NHC Events

Thurs., January 10 — 5:00 p.m."Our Own Dark Ages: The Colonial Period and the Story of America"Fred Anderson, University of Colorado, BoulderAndrew Cayton, Miami UniversityClick here for audio recording of the eventOver the last six decades an extraordinary efflorescence of scholarship in social, economic, and cultural history has transformed historians' understanding of North America in the century before the Declaration of Independence. It has also shattered a once-familiar story of dawning nationhood into a multitude of local stories, many of them dark and violent, difficult to relate to each other and hard to connect to the history of the United States. In their talk, Fellows Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton will describe the framework within which they are working to assemble the fragmented stories of North American colonial development into a narrative at once consistent with modern scholarship and relevant to the national narrative recounted in later volumes of The Oxford History of the United Stat