I have a longstanding interest in the ways settler colonialism shapes the collective memory or "historical consciousness" (Smith 2011) of settlers. How do settlers relate to their country, which they have wrested from others?  How do they tell the story of their arriving to this place?  When we compare settler colonial nation-states, what common tropes and zones of amnesia do we find in their national histories?  My work is greatly influenced by literature in Indigenous Studies and the work of Australian historian Patrick Wolfe.  I have explored these questions through a mixed method involving archival and ethnographic research, and thus far have explored three distinct cases:  French settlers from Algeria (Colonial Memory book, Europe’s Invisible Migrants book), Mormon settlers of Arizona (two articles : 2008, 2011), and U.S. settlers of Pennsylvania and New York (Memory Wars Book 2023).  I am currently researching how residents of Pennsylvania understand the Walking Purchase of 1737, a duplicitous land deal that led to the removal of Lenape people from their remaining territories in eastern Pennsylvania.