Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Seeing the Materiality of Race, Class, and Gender in Orange County, Virginia(2021) Woehlke, Stefan; Leone, Mark P.; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores some of the ways the African American community in Western Orange County, Virginia adapted to life after emancipation. The interpretation relies upon intersectional materialism, which is rooted in the intellectual legacy of Black Left Feminists. Intersectional materialism rejects the dualities and dichotomies common in dialectical thinking and embraces a polylectical framework that has emerged following the influences of postmodern theorists in the mid to late 20th-century. Polylectical analysis requires the inclusion of a wide array of voices from people positioned across a complex matrix of domination to better understand the structure of that matrix and the possible futures that could be produced from it. This has enabled an understanding of African American material culture that links directly to the ideas of generations of Black intellectuals. This has resulted in an emphasis on the material culture of domestic architecture and literacy. It becomes possible to more accurately interpret material culture that may not have been directly addressed by people in the past after a more complete interpretation of the structure of social forces is accomplished. This includes the analysis and interpretation of the dynamic relationship between African American domestic sites and the visualscape.Item Thinking, Scripting, and Performing: Constructing and Playing the Racial Synecdoche in the Antebellum North(2007-05-06) Jones, Douglas Anthony; Nathans, Heather S; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In my thesis, I argue that between the years of 1830-1842, free African Americans scripted and performed what I term, following historian Patrick Rael, the racial synecdoche. This "character" was a black performative identity that people of color should play on the public stage. The performance team--or those who scripted and performed this new black identity--believed that the performance of the synecdoche would grant free people of color eligibility to perform full civic participation in America's nascent democracy. In this study, I consider the national black conventions of the 1830s as ritualistic sites and as the primary loci where that self-scripting process took place. I characterize this thesis as an intellectual history and hope that it contributes to the vital and ever-growing bodies of African American history and African American theatre and performance history, as well as add contour and complexity to the well-charted Jacksonian period.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.