Wednesday, November 8, 7 PM on Zoom
Join us on Zoom for this free presentation. Dr. Kane will discuss her new book, which offers a sweeping, detailed cultural history of three centuries of Haudenosaunee women's labor and their agency to shape their nations' future. This event is offered in partnership with the Dutchess County Department of History. Attendees will receive a 40% discount code to purchase her book from Cornell University Press.
Maeve Kane is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University at Albany. She is the co-author of a new textbook on American women’s history in addition to several articles on material culture and Indigenous history, and her current project examines how objects are used to express ideas about race, gender, and nationhood in commemorations of the American Revolution. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New-York Historical Society, and the New York State Archives, and she is a member of the Organization for American Historians Distinguished Lecturer program. Her talk tonight is based on the research for her first book and is the first preview of one of her talks for the OAH program.
Her first book, Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange offers a sweeping, detailed cultural history of three centuries of Haudenosaunee women's labor and their agency to shape their nations' future. By looking at clothing that was bought, created, and remade, Maeve Kane brings to life how Haudenosaunee women used access to global trade to maintain a distinct and enduring Haudenosaunee identity in the face of colonial pressures to assimilate and disappear. Drawing on rich oral, archival, material, visual, and quantitative evidence, Shirts Powdered Red tells the story of how Haudenosaunee people worked to maintain their nations' cultural and political sovereignty through selective engagement with trade and the rhetoric of civility, even as Haudenosaunee clothing and gendered labor increasingly became the focus of colonial conversion efforts throughout the upheavals and dispossession of the nineteenth century.