College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Reckoning with Freedom: Legacies of Exclusion, Dehumanization, and Black Resistance in the Rhetoric of the Freedmen's Bureau(2017) Lu, Jessica H.; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Charged with facilitating the transition of former slaves from bondage to freedom, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (known colloquially as the Freedmen’s Bureau) played a crucial role in shaping the experiences of black and African Americans in the years following the Civil War. Many historians have explored the agency’s administrative policies and assessed its pragmatic effectiveness within the social, political, and economic milieu of the emancipation era. However, scholars have not adequately grappled with the lasting implications of its arguments and professed efforts to support freedmen. Therefore, this dissertation seeks to analyze and unpack the rhetorical textures of the Bureau’s early discourse and, in particular, its negotiation of freedom as an exclusionary, rather than inclusionary, idea. By closely examining a wealth of archival documents— including letters, memos, circular announcements, receipts, congressional proceedings, and newspaper articles—I interrogate how the Bureau extended antebellum freedom legacies to not merely explain but police the boundaries of American belonging and black inclusion. Ultimately, I contend that arguments by and about the Bureau contributed significantly to the reconstruction of a post-bellum racial order that affirmed the racist underpinnings of the social contract, further contributed to the dehumanization of former slaves, and prompted black people to resist the ongoing assault on their freedom. This project thus provides a compelling case study that underscores how rhetorical analysis can help us better understand the ways in which seemingly progressive ideas can be used to justify exercises of power and domination. Additionally, this interpretation of the Bureau’s primary role as a mechanism of supervision, rather than support, sheds light on the history of unjust practices that persist today in American race relations. Finally, this study affirms how black people have persevered in inventive and innovative ways to disrupt the pervasive discourse that seeks to destroy them.Item Fight or Flight: The Commitment of German-Americans to the Union Cause during the American Civil War(2017) Cade, II, Anthony J; Sumida, Jon T; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)German-Americans fighting for or supporting the Union during the American Civil War felt humiliated on several occasions because of the failures of German units on the battlefields of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, and the command mistakes of the German general, Franz Sigel, at New Market. Nativist Americans exploited these events to question the loyalty and fighting ability of all German-Americans fighting for the Union. This thesis examines the commitment of German-Americans to the Union cause and the resiliency they demonstrated when they experienced disgrace and hostility during the Civil War.Item Les Représentations littéraires de la guerre civile libanaise: pour une poétique du lien(2014) Matar, Marilyn; Brami, Joseph; Modern French Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I analyze representations of the Lebanese civil war in literature, and focus mainly on the works of the Francophone writers, Wajdi Mouawad, Elie-Pierre Sabbag and Ramy Zein. I trace in these works recurring themes and motifs that allow me to bring out the singularity of the aesthetics of war writings from the Lebanese civil war context. My thesis also reflects on the ethical questions raised by these works, which undertake a basic and universal examination of evil, meditate on the horrors of war, revenge and reconciliation, and grapple with the limits of human dignity. In the introduction, I present the authors and their works in the socio-historical context of the Mashrek and, more specifically, of Lebanon and the wars it has experienced since 1975. My dissertation is comprised of five chapters: In the first chapter, I examine the literary representation of the human cost of war: the aftermath of trauma, exile, and death. I also show how war and identity become inextricable in this literature. In the second chapter, I focus on the rewriting of myths and Greek tragedies such as Oedipus and Antigone as a way to gesture towards the unspeakable tragedy of war. In the third and fourth chapter, I demonstrate the importance of narrative by analyzing the links between intimate storytelling and the public space of theater, and by reexamining the notion of catharsis. The final chapter is a detailed study of the metaphors of reconstruction and reconciliation in Lebanese Francophone literature. In this section, I show how these works are characterized by a will to transcend conflicts; they thus constitute a powerful call for a society based on humanist ethical values.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 Teaching the Confederacy: Textbooks in the Civil War South(2009) Kopp, Laura Elizabeth; Rowland, Leslie; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)During the Civil War, at least 136 textbooks appeared in the states that made up the Confederacy, more than half of them in 1863 and 1864. The production of so many textbooks under difficult wartime circumstances suggests their significance in the promotion of Confederate values and ideologies. This thesis examines the Confederate textbook campaign, including the motives of authors and publishers, and analyzes the content of the textbooks themselves, including such themes as patriotism, gender roles, war, and death. While similar to antebellum textbooks in many respects, Confederate textbooks portrayed slavery as central to Southern society and offered explicit defenses of the institution. They also sought to promote Confederate nationalism among the new nation's youngest citizens and instructed children to honor and memorialize the Confederacy. The pages of Confederate textbooks constituted vital terrain for the shaping of the hearts and minds of Southern children.Item Nurturing Change: Lilly Martin Spencer's Images of Children(2008-04-22) Napolitano, Laura Groves; Promey, Sally M.