Black Montana: Settler Colonialism and the Erosion of the Racial Frontier, 1877-1930

2022 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize Finalist

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many African Americans moved westward as Greater Reconstruction came to a close. Though, along with Euro-Americans, Black settlers appropriated the land of Native Americans, sometimes even contributing to ongoing violence against Indigenous people, this migration often defied the goals of settler states in the American West.

In Black Montana Anthony W. Wood explores the entanglements of race, settler colonialism, and the emergence of state and regional identity in the American West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By producing conditions of social, cultural, and economic precarity that undermined Black Montanans' networks of kinship, community, and financial security, the state of Montana, in its capacity as a settler colony, worked to exclude the Black community that began to form inside its borders after Reconstruction.

Black Montana depicts the history of Montana's Black community from 1877 until the 1930s, a period in western American history that represents a significant moment and unique geography in the life of the U.S. settler-colonial project.

Author: Anthony W. Wood
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 07/01/2021
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.51lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.94d
ISBN13: 9781496219435
ISBN10: 1496219430
BISAC Categories:
- History | African American & Black
- History | United States | State & Local | West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | African American & Black Studies

About the Author
Anthony W. Wood is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Michigan. He worked as a historian for the Montana Historical Society on Montana's African American Heritage Places Project.