Settler Nationalism in America

This episode examines the Lower Ninth Ward as a case study in the ongoing structure of settler colonialism and its impact on land, vulnerability, and community displacement. Rather than treating Hurricane Katrina as an isolated tragedy that impacted the Lower Ninth Ward, Shannon Lee and Gabriela Garza explore how disasters like this reveals deeper historical patterns: indigenous dispossession, rac...

In this podcast, Fiona Pravida and Olivia Brand examine the long history of Levittown, Pennsylvania to examine the ways that the racial restrictions of settler colonialism evolved into new legalized patterns of racial exclusion in the postwar period. In comparing the language of the Walking Purchase treaty of 1737 with the restrictive covenants recorded in Levittown deeds of the 1960s, Pravida and...

In this episode, Lei'Aylah Anderson-Combee examines the critical role of terracotta as an ornamental material in promoting a Eurocentric conception of American character. Tracing its use in modernizing cities across Texas, Anderson-Combee compares the ways that terracotta ornament and indigenous cave painting produced diverging political interpretations of American indigeneity.

In this episode, Allison Frederick examines the ways that the Houston Colored Carnegie Library subversively promoted settler colonial ideas about white supremacy and Black inferiority. In her analysis, she demonstrates the ways that philanthropy, whiteness, and imperialism worked together to keep the settler narrative alive, even as Black communities became stronger and self-sufficient. Settler Co...

In this episode, Rohan Bergfield investigates the settler colonial overtones of the L.P. Mannen Residence, a 1926 home that looks like it belongs to the romantic Spanish mission era. This home's mission aesthetic displaces the indigenous Mexican architectural identities originally found on this site with a selective, idealized image crafted to instate white ownership and belonging.

In this episode, Jake Pescatore argues that English architect Alfred Giles' design for the Brooks County Courthouse was the result of a western settler-colonial mindset infecting the world of architecture towards the end of the 19th century. Following the design trends of the time, the neo-classical style should be viewed as something of an "invasive species," spreading ready-made ideas about Amer...

In this episode, Sriya Katanguru uses the architectural plans and first buildings created for the University of Texas at Austin's campus to analyze the relationship between land, the university, and the state. She finds that both the aesthetic choices and the commercialization of land holdings continues to support a settler colonial narrative of American education and citizenship to this day.

In this podcast, Joy Delight Presbre discusses they ways 19th century missionaries and 20th century travel agencies and preservationists used mission architectures to construct a white social imaginary to replace the native subjects of San Antonio with new definitions of white indigeneity.