The United States is not the only nation whose colonial heritage emerged from the violent conflict between European settlers and Native Americans. In the settlement of Brazil, that other American nation of near-continental proportions, the presence and persistence of semi-nomadic forest dwellers left a different historical legacy. When the Portuguese crown declared war against the Botocudo Indians in 1808, condemning them as cannibals and sanctioning their slaughter and enslavement, a policy forbidding colonization of a vast expanse of Brazil's coastal forests came to a bloody end. For more than half a century, however, local authorities and settlers already established in the Brazilian interior had actively pursued this conquest in violation of royal prohibitions. Their actions recast colonial identities, reconstituted the cultural significance of this immense geographic space, and ultimately transformed crown policy itself. Dr. Langfur will help place our own nation's past into a revealing trans-colonial context.

The western expanses of North American constituted only one of many frontier zones subjected to conquest, colonization, and settlement during the second half of the nineteenth century. Similar zones developed concurrently in South American, southern Africa, eastern Russia, and Australia, each of them distinct but each also part of a larger process of global territorial consolidation. This lecture explores the related histories of these various frontier zones, emphasizing their connection to worldwide political and economic changes after 1850. In this presentation, Dr. Langfur considers how western and non-western cultures encountered each other, interacted, and competed for land, labor, and resources. A powerful lesson emerges from this view of the frontier: events that we think of as being distinctly American were often manifestations of global developments that unfolded far from our nation's borders.

Requirements for Program: lectern