EIHS Lecture: Fathers and Sons: An Antigenealogy of Loyalism and Empire

Born to an Anglicized Dutch family in Albany, NY, Jacob Glen Cuyler (1773-1854) became a child of revolutionary exile. This colonial North American has long frequented histories of the early British Cape Colony in southern Africa. In South Africa, Cuyler would for a time become a symbol, for British humanitarians, of settler oppressions, and a symbol, for Afrikaner nationalists, of British oppressions. This paper closely examines two of his unpublished writings to extract a transoceanic story of colonialism, loyalism and the effects of the American Revolution. In keeping with this year’s Eisenberg Institute theme, this paper places one man and his shattered family at the center of struggles for order in the disorderly world of revolution, imperial expansion, and global war.

Greg Dowd (History and American Culture [AC]) is past Associate Dean for the Humanities, past chair of AC, and past Director of Native American Studies. His several published books and many articles explore the history of the Native North American East before 1850, but he has also touched on the history of South Africa, where he was a Fulbright fellow (1994) and a research fellow (2015-2016) at the University of the Witwatersrand. He has had several fellowships and his current work is supported in part by the Michigan Humanities Award. He has won two teaching awards. He has worked for tribes in a treaty rights case. He received his Ph.D. in History at Princeton University (1986) and his BA in History from the University of Connecticut (1978).

This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.