(Re)Imagining Brown 250+: histories of violence in the making of an American university Young, Phoebe author Martinez, Monica advisor Hu-DeHart, Evelyn reader Brown University Department of American Studies sponsor text theses 2017 141 p. reformatted digital eng Senior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2017 Ethnic Studies History This thesis asks, what histories are forgotten in order for the campus to uncritically celebrate its origins in 1764? And, how does this present-day process of forgetting histories of violence continue to uphold colonial logics established in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Celebrations like Brown's 250th anniversary demonstrate that the full scope of colonization, slavery, and violence that took place in order for Brown to be realized as an institution has yet to be reckoned with by the university. The trans-Atlantic slave trade, indigenous displacement and enslavement, and the making of Rhode Island need to be understood as deeply intertwined with one another. This thesis looks at how land dispossession in the emergent colony and King Philip's War in 1675 allowed colonists to clear Rhode Island of its Native inhabitants through war, slavery, and the legal system. By selling Native American captives of King Philip's War into slavery in the West Indies, and by selling Native homelands, colonists at the end of the seventeenth century were able to acquire the capital and land bases needed to uphold the slave trade. The same slave traders and colonists who had engaged in or benefited from King Philip's War would also enter into government in Rhode Island, creating laws and institutions like Brown University. Brown was not only a beneficiary of the transatlantic slave trade but, at its moment of founding, also represented a physical culmination of these colonization efforts that were behind the making of Rhode Island. When we celebrate the founding of Brown University uncomplicatedly, and when we continue to tell stories about the inherently exceptional qualities of Brown, we fail to recognize the institution as a site that represents the racialized violence that had to take place in order for us to be able to celebrate 250 years of institutional history. Brown University Slavery Colonization 10.7301/Z0XS5STJIn CopyrightCollection is open for research.