American Studies Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2740
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Item Historic Conservation Landscapes on Fort Hood, Texas: The Civilian Conservation Corps and Cultural Landscape Change in Central Texas(2009) Stabler, Jennifer Anne; Sies, Mary C.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was probably the most popular of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs. Many studies have examined the contribution of the CCC in national and state parks and forests, but less attention has been directed towards soil conservation work performed by enrollees on farms and ranches across the country. This dissertation examines cultural landscapes created by the CCC on farms and ranches in Central Texas that are now part of the Fort Hood Military Reservation. Cultural landscapes created by the CCC in the 1930s are significant because they represent large-scale federal government intervention into farming practices and planning on private land. Dramatic transformations occurred in both the conservation movement and on the land itself. This can be investigated through archaeological sites associated with activities of the CCC on Fort Hood from its period of operation (i.e., from 1933 to 1942). The significance of identified archaeological sites is evaluated based on the Secretary of the Interior's guidelines for evaluating archaeological sites for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places. Through the CCC, America's civilians transformed millions of acres of land across the United States from 1933 to 1942 in an effort to conserve natural resources that had been severely overexploited in preceding decades. Soil conservation and other New Deal agricultural programs primarily benefited land owners, but research on Fort Hood suggests that some tenants and sharecroppers benefited as well. Soil conservation work performed by the CCC on private land changed the way America's farming population operated their farms and included ordinary farmers in the conservation movement. Conservation was no longer the sole concern of academics, but through the efforts of federal, state, and local governments, became a major concern of ordinary farmers. This study also explores how rural planning efforts involved farmers in the decision-making process more than ever before. The reorganization of the rural landscape of Central Texas attests to the degree to which conservation measures were accepted by individual farmers.Item GRACIOUS BUT CARELESS: RACE AND STATUS IN THE HISTORY OF MOUNT CLARE(2010) Moyer, Teresa; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Historic plantation sites continue to struggle with the legacy of slavery and black history, particularly concerning their significance in American culture. Although enslaved persons are erased from the contemporary landscape of Carroll Park in Baltimore, Maryland, the historical and archaeological record preserves their importance to the Carroll family and the plantation called Georgia or Mount Clare. I argue that historic preservation is a form of social justice when underrepresented historical groups are integrated into interpretations of historical house museums and landscapes. Enslaved blacks held essential roles in every aspect of Mount Clare from circa 1730 to 1817. They became culturally American at the intersection of race and status, not only through the practice of their own cultural beliefs and values, but those of elite whites, as well. Focus on white ancestors reveals only part of the history of Mount Clare: I demonstrate that blacks' own achievements cannot be ignored.Item Hidden in Plain View: African American Archaeology at Manassas National Battlefield Park(2010) Martin Seibert, Erika Kristine; Shackel, Paul A.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how the categories of race, class, and/or gender intersected and informed life in an historic, rural, Southern community. Examining African American landscapes of consumption and production in historic, rural Virginia through the archaeological record is essential for understanding the development of African American cultural reproduction through time. Archaeological landscapes that include very early sites for this region and are comprised of material culture from pre-emancipation deposits can provide a framework for understanding how ethnogenesis worked as a method for the community to survive the harsh realities of slavery, redefine themselves as raced, classed, and gendered individuals with relation to their economy on their own terms, and build a foundation on which they could continually resist and transform the categories created for them during later periods in history. Sites that date to the mid nineteenth century and later provide information about the shift in these methods from ethnogenesis to racial uplift. Racial uplift during these later periods became the method which the African American families in this area used to connect themselves with citizenship and the American dream through their consumer and producer behavior. This behavior can then serve to illuminate how relationships of inequality became naturalized and institutionalized and how, through these methods, inequality was continually challenged and transformed. Examining historic and modern twentieth century African American landscapes through archaeological sites can also illuminate the response of the community to a period of intense commemoration by the Confederacy immediately following the Civil War and illuminate the lasting effects