Tyler Boulware

Teaching Fields:

Early America, Native Americans, Frontiers/Borderlands, the Colonial and Mountain South

Contact:

Tyler Boulware
G3A Woodburn Hall
P.O. Box 6303
Morgantown, WV 26506-6303
Phone: (304) 293-2421 ext. 5230
Fax: (304) 293-3616
Tyler.Boulware@mail.wvu.edu

• Degrees

  Ph.D. University of South Carolina, 2005
  MA, University of South Carolina, 2000
  BA, Presbyterian College, 1997

• Research Interests

  My current book project centers on the Cherokee people of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. In Deconstructing the Cherokee Nation: Town, Regional, and National Identities among Eighteenth-Century Cherokees (under contract with University Press of Florida), I explore the multifaceted structure of the Cherokee “nation” by detailing the ways in which diverse Cherokees were divided by an intense localism and regionalism for much of the pre-removal period. Region in particular is a principal organizing theme of Cherokee history that has, at best, received only cursory acknowledgement. For much of the colonial period, the Lower, Middle, Valley, and Overhill Cherokees encountered varying geo-political circumstances, situated as they were on the different “frontiers” of Cherokee country, and accordingly safeguarded their own interests by pursuing diplomatic, military, and economic agendas that could often be at variance.

  Yet, as the title suggests, nation was not an irrelevant concept for many Cherokees. Though lacking both an organized state and an overarching national identity for much of the eighteenth century, Cherokees demonstrated an ethnic awareness, grounded in kinship, that strengthened through increased interactions with non-Cherokee peoples. As these cross-cultural exchanges became more volatile, Cherokees were forced to confront powerful adversaries which demanded a more unified response. Much of my manuscript therefore examines how border conflict, especially during the Seven Years’; War and American Revolution, altered Cherokee conceptualizations of community. The result, I argue, was that while town and region remained important markers of collective identity and sociopolitical organization, a broader ethnic and national awareness crystallized in response to these dramatic events, which laid the foundation for the emergence of an institutionally-based Cherokee Nation in the early nineteenth century.

• Grad Students Advised

  MA
  Emily Hager
  Eric McLaughlin

  Ph.D.
  Isaac Emrick
  Ben Scharff

• Courses Offered

  152 Growth of the American Nation to 1865
  256 The American Revolution
  264 Native American History
  441 Seventeenth-Century Colonial America
  442 Eighteenth-Century America
  484 Introduction to Historical Research Methods (capstone)
  731 Readings in American History, 1585-1763
  732 Seminar in American History, 1585-1763

• Publications

  Deconstructing the Cherokee Nation: Town, Regional, and National Identities among Eighteenth-Century Cherokees (under contract with University Press of Florida).

  ” ‘our mad young men’: Authority and Violence in Cherokee Country,” in Bruce Stewart,
  ed., “The Riff-Raff of Civilization”: Appalachians and Violence (University Press of
  Kentucky, forthcoming Spring 2011).

  ” ‘skilful jockies’ and ‘good sadlers’: Native Americans and Horses in the Southeastern Borderlands,” in A. Glenn Crothers and Andrew K. Frank, eds., Comparative Perspectives on North American Borderlands, 1500-1850 (Ohio University Press, forthcoming Spring 2011).

  ” ‘We are MEN’: Native American and Euroamerican Projections of Masculinity” in Thomas A. Foster, ed., Manliness in Early America (under contract with New York University Press).

  ” ‘Traders, Pedlars, and idle Fellows’: Community Boundaries and Collective Identity in the Southeastern Deerskin Trade” in Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz, ed., The Wealth of all the World: the Commercial Gaze in the Long Eighteenth Century (forthcoming AMS Press).

  “The Effect of the Seven Years’; War on the Cherokee Nation” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Fall 2007), 395-426.

  “Native Americans and National Identity in Early North America” History Compass, Vol. 4 (5), August 2006, 927-932.

  “The Woodlands Culture,” in Rodney P. Carlisle and J. Geoffrey Golson, eds., Native America from Prehistory to First Contact (Santa Barbara, CA: Abc-Clio, Inc., 2006), 103-122.

  ” ‘Bound to live and die in defence of their country’: Conflict and Community in Cherokee Country,” Journal of Early American Wars and Armed Conflicts, Vol. 1, No. 1 (November 2005), 2-21.

  ” ‘a dangerous sett of horse-thieves and vagrants’: Outlaws of the Southern Frontier during the Revolutionary Era,” Eras, 6th Edition, November 2004.