vailsymposium

Catharine R. Franklin specializes in the history of the nineteenth-century United States Army with an emphasis on indigenous peoples and the American West in the post-Civil War era. Her research and teaching interests lie in nineteenth-century American history, military history, indigenous history and the history of the American West and borderlands.

Her book manuscript, “The Army Stands Between: Soldiers and Indians in the West,” upends the story of the so-called “Indian Wars.” Federal authority, indigenous resistance and borderlands and transnational themes inform her work. Dr. Franklin has written award-winning journal articles for Montana: The Magazine of Western History and the Southwestern Historical Quarterly.

A native New Yorker, Dr. Franklin earned a B.A. in English Literature and American Studies from The City College of New York, and the M.A. and Ph.D in History at the University of Oklahoma. She has received short-term fellowships from the United States Army Center of Military History, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and the Newberry Library in Chicago, as well as long-term fellowships from the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library and the Library of Congress.

In addition to her work in the American West, Dr. Franklin also maintains an active interest in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, with a focus on the police state. Her course offerings include United States Military Affairs to 1900, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, Native American ethnohistory and the first half of the survey in American history.