Reunions 2024 Schedule of Events

Romantic Rocks, Indigenous Traces: Poetry, Geology and Empire in Early America (A GradShares Event)

Princeton University Press Lobby - 41 William St.

How did geology dictate America’s expansion westward throughout the 19th century? How did rocks prophesy Manifest Destiny, and how did indigenous peoples resist such prophecies? This talk will explore these questions through two writers who had tremendous agency over the colonial, industrial and literary development of the Great Lakes region in the early 19th century: the geologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and the Ojibwe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft.