(Media release from Chieftains Museum/Major Ridge Home):
Chieftains Museum/Major Ridge Home is proud to present the 2024 Summer Speaker Series. Lectures will focus on the Protestant missionary groups which featured prominently in the lives of the Ridge family.
The third of these lectures will be Thursday, July 25 th at 7PM. This event will be held virtually on Zoom. To register please visit www.chieftainsmuseum.org/events/a-point-of-contention-theabcfm-cherokee-mission-american-slavery-and-the-definition-of-politics. Presented by Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz, “A Point of Contention” tells the story of ABCFM missionary resistance to Cherokee Removal in the face of their complex relationship to slavery in the Cherokee Nation. When ABCFM missionaries defended Cherokee sovereignty and opposed the Jackson administration’s implementation of Indian Removal, they had to navigate a complex debate over the political, religious, and ethical dimensions of their activities. Their Jacksonian political opponents charged them with turning a political matter into a moral issue, while members of the emerging northern abolitionist movement criticized ABCFM missionaries for accepting Cherokee slaveholding as only a political question. As missionaries, Cherokee Christians, and missionary supporters argued over the place of slavery in the mission movement, they set out new – and narrow – definitions of “politics” and “religion.”
Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz, PhD is an Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University and the author of Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and American Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century (Cornell University Press, 2024), Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Cornell University Press, 2015), and a co-editor of The Early Imperial Republic: From the American Revolution to the US-Mexico War (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). Her writings on foreign relations, religion, reform, empire, and gender have been published in leading academic journal and periodical, ranging from the Journal of the Early Republic to The Washington Post. She is the recipient of SHAFR’s 2021 Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize, the 2019 Jane Dempsey Douglass Prize from ASCH, and a 2018 China Residency from the OAH. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Yale Divinity School Library, the Presbyterian Historical Society, the Schlesinger Library, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard, and the Humanities and Arts Research Program at Michigan State University.
Chieftains Museum/Major Ridge Home would like to thank the Cherokee Presbytery in Cartersville, GA for generously sponsoring this lecture. Thanks also go to Columbia Theological Seminary for promoting this event.
To view the full schedule of lectures, visit the Chieftains Museum website at www.chieftainsmuseum.org/events. Each lecture is free and open to the public.
For more information about the Summer Speaker Series, visit www.chieftainsmuseum.org or call (762) 327-6124.
