Fields

• Regional Field: North American West, both the US and Canada.
• Thematic Field: Public History.

Research: My PhD focuses on historical societies and heritage organizations in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia (or the Pacific Northwest) during the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. I ask how settlers’ claims to stolen land—claims that were both local, regional, and national—appeared in their construction of a usable past, as they attempted to forge a white settler society and enacted policies that dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their land. To examine this, I utilize the meeting records, publications, and private correspondence of heritage societies, organizations, and historians, drawing upon the lens of settler-colonial studies. I argue that white settlers in the Pacific Northwest constructed historical claims to a past that helped justify their supposed right to be in the region and assuage settler fragility, and we can see the results of these early days of historical construction in the myths expressed today about the region. These claims also functioned as a way to express future desires for the newly formed region and newly claimed national identities as Americans and Canadians.

In addition, Lily is the Managing Editor for the nonprofit Confluence’s Voices of the River journal, and previously worked in a variety of roles for Confluence.

“Voices of the River: The Confluence Story Gathering Interview Collection.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 119, no. 4 (2018)

“Invisible Walls: Mapping Residential Segregation In Portland.” Katrine Barber, Lily Hart, Curtis Jewell, Madelyn Miller, and Greta Smith. Oregon Historical Quarterly 119, no. 3 (2018)

• 2024 Donald J. Sterling, Jr. Graduate Fellow, Oregon Historical Society (2024)

Dr. Coll Thrush