten world, a world where colonists and Indians mixed and mingled, where colonists ultimately “went on the warpath”–and Indians hired attorneys.

 James Merrell, the Lucy Maynard Salmon Professor of History at Vassar College, studied at Lawrence University and Oxford University before receiving his PhD from The Johns Hopkins University in 1982. Before coming to Vassar in 1984, he was a Fellow at The Newberry Library Center for the History of the American Indian in Chicago and the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia. He has also received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Merrell is the author of numerous books and articles on Indians and other early Americans.