About

Gregory E. Dowd is the Helen Hornbeck Tanner Collegiate Professor in the Departments of American Culture and History at the University of Michigan. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University (1986) and a B.A. in History from the University of Connecticut (1978). His scholarly interests include early American history, Native American studies, British settler colonies, and indigenous peoples from 1750 to 1825. Dowd has published several books and numerous articles on the history of Eastern North America from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, focusing on topics such as rumor, religion, law, and the intersection of ideas and popular action. He has taught at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Connecticut, and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Additionally, he has held fellowships at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Dowd has also contributed expert witness reports and provided professional testimony in treaty-rights cases involving tribes in Michigan.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Ethnology
• History
• Archaeology
• Law
• Ecology
• Genealogy
• Sociology
• Physics
• Geography
• Gender studies
• Biology
• Economics
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• Native Middle Worlds to 1850

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-05-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Considering three scholarly approaches that have dominated Native American history since the 1990s, this chapter surveys the Indigenous Midwest until 1850. Dividing the vast and geographically diverse area into three subregions, it subjects the continental, settler-colonial, and imperial borderlands perspectives on Native history to the critical contingencies of time and space. The continental approach, appropriate everywhere in the earliest period, begins to share value with the imperial borderlands and settler-colonial approaches in certain subregions and periods. No single approach can encompass the complexity of the Midwest’s Indigenous history before the Midwest had its name.

  PublisherDOI

• Karen L. Marrero. <i>Detroit’s Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century</i>

  University of Toronto Quarterly · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Genealogy
  • History
  • Ethnology
  PublisherDOI

• Indigenous Self-Vanishing? Relating the North American "Iroquois Wars" and the Southern African Mfecane

  The William and Mary Quarterly · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • History

  Early American history and early Southern African history have much to offer one another, but signal debates in one field go unnoticed in the other. Both fields have witnessed strong efforts to reorient scholarship from older vantage points along the colonial coastlines to newer ones in the continental interiors. Both fields have investigated the consolidation of powerful indigenous social formations, and both fields have engaged the concept of settler colonialism. For a generation, however, Southern Africanists have robustly debated a period of great violence, the so-called Mfecane, said to have gripped indigenous peoples at the outer edges of, or even beyond the reach of, colonialism. Here Native North Americanists can learn from their Southern Africanist counterparts. This debate resembles and can contribute to early Americanists' discussion of such matters as the "Iroquois Wars" (also known as the "Beaver Wars") and the southeastern "shatter zone." And exploring Southern Africanist scholarship offers more than new questions for consideration by Americanists. It also reveals a troubling shared backstory to the colonialist theme of indigenous self-vanishing.

  PublisherDOI

• The French King Wakes up in Detroit: ‘Pontiac's War’ in Rumour and History

  2022-01-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In the Great Lakes region after the withdrawal of France, the belief that the French king would return his armies to North America found remarkably wide acceptance. Held by individuals among both the French and the Indian communities, this belief influenced many of the warriors in the western theater of the war that bears Pontiac’s name. Encountered and seized upon by British traders and officers, it was carried into the upper echelons of both the British Indian department and the British North American military establishment, where it was transmuted into an understanding that the war was the result of a French conspiracy. Pontiac’s own version of Neolin’s message, however, spoken in a Detroit that still supported a significant and influential French community, clearly distinguished between the habitants and the English. Detroit’s French, in short, presented the Indians with divisions of their own. Taken as a whole, the French at Detroit were, at most, reluctant suppliers of the desperate Indians.

  PublisherDOI

• Custom, Text, and Property: Indians, Squatters, and Political Authority in Jacksonian Michigan

  Early American studies · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Political Science

  A controversy over land in the Grand River Valley of Michigan reached the United States Attorney General's office in 1837. The quarrel warrants attention not only because the lands had value but because it engaged several groups with competing understandings of their rights to property. Native Americans confronted settlers, who confronted one another. At one level, the dispute pitted two forms of customary rights—one exercised by Indians and the other by squatters—against the demands of capital and the discipline of the state. But on another level, the contest reveals how in the early national period, irregular settlers could look to law, Native people could speak the language of improvement and look to text, and advocates of federal order could invoke imaginary violence.

