College of Arts & Humanities
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1611
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item WAITING ON “THE HIGHER LAW”: HENRY MASSEY AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST PHILADELPHIA’S FUGITIVE SLAVE COURT(2023) LaRoche, Matthew David; Bonner, Christopher J; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Philadelphia’s preeminence as an historical hub of Underground Railroad activity, popularized through the exploits of William Still, is well established. However, a series of archival gaps have virtually erased Philadelphia, and particularly the early years of its fugitive slave court, from the wider historiography of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This work attempts to re-center Philadelphia, as well as its white-led abolitionist organizations and its African American community, in the scholarly discussion over the Act’s origin, intent, and effect. Attempting to overcome archival limitations, this work reconstructs the city’s first fugitive slave court, overseen by Commissioner Edward D. Ingraham from December of 1850 until his death in November of 1854, through the eyes of its participants. Using a close-reading approach, this thesis considers Philadelphia’s resistance to both the Ingraham court and the Act in toto from three perspectives. By comparing the case of Adam Gibson (the first victim of the Ingraham court) to that of Henry Massey, a Maryland freedomseeker and the last person sentenced before Ingraham’s death, this thesis establishes a documentary baseline through which one can trace the court’s evolution across the opening years of the Act’s enforcement. Through recreating the personal and institutional histories of Commissioner Ingraham, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, and the abolitionist lawyers who represented Gibson, Massey, and other freedomseekers, this thesis provides context to evaluate the legal, social, and religious moves made by the city’s elite in response to the Act’s passage. Finally, by drawing out indications of black organization and agency hidden within the internal records of the Abolition Society itself, this thesis attempts to delineate the practical limits of interracial abolitionist cooperation within Philadelphia at the time. Ultimately, this thesis finds that a combination of geographic pressures and ideological guardrails particular to Philadelphia prevented a stronghold of abolitionist outrage from forming an effective counter to the Act, even while comparable cities (Boston, Syracuse, Harrisburg) developed legal and illegal strategies for shutting down their resident fugitive slave courts.Item City of Hope and the 1968 Poor People's Campaign: Poverty, Protests, and Photography(2017) Bryant, Aaron E; Sies, Mary Corbin; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Scholars have produced rich materials on the civil rights movement since Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. These resources generally offer the familiar narratives of the period, as they relate to King’s earlier campaigns as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). This includes research on demonstrations in Alabama, Mississippi, Washington, and Memphis. Few studies offer insights on King’s final crusade, the Poor People’s Campaign, however. As an original contribution to civil rights research, the following study offers an overview of King’s antipoverty crusade to contextualize the movement’s impact on America’s past and present. This study presents new insights on the movement by introducing previously undiscovered and unexamined archival materials related to the campaign and Resurrection City, the encampment between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial that housed campaign participants. Photographs, architectural drawings, and other visual materials supplement evidence collected from primary documents and other archival sources. While the investigation of written records and printed materials helps the study construct a chronology of events to frame a historical narrative of the campaign, graphic materials presented in the study add eyewitness perspectives and visual evidence to help shape the study’s conclusions. Perceptions of the Poor People’s Campaign were unfavorable as media coverage fed national fears of riots and civil disorder. Additionally, national memory recorded the efforts of the campaign’s leadership as inadequate in filling the void left by King’s assassination. King’s antipoverty campaign, however, had its merits. It was a microscope on poverty and a critique that focused public attention on poverty nationwide. It was a catalyst to important federal and grassroots programs that laid the groundwork for later legislation and social change. The campaign was also a precursor to subsequent civil and human rights movements. In addition to bringing social concerns related to race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic justice to the public fore, King’s antipoverty crusade introduced age, gender, and quality-of-life issues to a national discourse on equality. Additionally, the campaign represented a change in sociopolitical activism as protest movements shifted from civil rights to human rights campaigns. Equally important, however, the campaign was the final chapter of King’s life and, conceivably, his most ambitious dream.Item "To Go to Nature's Manufactory": The Material Ecology of Slavery in Antebellum Maryland(2018) Perry, Tony; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the environmental history of slavery in Maryland and attends specifically to the ways enslaved people’s relationship to their environment manifested in their everyday lives. In