Online Author Talk: Nicole Eustace

You’re invited to explore early-American history during an online afternoon conversation with Pulitzer Prize winning historian Nicole Eustace as she discusses her 2022 award winning book Covered With Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America.

In Covered with Night, Dr. Eustace reconstructs the crime and its aftermath, bringing us into the overlapping worlds of white colonists and Indigenous peoples in this formative period. As she shows, the murder of the Indigenous man set the entire mid-Atlantic on edge, with many believing war was imminent. Isolated killings often flared into colonial wars in North America, and colonists now anticipated a vengeful Indigenous uprising. Frantic efforts to resolve the case ignited a dramatic, far-reaching debate between Native American forms of justice—centered on community, forgiveness, and reparations—and an ideology of harsh reprisal, unique to the colonies and based on British law, which called for the killers’ swift execution. As Eustace powerfully contends, the colonial obsession with “civility” belied the reality that the Iroquois, far from being the barbarians of the white imagination, acted under a mantle of sophistication and humanity as they tried to make the land- and power-hungry colonials understand their ways. 

Register for this author talk: https://libraryc.org/northhavenlibrary/20991. This program will be held on Zoom and available for viewing in the Community Room.