Telling a Tall Tale, Family-Style—Author and Cultural Historian Scott Sandage Delivers 17th Annual Levine Lecture |
Rider University News
Rider University, New Jersey
2008-10-16
For all his traditional academic rearing, Scott Sandage readily concedes that the revival of narrative has brought a new vitality to the discipline of history. “It was long considered unintellectual to tell stories,” explained Sandage, an associate professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “But today, with the rise in history writers like David McCullough, it’s become a way to compete with them for people’s attention.”
Sandage, who presented the 17th Annual Levine Lecture at Rider University on October 16, arrived with a new twist on a story that had been often told on the old American frontier, but was unfamiliar to the capacity audience in the Sweigart Auditorium. In doing so, Sandage not only shone a new light on the social conceptions of race, but framed it in a surprisingly personal context.
A noted author and cultural historian, Sandage specializes in the 19th century United States and in the changing aspects of American identity. He spoke in support of his current book project, Half-Breed Creek: A Tall Tale of Race on the Frontier, which focuses on a little-known, mixed-race Native American reservation in southeast Nebraska and investigates how family folklore has shaped racial identity in the United States.
“This is a story of what race is and how Americans have determined what race a person belongs to based on what stories can be told about them,” Sandage began. He set the scene of the so-called Half-Breed Creek, a reservation established by the United States government in 1856 as a place for those who claimed partial, but not full, Native American lineage. “The thinking was that the smart, educated half of the half-breed would organize the Indians into making trouble” in the already tenuous location, situated in the only spot in the United States where slave, free and Indian territories met at the same time, he explained…
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