Selected Publications
- “The Indian Boundary Line and the Imperialization of US-Indian Affairs,” in Michael Blaakman and Emily Conroy-Krutz, eds., Making a Republic Imperial (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, in press, May 2023).
- “’A Better View of the Country’: A Missouri Settlement Map by William Clark,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 79, no. 1 (Jan. 2022): 89-120.
- “The Boon’s Lick Land Rush and the Coming of the Missouri Crisis,” in Jeffrey Pasley and John Craig Hammond, eds., A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200 (University of Missouri Press, 2021), 77-112.
- “Land-Grab Universities,” High Country News 52, no. 4 (April 2020): 32-45. Co-authored with Tristan Ahtone. Also see: Landgrabu.org.
- “Accounting for Conquest: The Price of the Louisiana Purchase of Indian Country,”
- Journal of American History 104, no. 4 (March 2017): 921-942.
FRIAS Project
Superintending Conquest: United States Expansion along the Indian Boundary Line
Superintending Conquest offers a new history of US colonial expansion, told through an institutional biography of the St. Louis Superintendency (SLS), the organization responsible for managing US-Indian affairs over much of the trans-Mississippi West in the first half of the nineteenth century. By combining archival research with historical GIS, the project traces this obscure but influential organization’s activities through the surprising string of well-known events it affected as it stewarded a territorial takeover aimed at incorporating the independently governed territories of Native nations into the national space of the United States. Historians know these events—from the Lewis and Clark Expedition to Bleeding Kansas—separately as textbook episodes of national history. Superintending Conquest shows that they cohere as chapters in the life of the SLS, which together reveal how the United States’ pursuit of Native land not only extended its boundaries but shaped what it became in the process.