James Madison Lecture Series
About the Series
The James Madison Lecture Series is an annual lecture series on early American history co-presented by the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Center for the Study of the American Constitution at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The lectures honor the scholarly work of Dr. Merrill Jensen (1905-1980), an influential scholar of the American Revolution, beloved mentor, and longtime faculty member of the University of Wisconsin Department of History.
Lectures are free with funding generously provided by the Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the James Madison Lectures endowment, which was made possible by a generous bequest from the Estate of John A. Peters and many private donors.
Michael Witgen
Native Land and the American Revolution
The American colonies were created around the idea of "discovering" the so-called New World—a world that had already long been home to Native peoples. The expansion that followed relied on a system built to recast what was taken as rightful inheritance. Join Michael Witgen, citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, Professor of History at Columbia University and 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist of Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America, as he delivers a powerful presentation on the effort to redefine American expansion as peaceful conquest.
Sept. 16 at Brown County Library in Green Bay.
Sept. 17 at the Wisconsin Historical Society Headquarters in Madison.
Reception at 5 PM, lecture at 6 PM.
Dr. John Kaminski
UW-Madison Center for the Study of the American Constitution
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