I teach and write about early American and Native American history at the University of Georgia.

My first book, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), explores a dramatic transformation that overturned the lives of Creek Indians and remade the Deep South in the 1700s. It vividly describes the changing world of the Creeks, showing how growing divisions between the wealthy and poor, powerful and powerless, ultimately destroyed their communities. This critical but unknown chapter in the creation of the United States cleared the way for the expansion of plantation slavery into the region.

My second book, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (Oxford University Press, 2005), tells the story of a Native American family with a long-kept secret: one branch is of African descent. Focusing on five generations from 1780 to 1920, the book illustrates how Indians disowned their black relatives to survive in the shadow of the expanding American republic.

I have also published several articles on race, property, and Native American history in journals such as The William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of Southern History, and The Journal of American History.

I am especially interested in expanding the traditional boundaries of early America and am currently working on a book-length project, "America in 1776," which looks at eight American communities in the year of our nation's founding. It opens on the Aleutian Islands, where Aleuts were encountering Russian fur traders for the first time. Other communities I am exploring include San Francisco (founded in 1776), the Black Hills (colonized by the Lakotas in 1775-76), and Santa Fe.