The Settling Ohio: First Nations and Beyond conference hopes to bring a knowledge of local history to students, community and faculty alike.
The conference will be held in the Ohio University Baker Center Ballroom, beginning on Friday, Feb. 21, at 11 a.m., continuing throughout the day and through Feb. 22.
The event will feature a range of speakers, including OU professors, professors and academics from around the country, OU President Duane Nellis and the first female chief of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe.
“I think one of the things that's really lost on people who are here in Athens is just how deep and rich the history is in this area,” Brian Schoen, an associate professor and co-organizer of the conference, said. “We think about Southeastern Ohio as a place in which the story is one of deindustrialization ... but in truth, if we were to roll that story back as we're doing in this conference to 200 years ago or so, you see a quite different story. This was where the action was happening.”
The conference will discuss the history of the settling of Southeastern Ohio, Schoen said. Schoen and Tim Anderson, an associate professor of geography, organized the conference after seeing the discussion surrounding David McCullough’s book The Pioneers, a book about the history of the Ohio territory, at a conference they attended May 2019.
“We set out to try to bring in experts who could tell the story in a rich way,” Schoen said. “Part of that means building upon the David McCullough book but also opening it up to make people realize how diverse the settlers were for this region. Also, some of the tensions that emerged as a result of these dynamics where you have white settlers coming in.”
A goal Schoen feels that the conference has is to educate the surrounding area, especially students, about the impact local history had on the region and the rest of the country.
“We realized it might be a really fruitful thing to have a conference that's intended for the public, who are familiar with part of the history and, in some cases, familiar with none of the history, to inform people about what it is that happened in this area and why it is that we're here, why it happened, why there is an Ohio University,” Schoen said.
The conference will feature an array of speakers, and due to the diversity of the subjects being discussed, the conference will have to keynote speakers.
“We're going to have ... Anna-Lisa Cox, who just published a book on black settlers into Ohio in the early 19th century,” Schoen said. “(William Kerrigan), who is going to be talking about Johnny Appleseed (and) connections between the cultures that he encountered when he came out here. … Adam Nelson, who is going to be talking about what public education meant. It's a timely topic for us today. … Then finally, Chief Glenna J. Wallace, who is the first female chief of the Eastern Shawnee nation, is going to ask us to think about how it is that we understand history and the legacy that history left.”
Schoen expects to have attendees coming from Marietta and Columbus as well as many from the Athens area but he also hopes to get a good turn out of students.
“We would love for (students) to become more informed about the history that Ohio University has,” Schoen said.
Some students around campus believe the event is very beneficial.
“I think it's important because I think a lot of, especially OU students, just don't know a lot about the area in general,” Coleman Murray, a first-year graduate student studying public health, said. “So I think that'd be important. I'm from the area, so that'd be neat to hear that stuff.”
Other students, while interested in the event, will be attending for extra credit as well.
“I need to go to it for class for extra credit. It's my anthropology class, and we get extra credit for going and writing a paper on it,” Holly Ervin, a sophomore studying publication design, said.
Schoen also hopes the conference is an opportunity for people to come together.
“OU is fantastic because it's so closely aligned to the city of Athens in this region, yet so rarely are those walls broken down to where you see the community and the students, the faculty and the staff all mingling together,” Schoen said.
