Polk’s America Series: Dr. Ken Vickers

Join us for a special Polk’s America Lecture on September 12 at 6 PM at the Parish Hall of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church (311 W. 7th St, Columbia, TN 38401)! This event is FREE and open to the public.

Dr. Ken Vickers of the University of Tennessee Southern will present, “Background to a Tragedy: United States-Native American Policy and the Evolution of the Indian Removal”

When Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law on May 28, 1830, he put pen to legislation that had its origins in the earliest days of the American War for Independence. Indian Removal did not spring whole cloth from the Jackson Administration. It was simply a progression of the ever-shifting nature of United States-Native American relations that began with the Washington Administration and continued at least into the early twentieth century. The purpose of this talk is to briefly chart the evolving nature of early US policy toward the Eastern bands of Native Americans that would meet its culmination in the Indian Removal Act which allowed the error that was the Treaty of New Echota and the subsequent tragedy of the Trail of Tears.

Kenneth Vickers is currently professor of history, Chair of the School of Social Sciences, and Coordinator of the History Program at the University of Tennessee Southern. He has taught in the past at the Mississippi University for Women and at the University of North Alabama. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Mississippi State University. He is the author of T. S. Stribling: A Life of the Tennessee Novelist (University of Tennessee Press, 2004).