History Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2778
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Item "In This You Street Vicinity": Building a Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., 1903-1912(2024) Jamison, Bridget; Giovacchini, Saverio; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The decade of 1903-1912 was a period of great creation in the U Street neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the result of social conditions that had emerged through Reconstruction and beyond. The institutions that were built to house Black Washington’s cultural activities in this time were sites of conflict between contingents of Washingtonians, both Black and white, who held competing visions for the future of their city and communities. Although different principles and priorities determined the development and operation of different buildings, such as True Reformers’ Hall, the Twelfth Street Y.M.C.A., and the Howard Theatre, the concentration of cultural institutions in this one location produced a coherent idea of U Street that would carry into future decades. U Street at the beginning of the twentieth century was the local creation of people who were involved in national discussions on politics, religion, society, and economics and engaged with what was new and modern in arts and entertainment. Even before it became a famous theater district, U Street was an expression of Black business and Black artistry and the aspirations that the people there had for the future.Item Claiming Place, Placing Claim: African American Life in Working-Class Nashville, Tennessee, 1861-1900(2023) Maxson, Stanley D; Rowland, Leslie S; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation tracks the development of Black Bottom, a working-class neighborhood in Nashville, Tennessee, from the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century. It examines the lives of African Americans, mostly refugees from slavery, who lived in Black Bottom during and after the Civil War and created one of the city’s first Black enclaves. In so doing, it argues for using space and place as analytical categories. Black Nashvillians claimed space by building Black Bottom into a neighborhood of labor, leisure, culture, education, and community. Attention to space offers insight into the lived experience of working-class African Americans and the opportunities and threats that urban life presented. The dissertation traces the racialization of place in a New South city by adopting the focused scope of a neighborhood study. White newspapers depicted Black Bottom as a slum and its residents as a danger to the entire city. The characterization of Black Bottom as a place of crime, vice, and disease was a crucial tool for those who sought to justify its policing, regulation, or even destruction. The dissertation also argues for the importance of space and place in the politics of Black claims-making and joins scholarship that has emphasized the collective nature of Black politics in the late nineteenth century. Claiming space brought tangible, real-world benefits for working-class African Americans. Black Bottom was a place where Black Nashvillians exercised freedom in the physical world, on porches and sidewalks, and in churches and dance halls. The physical space of Black Bottom enabled communal relationships among residents, which, in time, became a resource for Black claims-making. African Americans defended Nashville during the Civil War and claimed Black Bottom as their neighborhood. Later, the neighborhood defended the founding generation’s claims to the entitlements of wartime service.Item FOR THE BENEFIT OF THESE CHILDREN: AFFIRMING RACIAL IDENTITY IN THE ERA OF SCHOOL DESEGREGATION, PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY, MARYLAND, 1954-1974(2017) Matthews, Avis Danette; Muncy, Robyn L.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This history examines attitudes toward and responses to school desegregation within an established, closely knit network of African-American communities in Prince George's County, Maryland, from 1954, immediately after Brown v. Board of Education, through the first year of the destabilizing busing era. Optimistic about the opportunities and social equality desegregated schooling might afford their children, black residents of this county nonetheless recognized the value of segregated schooling in securing a general sense of well being within both their children and their communities. Thus, for two decades they approached school desegregation with expectation and ambivalence, asserting collective agency to influence the school board's decision making, prevent the closing of black schools, and affirm their racial and cultural identity.Item CHESAPEAKE FREE BLACKS AND THE ORIGINS OF THE LIBERIAN STATE, 1776-1848(2017) Brewer, Herbert; BERLIN, IRA; ROWLAND, LESLIE S.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the phased, uneven, and contradictory development of republican ideas in the political thought of Chesapeake free blacks who migrated to Cape Mesurado, West Africa, between the founding of the Liberia colony in 1822 and Liberia’s declaration of independence in 1847, and how their republican ideas shaped the creation of the Liberian state. A key finding is the extent to which the origin of the Liberian state was specifically tied to the development of an embryonic petit-bourgeois social layer of artisans, small traders, shopkeepers, and aspiring merchants among Christian evangelical small property-holding Chesapeake free blacks whose ideas and actions drove the events, thus linking the formation of the Liberian state to the peculiar history of this group. The establishment of capitalist property relations was the founding principle of the Liberian state, and although religion and race were of considerable significance, they were, contrary to what much of the historiography has claimed, of secondary importance in explaining the state’s origins. Liberia’s Chesapeake free black founders tied citizenship to property ownership as well as to race, thereby rooting the state’s origins in a political economy of black identity. The coming into being of Liberian identity was powerfully informed and conditioned by the ideology of property, revealing the tension between the hierarchies intrinsic to the Chesapeake free blacks’ property-bound conception of citizenship and the egalitarian impulse behind their anti-slavery views. The interplay of political and economic events in and around Cape Mesurado during Liberia’s founding, gave rise to a particular social identity – an imagined black nationhood – linked to the idea of property. The development of race consciousness specific to that time and place – for example, the idea of Liberia as an exclusively black space – was tied to a theory of property ownership and to the exigencies of state formation that entailed absorbing and subordinating local African polities, thereby creating new identities and social hierarchies. A careful reading of the correspondence between the American Colonization Society in Washington and the Chesapeake free black leadership at Cape Mesurado shows that by December 1823, within months of settlement, this incipient class of free black property-holders had announced its intentions, to the dismay of