Michael Green, Professor, Joint Appointment with History

Contact Information

CB #3195, Hamilton Hall
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3195
mgreen@email.unc.edu

Education

Ph.D., University of Iowa, 1973
M.A., University of Iowa, 1963

Research Interests

My field of specialty is Native American history, my area of research is on the history of the Creeks. My research and publications on Creek history have focused on the period prior to their removal to Indian Territory in the 1830s. Mostly I have worked on the early 19th century period marked by the growing demands of Georgia and Alabama that the Creeks be expelled. These demands challenged Creek political systems to respond in novel ways. Creek leaders developed new ideas about politics and government that they hoped could enable them to remain in their homelands and retain their sovereignty. Central to these new ideas was a growing sense of Creek nationalism. My research has been on how the Creeks developed these changes in political theory and practice, how they tried to make them work, and how they impacted the relations between the Creeks and the US and the states.

I have also worked on the history of the Creeks in the early 18th century, especially in the early years of Georgia when a new set of relations between a Native group and an English colony were first established. I have focused this work on a Creek woman, Mary Musgrove, and her role as interpreter, advisor, and agent to James Oglethorpe, Georgia's founding father.

My work is now taking me west, to Indian Territory, in the period between Creek removal and the establishment of Creek constitutional government in 1867. The Creeks were the last of the southern tribes moved to Indian Territory to adopt a constitutional government, the ideas of which continue to divide Creek people into politically opposing camps. My interest here is to study the economic, social, and political history of the process of reestablishing the Creek Nation in the west, particularly with an effort to understand how the ideas of nationhood developed in this new historical environment.

Courses

HIST72A/AMST 72A -- Native America: The East
HIST72C/AMST 72C -- Native America: The West
HIST 248/AMST 248 -- Readings Seminar in Native American History
HIST 348/AMST 348 -- Research in Native American History