Join us on Thursday, August 15, 2024 at 4:00 p.m. ET for a fellow's forum with Graeme Mack, Visiting Assistant Professor of History, University of Richmond.

Held in the Berkeley Conference Room of the Jefferson Library, this research presentation will begin at 4:00 p.m. and last for one hour, including time for discussion. This in-person presentation is free and open to the public, no registration required. 

About the Presentation

This Fellow’s Forum will focus on the earliest forms of American territorial expansion to the Pacific. It will explore how American territorial expansion was connected to the social, economic, and political impacts of the sea otter fur trade in the Columbia River region. As Americans established their national independence in the mid-1780s, otter furs emerged as one of the most valuable commodities in the world. Wealthy Chinese elite paid extraordinary prices for otter pelts, prompting American merchants to invest their capital in sea otter voyages to the Columbia River region, where they obtained tens of thousands of otter furs from coastal Indigenous groups. The American sea otter trade soon generated profits and American officials from the Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe administrations increasingly focused their energies and resources on maintaining the security of their trading ventures in the Pacific. As tensions between American sailors and Indigenous traders escalated into cycles of violence, the region increasingly elicited government intervention. This talk will examine how the fur trade and American-Indigenous violence shaped the early American Republic’s expansion to the Pacific.

About Graeme Mack

Graeme Mack is a historian, writer, and teacher based in Virginia. Currently, Dr. Mack serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of History at the University of Richmond, where he teaches courses on Early America, Antebellum and Civil War America, and the American Presidency. After completing his Ph.D. in the History Department at the University of California, San Diego in 2022, Dr. Mack began work on his book Seaborne Sovereignties, which examines American merchants and U.S. officials' efforts to expand American commercial and political influence over strategically important spaces in the Pacific, and considers the ways in which international and multiracial labor forces that manned their vessels both disrupted and reinforced these state-business ambitions. In addition to his Ph.D., Dr. Mack also holds a B.A. in History from the University of British Columbia and an M.A. in History from McGill University. His writing has also been featured in the Washington Post’s “Made By History” series, the Journal of San Diego History, and H-Net. Dr. Mack’s work has been supported by fellowships and grants issued by the Huntington Library, the Virginia Academic Library Consortium, the Harvard Business School, the Tinker Foundation, the UC Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation, the Rocky Mountain Council of Latin American Studies, the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, the American Historical Association, and the Organization of American Historians.