Alexis Wood
Settler Colonialism and American Political Development: A Congressional Analysis
What are the legacies of settler colonialism on American political development? Scholars understand settler colonialism as a “structure, not an event,” yet little attention has been devoted to understanding how settler colonialism has impacted the formation of the American state. To this end, our summer project seeks to answer the question: How much legislative activity has been devoted to territory governance in the United States and how has this changed over time? To investigate this question, we will be constructing an original dataset tracking congressional activity from 1789 to 1947 using data from legislative journal indices with the intention of visualizing the changing proportion of legislative topics – such as westward expansion, public lands management, and “Indian removal”– over time. This analysis will provide the baseline, descriptive information needed to characterize the extent to which early governmental activities in the United States can be said to be settler-colonial.
Message To Sponsor
Thank you for supporting this project as well as the cultivation of undergraduate researchers. URAP has made such a large positive impact on my time at UC Berkeley and I am very honored to be given the opportunity to work on this project over the summer.