[Sci-tech-public] MIT Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History (SEAH) : November 14, 2025

[Kathleen Lopes]

Please join us for our SEAH event on Friday, November 14, 2025  This event will be held in a hybrid format, allowing participants to join in person or via Zoom. 
Prior registration is required to join via zoom.

Friday, November 14, 2025 at 2:30 PM
Hybrid Event
MIT Campus, Building E51, Room 285
 
Indian Landlords and Socialist Votes: Imperial Indigestion in Oklahoma
Sarah Phillips, Associate Professor of History at Boston University
 
Register Here : https://mit.zoom.us/meeting/register/3HT0zWy8R82NpfibSJqbmA



Indian Landlords and Socialist Votes: Imperial Indigestion in Oklahoma

The Indian Territory, which became the state of Oklahoma in 1907, remained the last region in the continental United States where Indigenous people exercised political and territorial sovereignty. There, the entwined processes of denationalization and land privatization resulted in a unique orgy of land speculation, violence, and fraud. Oklahoma birthed the highest rates of settler farm tenancy and subsequent white out-migration in the nation.
 
This talk will narrow in on the second decade of the twentieth century, when Oklahoma hosted the largest Socialist party in the United States. The poor white farmers who formed its base hoped that their representatives would release them from local landlords, banks, and creditors. But these tenants and sharecroppers also vented their grievances from inside a shattered landscape of recent and ongoing Indigenous dispossession. Oklahoma Socialists observed how politicians, lawyers, and businessmen grew fat on Indian resources and the deliberate pursuit of injury, fraud, and deception. But they evaded a direct attack on American colonial expansion and instead condemned its capitalist character. 
 
Standard narratives of American history break sharply between the nineteenth-century era of territorial expansion and the reform politics of the twentieth-century industrial order. I challenge this this division and analyze how left-leaning Americans digested empire with a critique of capitalism and a condemnation of the industrial class relations of modern agriculture.




Kathleen Lopes 
Administrative Assistant III
MIT History Section 

 Schedule
On-site: Monday and Wednesday 
Remote: Tuesday, Thursday  and Friday



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