this project, I advance an ecological analysis that foregrounds networks of relation between slaves, slaveholders, soils, plants, animals, and cold weather. Grounding my analysis in the everyday world of slavery, my dissertation employs a framework I call material ecology, which utilizes object-oriented analysis as a means of thinking through, unpacking, and rendering the ecology of slavery in Maryland. Using this approach, I organize each of my chapters around a class of objects that materialize different ecological relations. As the points at which such relations converge, cast-iron plows, enslaved people’s shoes, slave-made charms, as well as stews and similar one-pot meals disclose distinctive interactions between the enslaved and their environment. From my analysis of the relationships that cohere around these objects, I argue that in antebellum Maryland slaves and slaveholders differently mobilized elements of their environment against one another in their multiform contests over power. Examining the ecological networks informing these contests illustrates the extent to which the environment in enslaved people’s lives was simultaneously antagonistic and empowering.Item “THE VERY MESSENGERS OF GOD”: THE TEACHERS OF ALABAMA’S FREEDPEOPLE, 1865-1870(2017) Jordan, Sylvia Alyssa; Rowland, Leslie S.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Using Freedmen’s Bureau records, the papers of the American Missionary Association, and other materials, the author identified 585 individuals who taught ex-slaves in Alabama between 1865 and 1870. The thesis describes their sex, race, and geographical origins, their motives for teaching, the high rate of turnover, and a growing number of black teachers. It examines the teachers’ work in the classroom and the many challenges they faced. It argues that the schools survived only because of the ex-slaves’ own commitment to education and the lengths to which the teachers went in order to keep their schools in operation. Finally, the thesis explores the teachers’ interactions with their surrounding communities. While some white Alabamians were supportive, others expressed hostility through social ostracism, physical assault, arson, and even murder. Especially in the face of such white opposition, the teachers relied heavily upon freedpeople to help build, maintain, and protect the schools.Item “WELCUM, OONA. TIME FA WE LAAN BOUT GULLAH” (WELCOME, EVERYONE. TIME FOR US TO LEARN ABOUT GULLAH): PENN CENTER’S ROLE IN THE PRESERVATION OF GULLAH GEECHEE’S CULTURAL HERITAGE(2016) Chaplin, Jennie; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Welcum, Oona. Time Fa We Laan Bout Gullah” (Welcome, Everyone. Time for us to learn about Gullah): Penn Center’s Role in the Preservation of Gullah Geechee’s Cultural Heritage focuses on the historic Penn Center, formerly the Penn School, on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, as a selected site of analytical inquiry and as a premier cultural institution that preserves Gullah history and heritage. This project makes use of interdisciplinary methods from several fields—material culture, museum studies, self-ethnography, visual analysis, and historic preservation, among others—to illuminate the history and culture of the Gullah people. I use these methods to argue that the Penn Center presents a competing “voice” to prevailing discourses because it rewrites and revalues Gullah history. This dissertation delineates how the Gullahs have responded to the dominant discourses through counter-narratives, cultural practices, and individual and community activism. It argues that the Penn Center disrupts discourses seeking to stereotype the Gullah culture by functioning as a site of resistance to mainstream definitions, as a site of the reclamation of voice and agency in the process of self-definition, and as a site for the preservation and celebration of Gullah Geechee culture and cultural identity. In demonstrating the contribution of the Penn Center, this dissertation renders attention to issues related to race, class, and gender as these issues have surfaced in the history and culture under discussion. This project also offers analysis of material culture housed at the Penn Center’s York W. Bailey Museum. Drawing upon the theories of Stuart Hall on cultural identity and E. McClung Fleming on material culture analysis, this study offers analysis of cultural objects and photographic images found in this museum space. This dissertation concludes with oral history narratives that further illuminate the competing “voices” found that shed light on Gullah cultural identity and the manner in which Gullah people must navigate and negotiate the larger American sociopolitical landscape.Item Breaking through the Margins: Pushing Sociopolitical Boundaries Through Historic Preservation(2016) Hopkins, Portia Dene; Williams- Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Breaking through the Margins: Pushing Sociopolitical Boundaries Through Historic Preservation” explores the ways in which contemporary grassroots organizations are adapting historic preservation methods to protect African American heritage in communities that are on the brink of erasure. This project emerges from an eighteen-month longitudinal study of three African American preservation organizations—one in College Park, Maryland and two in Houston, Texas—where gentrification or suburban sprawl has all but decimated the physical landscape of their communities. Grassroots preservationists in Lakeland (College Park, Maryland), St. John Baptist Church (Missouri City, Texas), and Freedmen’s Town (Houston, Texas) are involved in pushing back against preservation practices that do not, or tend not, to take into consideration the narratives of African American communities. I argue, these organizations practice a form of preservation that provides immediate and lasting effects for communities hovering at the margins. This dissertation seeks to outline some of the major methodological approaches taken by Lakeland, St. John, and Freedmen’s Town. The preservation efforts put forth by the grassroots organizations in these communities faithfully work to remind us that history without preservation is lost. In taking on the critical work of pursuing social justice, these grassroots organizations are breaking through the margins of society using historic preservation as their medium.Item "To Strike for Right, To Strike With Might": African Americans and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Baltimore, 1910-1930(2015) Doster, Dennis Anthony; Barkley Brown, Elsa; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“‘To Strike for Right, To Strike With Might’: African Americans and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Baltimore, 1910–1930” examines the nature, character and scope of early civil rights activism among African Americans in Baltimore, Maryland. Utilizing an expansive definition of “civil rights,” it explores not only voting and holding political office, access to public education, and fair housing opportunities; it also considers struggles for access to municipal and social services and struggles related to labor and employment. By placing all of these terrains of struggle under the umbrella of “civil rights,” the dissertation emphasizes the importance of these rights in relation to one another and their importance in the minds and lives of African Americans who struggled for rights in each of these categories as part of a broader struggle for equality. Baltimore has long been recognized for its civil rights activism by scholars who portray the era of the 1930s to 1950s as a kind of “golden age” of civil rights activism in the city, considering such activism to have been dormant prior to that period. The dissertation reveals an active civil rights movement in the city in the decades preceding the 1930s that was led primarily by members of the middle-class but drew widespread support and strength from members of all classes in Baltimore’s African American community. In uncovering the civil rights activism of the period from 1910 to 1930, the dissertation brings to the forefront previously ignored organizations, including the Federation of Parent-Teacher Clubs, the Women’s Cooperative Civic League, the Independent Republican League, and the Baltimore Urban League. It also reveals that the activism of the period from 1910 to 1930 was important in launching major civil rights campaigns of national organizations such as the NAACP, whose residential segregation campaign had roots in the fight in Baltimore. Throughout, the dissertation explores the ways that black Baltimoreans defined priorities and struggled for rights, resulting in a more nuanced understanding of African Americans’ struggles for citizenship and equality at beginning of the twentieth century.Item "The Schools are Killing our Kids!": The African American Fight for Self-Determination in the Boston Public Schools, 1949-1985(2014) Bundy, Lauren Tess; Freund, David M; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines a grassroots movement led by black Bostonians to achieve racial justice, quality education, and community empowerment in the Boston Public Schools during the postwar period. From the late 1940s through the early 1980s black parents, teachers, and students employed a wide-range of strategies in pursuit of these goals including staging school boycotts, creating freedom schools, establishing independent alternative schools, lobbying for legislation, forming parent and youth groups, and organizing hundreds of grassroots organizations. At the heart of this movement was a desire to improve the quality of education afforded to black youth and to expand the power of black Bostonians in educational governance. This dissertation demonstrates that desegregation and community control were not mutually exclusive goals or strategies of black educational activism. I examine the evolution of the goals, ideology, and strategy of this movement over the course of more than three decades in response to shifts in the national and local political climate. This work traces the close ties between this local movement in Boston and broader movements for racial and social justice unfolding across the nation in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. Most importantly, my dissertation puts this movement in conversation with a broader national project of various marginalized groups in the postwar period to radically transform the institutions of democracy. This dissertation challenges a well-known narrative of civil rights and school desegregation in Boston in this period. This story of the so-called Boston "busing crisis" focuses on white resistance, a narrow period of time in the mid-1970s, and court-ordered desegregation. In the rare instances in which black Bostonians are included in this narrative it is as victims or apathetic bystanders. The rhetoric of "busing," particularly the framing of opposition to desegregation as "anti-busing," obscured and continues to obscure the more complex racial politics driving the opposition to the integration of the Boston Public Schools. My scholarship brings light to a much broader and more nuanced history of racial politics in Boston and demonstrates that we cannot understand the period of court-ordered desegregation without examining the decades of grassroots activism which preceded it.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.