The 2024 John Lax Memorial Lecture in History will be delivered by Professor Ned Blackhawk: "Fighting Against Assimilation, Fighting for the Future: Native Activists in the Early 20th Century World."

Ned Blackhawk is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Professor Blackhawk was awarded the 2023 National Book Award in Nonfiction for his 2023 The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press). Some of his other works include:

• Co-editor, with Ben Kiernan, Benjamin Madley, and Rebe Taylor, The Cambridge World History of Genocide (in 3 Vols.) Vol. II: Genocide in the Indigenous, Early Modern, and Imperial Worlds, from c.1535 to World War One (New York: Cambridge University Press, June 2023)
• Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the Legacy of Franz Boas, co-edited with Isaiah Lorado Wilner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018)
• Unfolding Futures: Indigenous Ways of Knowing for the Twenty-First Century, co-eds. with Philip J. Deloria, Bryan Brayboy, K. Tsinina Lomawaima, Mark Trahant, Loren Ghiglion, and Douglas Medin, Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Spring 2018).
• Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

The John Lax Memorial Lecture was endowed in 1982 by Professors Peter and the late Anneli Lax of New York University’s mathematics department, in memory of their son, John, a historian who taught at Mount Holyoke in the mid-1970s. After John Lax’s premature death, his parents created a permanent memorial in the form of this annual lecture. The Lax Lecture is given by a historian of the highest distinction to commemorate the work and spirit of John Lax by making the latest advances in history accessible to the public.

This event is sponsored by the Mount Holyoke College History Department.

Please note: This event will be in-person and available via livestream.