Join us for the 2023-2024 William and Mary Quarterly Lecture by Matthew Kruer (University of Chicago) at 5:00 pm ET on February 6, 2024 in William & Mary’s Blow Hall, room 334. The lecture is titled “Colonial Anarchy, Indigenous Power: ‘Bacon’s Rebellion’ and the Susquehannock Nation.”

Reservations are not necessary and seating will be first-come, first-served.

Kruer will reexamine the outbreak of civil unrest in English colonies during the 1670s in light of the activities of the Susquehannock nation. Despite their small size—only a few hundred people in 1675—Susquehannock migration, diplomacy, warfare, and relationships with other Indigenous nations exposed fractures in settler societies. Exerting power wildly disproportionate to their numbers, Susquehannock actions challenged English colonialism and transformed Anglo-Indigenous affairs.

Matthew Kruer is an assistant professor in the department of History and the department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. His book, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2022), examines the relationship between the Susquehannock nation, the outbreak of multiple colonial rebellions, and the reconfiguration of Anglo-Indigenous relations in the 1670s and 1680s. His current research investigates Indigenous articulations and enactments of sovereignty and their influence on settler colonialism in the British empire.

The William and Mary Quarterly Lecture series features scholars whose work is transforming our sense of the past.