With Sarah Keyes

When: Thursday, April 17th, 2025 at 7:00 PM.

Where: The Sierra Presbyterian Church located at 175 Ridge Road, Nevada City.

For our April 17th Speaker Night presentation, historian Sarah Keyes will discuss her recent book, American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail. American Burial Ground places death at the center of the history of the Overland Trail and, in doing so, offers a sweeping and long overdue reinterpretation of this historic touchstone.  Keyes will discuss how emigrant graves became seeds of U.S. possession across the West and how Native peoples defended their homelands by pointing to their graves as proofs of Indigenous persistence and enduring territorial claims.  

Sarah Keyes is a historian of the United States. She specializes in the 19th century and the history of the U.S. West with a focus on the environment and intercultural interactions between Indigenous peoples and Euro-Americans. Her recent book, which was supported by a Donald J. Sterling Jr. Fellowship at the Oregon Historical Society, explores these topics along the overland trails to Oregon and California in the mid-19th century. Keyes has also begun work on her second project, a regional and transnational study of suffrage in the U.S. West, for which she was recently awarded a Mellon-Schlesinger Summer Research Grant from the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.. Sarah is an Associate Professor of History, University of Reno, Nevada.

Admission: FREE and open to the public, this event lasts one hour. Free refreshments offered after the presentation. For more information, call or text Daniel Ketcham at (530) 477-8056