Michael Blaakman is a historian of politics, empires, and borderlands in early America. His first book project, “Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic,” charts the relationship between revolutionary state formation and a frenzied rush to speculate in Native peoples’ land during the new nation’s first quarter-century. His undergraduate and graduate courses emphasize the centrality of Indigenous politics, ideas, and experiences in the history of the American revolutionary era.