  PublisherDOI

• 2. “We Are Heirs-apparent to the Romans”: Imperial Myths and Indigenous Status

  2020-11-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution

  Journal of American History · 2019-01-15

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Kathleen DuVal's first book, Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (2006), led an influential movement in the fields of early American and Native American history. DuVal and others radically reoriented our perspective from North America's Atlantic Coast to its interior. These works revealed that indigenous peoples long remained powers, while empires hovered only at the far edge of many Indians' concerns. With Independence Lost, DuVal again steers us away from the Atlantic Seaboard, carrying us this time to the Gulf of Mexico and its hinterlands. Set primarily in the revolutionary half century, between 1763 and 1815, Independence Lost readmits empire as a central historical player, and its standout empire is Spain's. Far from a creaky anachronism, the resurgent Spanish Empire expanded its power and influence through capable administrators. With responsive finance, adaptive diplomacy, and dynamic strategy, Spanish officials offered “advantageous interdependence” to subjects, allies—including Indians—and even slaves (p. xxi). DuVal attends carefully to indigenous decision making, contrasting especially the innovative strategies of Chickasaw and Creek leaders. DuVal offers more than a singular reorientation from one vantage point to another; she presents a Rashomon effect: a multiperspectival take on the revolutionary war and its meaning. To frame these perspectives, DuVal analyzes eight lives.

  PublisherDOI

• Thinking and Believing: Nativism and Unity in the Ages of Pontiac and Tecumseh

  2017-05-15 · 11 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Histories of the two movements for intertribal unity resonate with a distinction between the sacred and the profane. Each of the two movements has been keenly subdivided in our book-length histories into its religious and its secular dimensions. Each dimension is, in turn, personified in our histories by a leader. The interpretation that isolates Pontiac from Neolin hinges upon their differing perceptions of the French. Histories of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, far more than of Pontiac and Neolin, place a barrier between religion and realpolitik. The dramatic effect is to raise tensions, for not only does religion confront reason, but brother battles brother. To support his intertribal call, the Shawnee Prophet had at his disposal a concept of Indian identity that had been developing since at least the middle of the eighteenth century, a concept embodied in the notion of the separate creation of Anglo-Americans and Indians.

  PublisherDOI

• Indigenous Peoples without the Republic

  Journal of American History · 2017-06-01 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The past several decades of scholarship offer two powerful themes touching on the relationship between the American Revolution and indigenous peoples. The first holds that on the eve of revolution, ordinary European settlers were already American Indians' greatest danger, a danger only to be restrained by indigenous action, imperial intervention, or both. The second closely allied theme holds that the American Revolution greatly advanced Indian dispossession. These story lines weave a narrative that begins in the 1760s, when financially strapped Great Britain, facing powerful Indian resistance to British claims of conquest, extended meaningful protection to Native Americans from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. Settlers, locally oriented in politics and anti-Indian in sentiment, scrapped such imperial plans, often by murdering Indians, precipitating war. Metropolitan officials and appointees endeavored to regulate expansion, commerce, and violence. They offered coexistence and prospective subjecthood to Indians. The American Revolution dashed this incipient accommodation. It unleashed land-seeking, racist, backcountry men backed by a responsive government. Overthrowing an empire of graded rank in favor of a white settlers' republic, the Revolution endangered Native America.

  PublisherDOI

• Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier

  Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) · 2016-01-15 · 6 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  "Why did Elizabethan adventurers believe that the interior of America hid vast caches of gold? Who started the rumor that British officers purchased revolutionary white women's scalps, packed them by the bale, and shipped them to their superiors? And why are people today still convinced that white settlers...hardly immune as a group to the disease...routinely distributed smallpox-tainted blankets to the natives? Rumor...spread by colonists and Native Americans alike...ran rampant in early America. In Groundless, historian Gregory Evans Dowd explores why half-truths, deliberate lies, and outrageous legends emerged in the first place, how they grew, and why they were given such credence throughout the New World. Arguing that rumors are part of the objective reality left to us by the past...a kind of fragmentary archival record...he examines how uncertain news became powerful enough to cascade through the centuries. Drawing on specific case studies and tracing recurring rumors over many generations, Dowd explains the seductive power of unreliable stories in the eastern North American frontiers from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The rumors studied here...some alluring, some frightening...commanded attention and demanded action. They were all, by definition, groundless, but they were not all false, and they influenced the classic issues of historical inquiry: the formation of alliances, the making of revolutions, the expropriation of labor and resources, and the origins of war"..

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Eric Hinderaker

  University of Utah

  3 shared

• David B. Danbom

  Heska (United States)

  2 shared

• Betty Miller Unterberger

  2 shared

• Michael Fry

  2 shared

• Willard C. Frank

  2 shared

• Daniel H. Usner

  2 shared

• Peter C. Mancall

  2 shared

• Carole Fink

  1 shared

Labs

• U-M LSA American CulturePI