Dr. James Brooks, Carl and Sally Gable Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Georgia, will give a keynote talk from 5:00-6:30 PM. Dr. Brooks is a leading historian of western history and public history. His 2002 book, Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship and Community in the Southwest Borderlands focused on the traffic in women and children across the region as expressions of intercultural violence and accommodation and won the Bancroft Prize. Mesa of Sorrows: A History of the Awat’ovi Massacre appeared from WW Norton in 2016, and garnered the 2017 Caughey Prize for the most distinguished book on the American West from the Western History Association, and the 2017 Ermine Wheeler-Voeglin Book Award for best book-length contribution to the field from the American Society for Ethnohistory. 

Dr. Brooks will be speaking about his current project, "Picketwire." After the Keynote, there will be a separate banquet dinner for members and new inductees of Phi Alpha Theta.