Stephen Kantrowitz

Biography

Citizenship and Civilization: A Ho-Chunk History “Citizenship” has generally connoted rights and equality within a political community. This is how the term has functioned in the history and historiography of immigration, exclusion, Reconstruction, and Civil Rights. Yet in Native American life citizenship has another history: there, it has often been a tool of conquest, dispossession, and the destruction of other forms of belonging. How have these contradictory histories intertwined? What can the Ho-Chunk people’s encounter with U.S. citizenship during the nineteenth century tell us about this complex, dual genealogy? Stephen Kantrowitz is Plaenert-Bascom Professor of History and an affiliate faculty member in Afro-American Studies and American Indian Studies at UW–Madison, where he teaches courses on race, indigeneity, politics, and citizenship. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton and his B.A. from Yale. He is the author of More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (Penguin, 2012) and Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (UNC Press, 2000). He is currently working on two book projects. Citizenship and Civilization: A Ho-Chunk History traces the nineteenth-century encounter between the Ho-Chunk people and the emerging law and discourse of U.S. national citizenship; this book began as the Brose Lectures at Penn State and will be published by UNC Press. Unvanishing explores the interplay of early twentieth-century white scholars, Native leaders and intellectuals, and descendants of white Wisconsin settlers in the creation of a vast atlas and archive of the state’s Native past.