You’ve probably never heard of the Anishinaabeg tribe, but their influence is present in much of what you know about early American history. And at a February 16 lecture, you can learn more when Michael McDonnell presents “Mastering Empires: The Anishinaabeg of the Great Lakes and the Making of America.”

Sponsored by the Washington College Department of History, the talk takes place at 4:30 in Litrenta Lecture Hall on the WC campus. A book signing will follow, and the public is welcome. 

McDonnell is an associate professor of history at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the co-editor of Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation-Making from Independence to the Civil War, and the author of The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia, winner of the 2008 NSW Premier’s History Prize, as well as Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of North America, winner of the 2016 Michigan State History Award and the Western History Association’s Robert M. Utley Prize. 

In his talk, McDonnell will reveal the pivotal role played by the native peoples of the Great Lakes in the history of North America. Though less well known today than the Iroquois or Sioux, the Anishinaabeg, who lived across Lakes Michigan and Huron, were equally influential. By dictating terms at trading posts and frontier forts, they played a crucial part in the making of early America, including, as McDonnell argues, ultimately helping to light the fuse that would ignite the American Revolution.