This is a virtual program on Zoom. Click << HERE >> to register.

Join us on Zoom as historian Nicole Eustace discusses her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America.

About the book: "An immersive tale of the killing of a Native American man and its far-reaching consequences for Colonial America. In the summer of 1722, on the eve of a conference between the Five Nations of the Iroquois and British-American colonists, two colonial fur traders brutally attacked an Indigenous hunter in colonial Pennsylvania. The crime set the entire mid-Atlantic on edge, with many believing that war was imminent. Frantic efforts to resolve the case created a contest between Native American forms of justice, centered on community, forgiveness, and reparations, and an ideology of harsh reprisal, based on British law, that called for the killers' execution. In a stunning narrative history based on painstaking original research, acclaimed historian Nicole Eustace reconstructs the crime and its aftermath, taking us into the worlds of Euro-Americans and Indigenous peoples in this formative period. A feat of reclamation evoking Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale and Alan Taylor's William Cooper's Town, Eustace's utterly absorbing account provides a new understanding of Indigenous forms of justice, with lessons for our era." [from the catalog]

Nicole Eustace is professor of history at New York University. She is also the author of 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism and Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution.

This Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecture is presented in partnership with public libraries in Amesbury, Andover, Ashland, Boxford, Clinton, Danvers, Ipswich, Lynnfield, Newton, Peabody, Somerville, Tewksbury, Wakefield, Wayland, Woburn. It is sponsored in part by the Family Friends of the Billerica Public Library.