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 "If I Am Free My Child Belongs to Me": Black Motherhood and Mothering in the Era of Emancipation(2022) Wicks-Allen, Jessica Lynn; Rowland, Leslie S; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Black women’s reproduction was foundational to Atlantic slave societies because it produced future laborers and profits for slaveholders. Although the commodification of bondwomen’s children generated grief, loss, and violence, enslaved women constructed individual and collective practices of motherhood that challenged that commodification. As emancipation reconfigured the social order, black women’s and children’s bodies and labor acquired dramatically new meanings. From the standpoint of former slaveholders, black women’s reproductive capacity and offspring were no longer assets but encumbrances. Meanwhile, emancipation meant that freedwomen could exercise parental rights that had previously been denied. These shifts raise questions about how motherhood and childrearing informed black women’s transition from slavery to freedom in the U.S. South. The dissertation argues that black women’s identities as mothers profoundly affected how they experienced and negotiated freedom. Black mothers sought to exercise self-determination by defining motherhood on their own terms, gaining control over their reproduction, and rearing their children as they saw fit. To achieve these ends, they demanded remunerative employment, custody of their children, protection from violence, child support, education for their progeny, and personal dignity. Reconstituting family and protecting the welfare of their children animated formerly enslaved women’s pursuit and definition of freedom. Whereas formerly enslaved women’s reproductive capacity and children had been assets under slavery, in freedom they became undesirable to employers, generating a whole new set of constraints for black mothers, who, as a result, faced employment discrimination and poverty. In response to these circumstances, newly freed mothers developed a politics of mutual vulnerability that stressed collectivity rather than individualism. If motherhood engendered vulnerability, the embrace of relationality served as a source of black maternal empowerment. While building on previous scholarship that has examined emancipation through the lens of gender, the dissertation deploys a more specific social location—motherhood—to bring black women’s politics into sharper focus, emphasizing the ways in which ex-slave women made and remade freedom through kinship and care work. In so doing, it also reveals that motherhood remained a site of black subjugation, albeit in new ways.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 Cultivating Politics: The Formation of a Black Body Politic in the Postemancipation Louisiana Sugar Parishes(2018) Calhoun, John; Bonner, Christopher; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The capture of New Orleans by Union forces in 1862 led to the emancipation of thousands of slaves across Louisiana’s sugar parishes. This early emancipation preceded the abolition of slavery elsewhere in the South, and it held far-reaching implications for the freedpeople of the sugar parishes. In this thesis, I argue that early emancipation fostered the rise of a powerful black body politic in the sugar parishes that would endure throughout Reconstruction and beyond. This body politic aimed to protect black people’s unique conception of freedom as both white Southerners and white Northerners endeavored to circumscribe that freedom for their own purposes. In pursuit of this goal, the mobilized sugar workers employed a broad range of political tools, ranging from extralegal violence to labor organization. These methods proved effective and safeguarded the freedom of black sugar workers for decades after the Civil War despite attempts by both Democrats and Radical Republicans to dissolve and demarcate that freedom respectively.Item Deep River: Slavery, Empire, and Emancipation in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, 1730-1860(2013) Heerman, Matthew Scott; Berlin, Ira; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Deep River" offers a continental perspective on human bondage and emancipation in mainland North America. It unearths the deep history of indigenous and African slavery in the upper Mississippi River Valley and traces its connections outward toward the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. "Deep River" argues for a new spatial frame for the history of slavery and freedom to understand how colonial experiences in the upper Mississippi River Valley shaped the trajectory of emancipation in the United States. It also offers new perspectives on the history of emancipation by exposing free and enslaved black agency to eradicate slavery from Illinois. "Deep River" moves past legal categories as an organizing framework for slave and free societies. It demonstrates that inheritable bondage long survived its legal abolition. Displacing laws as the engine of change, it argues the collaborations between free black migrants, fugitive slaves, and white anti-slavery activists drove the processes of emancipation forward. Free and fugitive migrants into Illinois settled in black freedom villages which afforded slaves limited access to capital, avenues toward finding attorneys, and support in legal proceedings. In this way, Illinois's movement to a free society sprang from domestic migrations and a longer colonial legacy of trade and settlement in the Mississippi Valley, not laws and statutes passed by the United States. By focusing on the ways in which black northern migration and litigation in local courts shaped emancipation in the state, "Deep River" illuminates how legal and political development in Illinois followed the paths that enslaved African Americans created.