its ACS benefactors. In doing so, the free blacks set in motion a series of actions that would lead them, twenty-five years after the colony’s creation, amid debates reflected in published accounts and polemics by both supporters and detractors, to declare Liberia’s independence.Item REQUIEM FOR RECONSTRUCTION: THE SOUTH CAROLINA LOWCOUNTRY AND REPRESENTATIONS OF RACE AND CITIZENSHIP, 1880-1980(2017) Bland, Robert David; Rowland, Leslie S; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Requiem for Reconstruction” examines depictions of post-Civil War African American life in the South Carolina Lowcountry and their deployment in the public sphere to represent Reconstruction’s promise and perils. As a period when the United States took its first meaningful steps to challenge white supremacy and construct a color-blind democracy, Reconstruction was first tested and then most thoroughly sustained in the predominantly black counties of the South Carolina Lowcountry. In the century that followed Reconstruction’s collapse, both those Americans committed to racial egalitarianism and those who supported white supremacy regularly returned to the Lowcountry’s post-Civil War past to articulate competing notions of racial progress. “Requiem for Reconstruction” argues that the Lowcountry’s visibility led to a countermemory of Reconstruction that diverged from the narratives of professional historians and provided the foundation for a vision of black citizenship that informed twentieth-century debates over black landownership, cultural appropriation, and civil rights. In exploring how non-historians interpreted and utilized the past, “Requiem for Reconstruction” intervenes in the fields of American memory and African American cultural history. Showing that freedpeople’s Reconstruction-era experiences of landownership and political participation shaped the vocabulary of racial egalitarianism for more than a century, “Requiem for Reconstruction” focuses on a constellation of events, intellectuals, and organizations through which memory of Reconstruction was produced and sustained. By examining the afterlives of nineteenth-century battles over land, labor, African American culture, and black political power, “Requiem for Reconstruction” demonstrates that the Lowcountry’s past remained a touchstone in the struggle against white supremacy in the United States.Item Freedom, Kinship, and Property: Free Women of African Descent in the French Atlantic, 1685-1810(2012) Johnson, Jessica Marie; Berlin, Ira; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Freedom, Kinship, and Property: Free Women of African Descent in the French Atlantic, 1685-1810” examines the role kinship and property played in the lives of free women of African descent in the Atlantic ports of Senegal, Saint-Domingue, and Gulf Coast Louisiana. Over the course of the long eighteenth century, a distinct cohort of African women and women of African descent recognized as not enslaved, enjoyed status and position in the slaveholding French Atlantic. Free status allowed them to claim their own labor, establish families, accumulate property, and demand the rights that accompanied freedom. However, free women of color’s claims to freedom, kinship, and property were not always recognized, and during the tumultuous era of the founding of the French Atlantic world these women struggled to secure livelihoods for themselves and their progeny. “Freedom, Kinship, and Property” explores the ways French Atlantic free women of African descent labored to give meaning to their freedom. This study developed out of my broader interests in Atlantic slavery, diaspora studies, and the histories of black women and of free people of color. Using travel narratives, notarial records, parish registers, and civil and criminal court records, “Freedom, Kinship, and Property” describes the lives of women of African descent in eighteenth-century Senegal, Saint-Domingue, and Gulf Coast Louisiana. In Senegal, African and Eurafrican women's commercial networks and liaisons with European men secured them prized positions in local trading networks and the society being built at the comptoirs. In Saint-Domingue and Gulf Coast Louisiana, free women of color manipulated manumission laws, built complicated kinship networks, and speculated in property to support families of their own. Free women of African descent created kinship networks, established material wealth, and maneuvered through a world of slave trading, international warfare, and revolution. Considering how free women of color negotiated kinship and property as they moved with slaves and goods between Atlantic port cities sheds important light on the formation of the black Atlantic over time.Item African American Women's Politics, Organizing, and Activism in 1920s-Washington, D.C.(2012) Murphy, Mary-Elizabeth Bradley; Barkley Brown, Elsa; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation offers a social history of African American women's political activism and organizing in 1920s-Washington, D.C. Specifically, I examine the ways that black women worked to reform the school system, protested segregation in the offices of the federal government and neighborhoods, fought for the passage of an anti-lynching law, formed Republican organizations, upheld African American citizenship through commemoration, and recruited more than one thousand women and men to join a labor union, the National Association of Wage Earners. I argue that black women in 1920s-Washington, D.C., reached into the knowledge and skills they derived from black institutional culture, from their location in the city, from their work experiences, friendships, and family life to organize their campaigns and participate in politics. Black institutional culture formed a bridge to women's formal political activism. As churchgoers, dues-paying members of fraternal orders, fundraisers for the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), or participants in social clubs, African American women developed important skills, including fundraising, publicity, and public speaking, which they applied to their more overtly political campaigns. Locating the origins of African American women's political campaigns and organizations within black institutions helps to explain how black women were sometimes able to mobilize hundreds of foot soldiers in a short period of time. Personal experiences also mattered tremendously in women's political activism. Stories and memories passed along from family and friends inspired African American women to wage their wide-ranging campaigns for justice. During the 1920s, black women in ways both large and small, individual and collective--from walking through the streets to recruit members to a labor organization to raising money for a YWCA organizing drive, from marching through the streets in support of anti-lynching bill, to staging protests in front of the Board of Education building--organized to sustain their communities, reform their city, and enact democracy in Washington and throughout the nation. This dissertation relies on a range of sources, including organizational records, personal papers, black and white newspapers, social scientific studies, government documents, court cases, oral histories, Sanborn maps, city directories, and the manuscript census.