In this roundtable, historians will discuss new work and future directions in the study of how deliberate deceits and selective memory regarding “pioneers” created, reshaped, and distorted regional and national histories of the United States. American history creators attempting to justify expropriation from Indigenous communities made pioneers central to their accounts, but disagreed, debated, and deceived over many aspects of pioneer history, particularly when it came to violence. Focusing on different regions across the U.S. in the long nineteenth century, the historians in this roundtable discuss conflicts over who should count as a pioneer, dissension over which acts of violence should be celebrated or silenced, and Indigenous attempts to conserve communities and histories amid clashing Euro-American attempts at historical hegemony. Even the term “pioneer” continues to be debated, with some history makers maintaining the centrality of violence in its original martial meaning, and others pushing shifts in meaning toward innovation and discovery that could erase rather than celebrate that violence.

The historians in this roundtable will talk through important expansions in the field of memory studies (within and beyond their own works), building past documenting disparities and disagreements to revealing strategic silences and deliberate lies. Disparate histories are not only the result of different perspectives, but can also stem from the sometimes conscious promotion of falsehoods by history creators. The detritus of these deceits remains in the mainstream of many regional and national histories, often without the knowledge of historians who unwittingly draw on these earlier works. At the same time, records of disagreements over pioneer pasts form their own important archives. This roundtable will include discussions of the implications of this new work on the history of memory for the field of settler colonial studies, the reshaping of U.S. history, and practices of archival research.