The Portal to Texas History 2021 Research Fellowship Awardee

Brooks Winfree

Project Title

Enslaved People in Native Texas: Violence, Labor, and Family in the Texas Cotton Country

Project Description

Winfree’s dissertation, “Enslaved People in Native Texas: Violence, Labor, and Family in the Texas Cotton Country,” bridges the gap in the historical literature of Native people in Texas and black chattel slavery by contemplating how enslaved African Americans encountered Native people in nineteenth century Texas. It argues that the presence of indigenous people in Texas shaped life and labor for enslaved people, provided slaves with opportunities for freedom, and yet simultaneously threatened enslaved people’s physical well-being and the integrity of their families.

Biography

Brooks Winfree is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. For the 2019-2020 academic year, he was a fellow at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. His scholarship examines how enslaved African Americans interacted with the diverse indigenous populations they encountered in antebellum Texas. From 2018 until 2020, he was the assistant editor of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly.