“Rethinking Nineteenth-Century America” brings scholars of slavery, African American studies, the U.S. West, and Native American studies together to discuss new perspectives on the history of the nineteenth-century United States. Each panelist will be discussing a completed or nearly completed book project that attempts to decenter traditional nineteenth-century pivots (principally the Civil War) and to center historical actors of color. Paul Conrad’s contribution will draw from his recent book The Apache Diaspora. Conrad will discuss how his book engages central themes of nineteenth-century American history including migration, forced removal, slavery, genocide, and empire. Conrad will specifically discuss how “Indian removal” looks different when we examine Natives such as the Apaches who were displaced from west to east rather than from east to west. Natalie Joy will contribute insights from her forthcoming book The Indian’s Cause: Native Americans and the American Antislavery Movement. The Indians’ Cause traces the longstanding relationship between abolitionism and Indian rights, arguing that American Indians—as objects of concern and as participants in abolitionist activities—were central to the American antislavery movement from the late 1820s to the early 1860s. In centering Native peoples in our understanding of the antislavery movement, The Indian’s Cause promises to transform our understanding of a pivotal movement of nineteenth-century America. Nakia Parker’s book also looks at the intersection of slavery and Indigenous history, exploring how enslaved peoples held by Native enslavers experience and responded to forced removal from the Southeast. While historians have tended to focus on enslaved peoples’ resistance and labor, Parker considers enslaved people as migrants who had to acquire new knowledge to survive and to work in Indian Territory. By centering Indian Territory in the history of the expansion of slavery and the domestic slave trade, Parker proposes a new understanding of these critical nineteenth-century processes. Finally, Sarah Keyes will discuss her forthcoming book, American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail. American Burial Ground reexamines the iconic historic touchstone of the Overland Trail to Oregon and California from the innovative perspective of studies of death. While most histories of death in the nineteenth-century United States are centered in the East and pivot around the U.S. Civil War, my book argues that Indigenous peoples and the (largely imagined at the time) U.S. West played a pivotal role in the evolution of sociocultural and political practices surrounding death and the dead. In recentering scholarship of the nineteenth-century around previously sidelined peoples, places, and themes, “Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Americas” aspires to spark a conversation about a new history of the nineteenth-century United States.