This lecture explores how Creeks drew upon and manipulated the Euro-American conception of race in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in an attempt to protect sovereignty and geopolitical interests. This new biological understanding of identity challenged the dominance of matrilineal clan-based social structure.

Andrew Frank is Assistant Professor of History at California State
University, Los Angeles. He is currently working on Creeks and Southerners:
Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier for the University of Nebraska
Press. Professor Frank received his PhD. from the University of Florida in 1998.

This event is cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.