Historian’s Talk to Explore Native American, Black and White Views of 1833 Meteor Shower

On Nov. 12, 1833, North Americans witnessed 50,000 to 150,000 meteors streak across the night sky each hour. This “shower of stars” was recorded in settler diaries and letters, Plains Indian winter counts, the quilt patterns of enslaved Black people, and many other places.

In this year’s Eugene Lunn Memorial Lecture at UC Davis on Wednesday, May 17, Harvard University  historian Philip J. Deloria will explore this celestial event and the distinctive ideas it generated among Native American, Black and white communities of the time about the cosmos and humanity’s place in it. 

His talk, “When the Stars Fell: A Multi-Epistemological Inquiry into the Leonid Meteor Shower of 1833,” will be at 4:30 p.m. in the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.

Deloria (Dakota descent) is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard. He chairs the Repatriation Committee for the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian. He is the author of award-winning books Playing Indian and Indians in Unexpected Places and co-author of American Studies: A User's Guide.

The annual Lunn Lecture commemorates Eugene Lunn, a cultural and intellectual historian who taught at UC Davis from 1970 until his death in 1990. The lecture is supported by a donation from alumnus Michael Tennefoss (B.A., political science and economics, ’80).

This year’s lecture is co-sponsored by the Manetti Shrem Museum.