American Indians and the Study of the Early Republic: Missed Opportunities in the Historiography of the War of 1812

In this round-table conversation, I hope to draw attention to the important insights generated by the past generation of scholarship on the place of American Indians in the historiography of the War of 1812, illustrating the strengths provided by Richard White’s classic paradigm for the end of the “Middle Ground” while highlighting the seeming inability of other early republic U.S. historians to incorporate such insights into their findings. This presentation ends by questioning the absent place of American Indians in many studies of the evolution of U.S. constitutional history.