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COVERED WITH NIGHT PROFESSOR NICOLE EUSTACE IS AN ACCOMPLISHED RESEARCHER, WRITER AND HISTORIAN WHO HAS FOCUSED HER PROFESSIONAL CAREER ON THE STUDY OF EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY. HER PASSION FOR HISTORY WAS DEVELOPED AT AN EARLY AGE. HER MOTHER, A LIFELONG EDUCATOR, SERVED AS A ROLE MODEL IN DR. EUSTACE’S FORMATIVE YEARS. ONE OF HER EARLIEST MEMORIES IS LANDING A ROLE AS A FOUR-YEAR-OLD COLONIAL CHILD IN A HIGH SCHOOL PRODUCTION PUT ON BY HER MOTHER’S CLASS. Undergraduate work at Yale, followed by Master’s and Doctorate Degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, led to the faculty at NYU, where she quickly rose through the ranks. NYU has roughly 6500 instructional em- ployees, approximately 3000 of whom are full-time faculty, 1200 of them tenured. But the University’s highest academic category is reserved for its seventy-five Silver Professors, an elite group to which Dr. Eustace was named on March 23, 2023. In 2022 Dr. Eustace won the Pulitzer Prize in History for her book Covered With Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America. As a historian, Dr. Eustace told us she rarely has an opportunity to have any influence on contemporary policy. But Covered With Night gave her the opportunity to make her research into early American Justice Systems have real relevance today. The setting for her award-winning book is 1722, five decades before our nation’s Declaration of Independence. The location is the colony of Penn- sylvania, deep in the woods where indigenous people had once controlled every aspect of life. By the early 1700’s colonists had ventured into rural Pennsylvania, building homes, establishing farms and trading with the in- digenous people of that region. Relationships were formed; and sometimes tensions arose. It was against this backdrop that the death of a native man at the hands of two colonists sparked a controversy which ultimately result- ed in America’s first recognized treaty with in- digenous people. Covered With Night reads like a novel, but it is a work of non-fiction, based upon heavily re- searched historical facts. Dr. Eustace explained: “The murder case at the heart of my story ex- poses two very different sets of world views on the correct conduct of justice, and in the vivid ordinariness of its smallest details, it reveals how much we still have left to learn from history. It reminds us we must con- tinuously challenge ourselves to attune to more and different voices, to avail ourselves of the fullest range of resources that the past has to bequeath to the present.” In February of 1722, after a night of bargain- ing mixed with alcohol, two settler colonists, brothers John and Edmond Cartlidge, assault- ed a Seneca man named Sawantaeny and left him for dead. 35 JOURNAL