Alaina E. Roberts, associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, will present "Black Slavery, Native Nations, and the Path to Reconciliation," as the Department of History's 2024 Timothy Donovan Lecturer at 6 p.m. Thursday, March 28, in the Honors Auditorium in Gearhart Hall. 

The lecture will be based on Roberts' recent book, I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land, which won the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize given by the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Western History Association's John C. Ewers Award and W. Turrentine Jackson Book Prize.

The book upends the traditional story of Reconstruction by connecting debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white and Native people reconstructed ideas about race, belonging and national identity, the Indian Territory became, at least until Oklahoma statehood in 1907, a place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights.

Roberts earned her B.A. in history from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2011 and a Ph.D. in history from Indiana University in 2017. In addition to I've Been Here All the While, her work has appeared in the Journal of Civil War History, American Indian Quarterly, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Western Historical Quarterly and Southern Cultures. Roberts' public-facing scholarship has been published by Time, High Country News, Black Perspectives, Al Jazeera, Washington Post and the National Council for Public History. 

The Donovan Lecture Series is named in honor of Timothy Donovan, former professor and chair of the Department of History at the U of A. The series has brought leading historians to campus. This event is sponsored by the Department of History in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.