Power and Authority on the Early American Frontier: Exploring Race, Gender, and Class with Text Analysis

This project employs text analysis methods, including topic modeling, collocation, and sentiment analysis, to examine the complex relations between Indigenous peoples, settlers, military leaders, and metropolitan officials to understand how American settler colonialism developed between 1776 and 1832. Specifically, this project will first look at the evolution of Native American leaders’ views and sentiments expressed in treaty council meetings between 1776 and 1795 to make sense of the many factions that developed within tribes in response to American colonization. Second, we will develop a topic model of American political correspondence between 1776 and 1795 to analyze American perspectives on the western territories within the context of broader political discussions that unfolded in correspondence, as well as debates within state and federal Congressional assemblies. In the future, the research team plans to submit grant applications to fund a much more extensive project – the creation of an “Early American History Explorer,” a searchable corpus that is ready for computational analysis.