of the Lost Cause ideology on modern day race relations. Defining and understanding archaeology through this period not only acknowledges how and why African American history has been left out of modern interpretations, but helps outline new interpretive plans that both challenge visitors to our national parks and attempt a more democratic voice for the National Park Service and for our nation.Item Negotiating Public Landscapes: History, Archaeology, and the Material Culture of Colonial Chesapeake Towns, 1680 to 1720(2008-01-30) Lucas, Michael Thomas; Sies, Mary C; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Many studies over the past several decades have contributed to our understanding of colonial Chesapeake town development, but several key elements including material culture, multiple agencies, and the role of towns in the construction of race relations and chattel slavery are underrepresented or entirely missing. An understanding of how these elements relate to the construction and use of the many small towns that lined the shores of the Chesapeake Bay is especially lacking. This problem is addressed by focusing on the social, political, and economic histories of a small courthouse hamlet called Charles Town in Prince George's County, Maryland from 1684 to 1721. The dissertation argues that the meaning of early towns like Charles Town were generated through material culture and human agency enacted on the local level. The actions of those who used and sustained the town are examined to create a model for understanding the precise ways that small hamlets served local communities. Court cases, land deeds, archaeological data and other records are used to show the central role material culture played in the interaction between people at Charles Town during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. The primary forms of material culture used in this exchange were alcohol, food, and lodging purchased at the ordinaries, land patented, purchased, and sold in and around the town, and a variety of manufactured goods purchased from merchant stores. This investigation makes four contributions to the study of colonial Chesapeake towns. First, the interplay between human agency and material culture is examined as a mechanism for understanding how towns served local populations and why some succeeded while others failed. The second contribution is a detailed study of the myriad relationships between people of all social strata from landless ordinary keepers and enslaved persons to merchant politicians and planters. Third, the study demonstrates the central role of material culture in the physical and social construction and use of colonial Chesapeake towns. Finally, this study contributes to our understanding of colonial Chesapeake towns by stressing the importance of triangulating between a variety of primary historical and archaeological data.Item On the Edge of Freedom: Free Black Communities, Archaeology, and the Underground Railroad(2004-06-09) LaRoche, Cheryl Janifer; Shackel, Paul A.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"On the Edge of Freedom" is an interdisciplinary study of five free black communities that functioned as Underground Railroad sites along the southern borders of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Small rural free black communities along the borders of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers were situated in the landscape to offer sanctuary to runaways as first points of entry within often violent and racially hostile southern regions of the northern border states. I worked with National Forest Service archaeologists, universities, and private non-profit preservation groups. By combining archaeology, with oral and documentary history, genealogy, and cultural landscape studies, I contribute new comparative and theoretical models for explicating African-American history, and identifying and mapping undocumented Underground Railroad sites. The resulting geography of resistance reveals the risks African Americans endured in the cause of their own liberation. Blacks who participated in the subversive work of the Underground Railroad knew the level of violence to which whites would resort in response to black defiance in the face of oppression. Interrelated families played a central role in the establishment of the frontier settlements. Exclusive and independent of white abolitionist activities, virtually every nineteenth-century black settlement, urban or rural, offered some form of assistance to those escaping slavery. African-American, as well as white, Underground Railroad workers were loosely organized to offer assistance within their separate religious denominations although they worked across racial lines. For four out of the five sites, I demonstrate the relationship between the independent black church and the Underground Railroad. Methodist minister and fourth bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, William Paul Quinn, who was instrumental in the spread of Methodism to the northwest, established two churches associated with Underground Railroad sites in this study. Maps, in conjunction with archaeological techniques, are crucial to the identification and recovery of these enclaves. By mapping free black settlements, and black churches, new Underground Railroad routes emerge from the shadows of larger, nearby, better-known Quaker and abolitionist sites. Mapping little known African American Underground Railroad routes has implications for African American preservation initiatives and heritage tourism.