Stuart Marshall

Stuart Marshall is a historian of the Native South, specializing in ethnohistory of the Cherokee people and their staying power in their Appalachian homeland. He represents the History Department in Sewanee’s Indigenous Engagement Initiative and is looking forward to collaborating with community partners including the Trail of Tears Association. Marshall offers courses on Indigenous history topics that place Native people at the center of U.S. history.

 

Marshall’s dissertation, “The Age of Junaluska: Eastern Cherokee Sovereignty in the Long Civil War Era,” is a new political history of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians with the Civil War as the central event. The title is a counter to the “Age of Jackson,” emphasizing the political power of Junaluska, who once fought beside Andrew Jackson and later famously wished he had killed the architect of Indian Removal when he had the chance. Junaluska suffered the Trail of Tears and returned to North Carolina, where he became both a citizen who demanded his right to vote and a Cherokee statesman who inspired the Civil War generation of Eastern Cherokees to organize and ensure their survival as a people. Directed by Dr. Greg O’Brien, the dissertation bridges the gap between Civil War history and Native ethnohistory. Marshall’s ongoing work with Cherokee syllabary documents is currently supported by the American Philosophical Society and facilitated by his colleagues with Eastern Cherokee Histories in Translation (ECHT), a collaboration between scholars and Native speakers.

 

Marshall has also published two articles that emphasize the role of Native people in shaping early American history: “Facing East from Tryon Mountain: New Vantages on the ‘Great Wolf,’ Rogues, and Regulators” (North Carolina Historical Review, January 2022) and “Dividing the Carolinas: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in the Prerevolutionary Boundary Dispute, 1763–1773” (Early American Studies, Winter 2023). Marshall is also a digital historian with several ongoing projects, including “Mapping the Deerskin Trade in Colonial North Carolina,” which can be found in the National Council on Public History’s Digital Project Directory.

 

Marshall holds a doctoral minor in Public History, with a decade of experience in the field. For the past five years, Marshall practiced the potter’s trade at Historic Bethabara Park (Winston-Salem, NC), interpreting site history and archaeology through learning the Moravian earthenware tradition. Marshall has also assisted with research and exhibit design at the Historic Magnolia House (a Green Book site in Greensboro, NC); an archaeological dig at Old Salem; design and construction of the “North Carolina and World War I” exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of History; and operating a reconstructed gristmill at West Point on the Eno (Durham, NC). When not doing history, Marshall devotes his time to music as a professional-grade bagpiper who has performed and competed across the U.S. and in Canada and Scotland.