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is the first full-length study to concentrate on American genre painter Lilly Martin Spencer's images of children, which constituted nearly one half of her saleable production during the height of her artistic career from 1848 to 1869. At this time, many young parents received advice regarding child rearing through books and other publications, having moved away from their families of origin in search of employment. These literatures, which gained in popularity from the 1830s onward, focused on spiritual, emotional, and disciplinary matters. My study considers four major themes from the period's writing on child nurture that changed over time, including depravity and innocence, parent/child bonding, standards of behavior and moral rectitude, and children's influence on adults. It demonstrates how Spencer's paintings, prints, and drawings featuring children supported and challenged these evolving ideologies, helping to shed light not only on the artist's reception of child-rearing advice, but also on its possible impact on her middle-class audience, to whom she closely catered. In four chapters, I investigate Spencer's images of sleeping children as visual equivalents of contemporary consolation literature during a time of high infant and child mortality rates; her paintings of parent/child interaction as promoting separation from mothers and emotional bonding with fathers; her prints of mischievous children as both considering changing ideals about children's behavior and comforting Anglo-American citizens afraid of what they saw as threatening minority groups; and her pictures with Civil War and Reconstruction subject matter as contending with the popular concept of the moral utility of children. By framing my interpretations of Spencer's output around key issues in the period's dynamic child-nurture literature, I advance new comprehensive readings of many of her most well-known paintings, including Domestic Happiness, Fi, Fo, Fum!, and The Pic Nic or the Fourth of July. I also consider work often overlooked by other art historians, but which received acclaim in Spencer's own time, including the lithographs of children made after her designs, and the allegorical painting Truth Unveiling Falsehood. Significantly, I provide the first in-depth analysis of a newly rediscovered Reconstruction-era painting, The Home of the Red, White, and Blue.Item "To Aid Their Rebel Friends": Politics and Treason in the Civil War North(2008-04-22) White, Jonathan W; Belz, Herman; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In "To Aid Their Rebel Friends" I argue that Civil War-era politicians relied on meanings of treason from old English law and Revolutionary-era America to broaden the definition of treason beyond the narrow definition found in the Constitution. In doing so, they gave new meaning to words and phrases in the Constitution that had been dormant for many years. Treason is the only crime defined in the U.S. Constitution: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." The next sentence states that treason must be an "overt Act," thus precluding judges or politicians from declaring that conspiracy or words might be deemed treason. In defining treason narrowly the Framers hoped to depoliticize a crime that for centuries had been political in nature. In early modern England kings could define treason however they chose and force judges to convict the accused, simply to eliminate political opposition. Moreover, since the fourteenth century it was a treasonable offence to imagine or compass the king's death. The Founders hoped to avoid such occurrences on American soil. Despite the Founders' precaution of carefully defining treason in the nation's fundamental law, the Civil War transformed how treason was understood in American legal and political culture. The definition of treason broadened to include more than just overt acts of war. Included in its meaning were also disloyal or treasonous words. Sedition was punished, though not always as a defined crime. Speech codes were enforced in several northern states, and loyalty oaths were required at all levels of government and in nearly every jurisdiction. Violations of these laws, or refusals to take prescribed oaths, opened up northern citizens to charges of treason and disloyalty. In essence, the line between words and deeds blurred so that someone might be considered a traitor for speaking "traitorously" or for harboring "disloyal" sentiments. Beyond looking at the federal level, this dissertation also examines how understandings of treason broadened at the state and local levels, something that no scholar has yet attempted to do.Item Remembering Antietam: Commemoration and Preservation of a Civil War Battlefield(2005-03-11) Trail, Susan W.; Sies, Mary C.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Civil War memory has been the focus of a great deal of scholarship in recent years. A large percentage of this attention has been directed toward one battlefield--Gettysburg, which has come to represent remembrance of that conflict as a whole. This study of Antietam battlefield, however, reveals a very different commemorative experience than the one found at Gettysburg, suggesting a more nuanced Civil War memory at work in the United States than found by looking at Gettysburg alone. The Battle of Antietam remains, to this day, the single bloodiest day in American history. Yet, Antietam's location within the slaveholding, Union border state of Maryland resulted in a conflicted and ambivalent remembrance of that battle on the part of local inhabitants, the state, and national veterans' organizations. This ambivalence shaped the commemorative landscape at Antietam, and was reflected within it. The first objective of this study was to document the formation of the commemorative landscape at Antietam battlefield up to the 1960s, within the larger evolution of Civil War memory. A major factor in this landscape's development was the fact that, unlike other early