"The Girl in the Middle" Author event and conversation | June 20 | 3pm with Martha Sandweiss

June 20 2025, 3:00 – 4:30pm, $10 

Join Princeton historian and author Martha A. Sandweiss as she discusses the detailed historical research that led to her most recent publication, The Girl in the Middle. In the publication, Professor Sandweiss critically engages with what it means to recover the identity of someone previously lost to history. Hannah Abelbeck (Curator, Photographs and Archival Collections, New Mexico History Museum) and Dakota Hoska (Curator of Native Art, National Gallery of Art) will join her in the conversation.

In 1868, celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner to Fort Laramie to document the federal government’s treaty negotiations with the Lakota and other tribes of the northern Plains. Gardner posed six federal peace commissioners with a young girl wrapped in a blanket. The hand-labeled prints carefully name each of the men, but the girl is never identified. The Girl in the Middle goes in search of her. Sandweiss follows the lives of the men in the photograph, and she identifies Sophie Mousseau, the girl in the picture (estimated 8 years old), whose life spanned the period from the Civil War to the Great Depression.