The 2019-2020 George Washington Prize winner, author and historian Colin Calloway, will join Washington College to talk about his latest book, “The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation.” As Calloway will discuss, Indian people and Indian lands played a crucial role in shaping our nation, as well as the life of the man who founded the nation.
Colin Calloway
The Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience is the host of this free public event to be held on March 17th at 6 pm in John S. Toll Science Center’s Litrenta Hall. A book signing will follow immediately after the talk.
Colin G. Calloway is the John Kimball, Jr. 1943 Professor of History and Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. His previous books include “Pen and Ink Witchcraft: Treaties and Treaty Making in American Indian History” and “The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army.”
In “The Indian World of George Washington,” Calloway tells the fascinating story of Washington’s lifelong engagement with Native America. The book paints a new and, at times, disturbing portrait of the nation’s first president—as an untested militia officer on the banks of the Ohio, as a diplomat who gradually learned to work with Indians on their own terms, and, during his final years, as a disappointed Indian land speculator.
“Calloway has written one of those rare works that combines pathbreaking scholarship with lively, engaging, and accessible writing,” said Adam Goodheart, the Hodson Trust-Griswold director of Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
Calloway’s talk is well-timed, coming on the heels of Washington College’s 2020 Convocation, a celebration honoring the birthday of our First President alongside the achievements of Henry Red Cloud, a Lakota Sioux elder who has worked to make Pine Ridge environmentally, culturally, and economically sustainable.
The George Washington Prize honors the year’s best new works on early American history, especially those that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history. Created in 2005, the George Washington Prize was presented that year to Ron Chernow for “Alexander Hamilton.”
The prize is one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious literary awards. Washington College sponsors the prize with its partners the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
About the Starr Center
Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience explores the American experience in all its diversity and complexity, seeks creative approaches to illuminating the past, and inspires thoughtful conversation informed by history. Through educational programs, scholarship and public outreach, and a special focus on written history, the Starr Center seeks to bridge the divide between the academic world and the public at large.
About Washington College
Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 39 states and territories and 25 nations. With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.
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