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
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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 Remembering Bailey, Space, and A Whole Lotta Movement(s) in Michelle Tyrene Johnson's The Green Duck Lounge(2021) Moore, Zahria Imani; Blanco Borelli, Melissa; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Remembering Bailey, Space, and a Whole Lotta Movement(s) in Michelle Tyrene Johnson’s The Green Duck Lounge” is a critical study of Michelle Tyrene Johnson’s stage play, The Green Duck Lounge, and the premiere production in February 2018 at the University of Missouri. Through my scholarly analysis of the stage play (that is, through a dramatic analysis of the script, two oral histories, and an embodied written reflection remembering the premiere performance), this thesis explores the overarching question: How does Green Duck utilize Black feminist orality to theatrically emphasize Black women’s contributions to contemporary movements like the people for #BlackLivesMatter? By engaging Green Duck as a commemorative project, this thesis examines the ways in which Green Duck challenges how we remember Black resistance by telling history using a Black woman’s body (that is, Bailey).Item NELSON MANDELA’S 1990 VISIT TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: RHETORIC(S) OF THE ANTI-APARTHEID MOVEMENT(2019) Obike, Nma Winnie; Parry-Giles, Trevor; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Nelson Mandela’s 1990 visit to the United States of America was a victory tour for Mandela and the anti-apartheid movement in America given the significant role that everyday Americans played to secure his release from prison. In this dissertation, I ask how Mandela’s 1990 visit underscored the historic, visual, and ideographic rhetoric of the anti-apartheid social movement in America. To find answers, I examine Mandela’s rhetoric as expressed in the black power salute, his address to Congress, and solidarity with regional anti-apartheid groups. The anti-apartheid movement in America mirrored the civil rights movement with its myriad protest strategies. Under the umbrella of the Free South Africa Movement (FSAM), boycotts, sanctions, and divestment strategies were implemented at the national and state level to end apartheid. FSAM members hosted Mandela’s 1990 visit during which he used the tools of rhetoric to reach directly to the American people to seek solidarity and support for continued sanctions against the South African apartheid regime. Mandela’s display of the visual gesture of the black power salute contributed to a cultural change in the denotative meaning of the gesture. Once the symbol of radical nationalist black politics, the black power salute became a symbol of black pan-African unity and solidarity.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 “PROSPERING BECAUSE THAT’S ITS HISTORY”: BLACK RESILIENCE AND HONORS DEVELOPMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY AND THE STATE OF MARYLAND, 1867-1988(2015) Dula, Traci Leigh Moody; MacDonald, Victoria-María; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study explores the origins and development of honors education at a Historically Black College and University (HBCU), Morgan State University, within the context of the Maryland higher education system. During the last decades, public and private institutions have invested in honors experiences for their high-ability students. These programs have become recruitment magnets while also raising institutional academic profiles, justifying additional campus resources. The history of higher education reveals simultaneous narratives such as the tension of post-desegregated Black colleges facing uncertain futures; and the progress of the rise and popularity of collegiate honors programs. Both accounts contribute to tracing seemingly parallel histories in higher education that speaks to the development of honors education at HBCUs. While the extant literature on honors development at Historically White Institutions (HWIs) of higher education has gradually emerged, our understanding of activity at HBCUs is spotty at best. One connection of these two phenomena is the development of honors programs at HBCUs. Using Morgan State University, I examine the role and purpose of honors education at a public HBCU through archival materials and oral histories. Major unexpected findings that constructed this historical narrative beyond its original scope were the impact of the 1935/6 Murray v Pearson, the first higher education desegregation case. Other emerging themes were Morgan’s decades-long efforts to resist state control of its governance, Maryland’s misuse of Morrill Act funds, and the border state’s resistance to desegregation. Also, the broader histories of Black education, racism, and Black citizenship from Dred Scott and Plessy, the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation to Brown, inform this study. As themes are threaded together, Critical Race Theory provides the framework for understanding the emerging themes. In the immediate wake of the post-desegregation era, HBCUs had to address future challenges such as purpose and mission. Competing with HWIs for high-achieving Black students was one of the unanticipated consequences of the Brown decision. Often marginalized from higher education research literature, this study will broaden the research repository of honors education by documenting HBCU contributions despite a challenging landscape.Item The Only Woman In The Courtroom Dismantled Jim Crow: Constance Baker Motley(2013) Ford, Gary L.; Struna, Nancy; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Bold Words The Only WOman In The Courtroom Dismantled Jim Crow: Constance Baker MotleyItem 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.