battlefield parks, the federal government acquired very little land at Antietam. Paradoxically, this contributed greatly toward Antietam's successful preservation under present-day standards. The second objective was to define the local community's role in shaping the landscape at Antietam. Because it remained in private hands, community members exerted a great deal of influence over Antietam's commemorative landscape relative to other battlefields. In fact, elements within the Sharpsburg community consistently resisted or undermined the authority of those seeking to impose a commemorative overlay on Antietam battlefield. Situating Antietam battlefield within the larger discourse and politics of Civil War memory was the third objective. The complexity of remembrance at Antietam first manifested itself with the creation of Antietam National Cemetery, and the struggle between Maryland and the northern states over early memory of the battle. This contrasted with the clear message conveyed by Lincoln at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery, and set the stage for the different paths of remembrance taken by the two battlefields.Item Nothing Ladylike About It: The Theatrical Career of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson(2004-04-30) Stewart, Stacey A.; Schuler, Catherine A; TheatreIn 1864, at the height of the Civil War, twenty-one year old Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842-1932) stood in the House of Representatives, before Congress, the Cabinet, and the Supreme Court, and lambasted President Lincoln for his compassion toward the South. She was the first woman ever to speak before Congress. Her performance earned her the title "America's Joan of Arc," and she went on to become one of the nation's most famous, most popular, and most highly-paid orators. Abolitionists, suffragists, and powerful political parties sought to make her the spokesperson for their causes. When the lecture circuit dried up in the wake of the war, Dickinsonflying in the face of her Philadelphia Quaker upbringingrealized a lifelong ambition to go on the stage. Lacking both theatrical training and experience, Dickinson nevertheless wrote a play, Anne Boleyn, or, A Crown of Thorns, and attempted its title role. Although many newspapers were generous, the powerful New York critics were merciless in their condemnation of both play and player. But Dickinson continued to pursue a career in the theatre, writing a half-dozen plays and acting in severalmost notably, a controversial performance as Hamlet in 1882. Having risen to fame as a public speaker while protected by her Quaker heritage and her youth, Dickinson became a troubling figure once she appeared on a theatrical stage. I argue that Dickinson's attempt to establish herself in the theatrical world can be seen as a manifestation of a larger quest for citizenshipfor full participation in American culture and society. Through her playwriting, Dickinson both consciously re-visioned patriarchal history and challenged conventional notions of appropriate feminine behavior. As an actress, she sought to communicate original ideas about character through carefully considered interpretations. As a woman working in the theatre, she demanded satisfactory compensation and working conditions without regard to the norms of the professionnorms that did not accommodate a woman with her goals and expectations (however unrealistic). In a period when "True Women" were expected to be passive and private, Dickinson was aggressive and obstinately public. And there was nothing ladylike about it.Item "A LIGHT WHICH REVEALS ITS TRUE MEANING": STATE SUPREME COURTS AND THE CONFEDERATE CONSTITUTION(2004-04-30) Stelluto, Jr., Donald Louis; Belz, Herman J.; HistoryDuring the Civil War, Confederate wartime legislation, chiefly conscription, exemption, and impressments statutes, raised fundamental constitutional issues. These actions by the national government became a prolific source of litigation in many southern states. Yet, in the absence of a national Confederate Supreme Court, it fell to state supreme courts and state jurists to resolve these challenges to the national government's exercise of constitutional war powers and to enunciate key constitutional principles and explain the tenets of Confederate political philosophy. As a result, southern state supreme courts became the primary venues in which national constitutional issues were adjudicated. The constitutional purposes and goals of the Confederacy were national- rather than state-oriented and provided for limited but effective national government, a truly federal union in which state and national governments were to both operate effectively and energetically, and within the national government, the powers of the national government were to be separated to promote efficiency and prevent usurpation. In these cases, state supreme courts enunciated key Confederate constitutional doctrines and principles namely, limited government or constitutionalism, federalism, the separation of powers, and national purposes. State jurists established that the Confederate Constitution was a substantive and purposeful constitutive consisting of conservative principles and innovative forms and features. Operating as a de facto supreme court, these state supreme courts considered scores of wartime decisions. Consistently, across jurisdictions, these justices rejected states' rights as the political philosophy of the Confederacy, they upheld the exercise of constitutional Confederate war powers within a carefully articulated doctrine of federalism, they limited national government within its delegated authority without handicapping its capabilities to fulfill its duties, and maintained a strict separation of government powers between the three national branches. State supreme court cases have been largely ignored by Civil War scholars. However, these decisions reveal the substantive and normative nature of constitutional principles in the Confederacy. The specific holdings in these cases contradict earlier historiographical understandings of the Confederacy as a loose confederation of states with each acting independently.