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 “Freedom in Their Hands is a Deadly Poison”: Print Culture, Legal Movements, and Slaveholding Resistance on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, 1850-61(2018) Chaires, Jacob Wayne; Bonner, Christopher; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The goal of this thesis is twofold: to explain the rise of slaveholding anxiety in relation to the growing free black question, as well as to articulate how slaveholders sought to regain their power. I argue that slaveholders on the Eastern Shore politically organized around ideas and concepts produced in newspapers. Slaveholders utilized new ideas about race and the law to organize, and call upon the General Assembly to enact tougher sanctions on free black mobility. Newspapers are not only a means by which to quote mine, but they are also living, breathing, cultural organisms. They both reflect slaveholding anxieties, as well as play into them. They both record local news events, as well as conspicuously pair those local stories with similar stories from other counties, states, and nations.Item A New Race of Christians: Slavery and the Cultural Politics of Conversion in the Atlantic World(2020) Fischer, Matthias; Brewer, Holly; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is intended to fill a significant gap in the scholarship on slavery, race, and religion in the early modern Atlantic. Restoring a longue durée approach to the study of colonial history, it argues that there was a long, broad, and vibrant debate over the legitimacy of slavery and race. A central analytical tenet of this work is that religion and race were concepts linked from the early decades of colonization and developed in conjunction with one another. Enslavement predicated on heathenism brought baptism in particular to the center of the debate over whether African slaves could become free by adopting Christianity. Heathenism was central to early justifications of African slavery in the plantation colonies of the New World, and it also played a fundamental role in the construction, contestation, and articulation of racial categories, even if Christianity remained an important marker of colonial identity and social belonging.While the accommodation between the clergy and governors, planters, vestries, and colonial assemblies often conflated Christianity’s moral obligations with colonial self‐interest, religion and religious ideas also helped to challenge and undermine hierarchies based on race. Whether they were Jesuit priests, Anglican ministers, Quaker clerics, or Moravian evangelicals, missionaries of all backgrounds were able to provide a measure of spiritual and material relief to men and women who experienced human, material, and cultural deprivation on a massive scale. In these ways, enslaved and free people of African descent ascribed new meaning to Christianity that transcended narrow European definitions, challenging emergent notions of racial difference. Linking intellectual processes with social and political practices and institutions, this study attempts to resituate the Caribbean as foundational to the creation of a modern consciousness.Item Troublesome Properties: Race, Disability, and Slavery's Haunting of the Still Image(2019) Mobley, Izetta Autumn; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Troublesome Properties: Race, Disability, and Slavery’s Haunting of the Still Image interrogates race, disability, slavery, and the visual, arguing for a reorientation of disability studies toward a comprehensive analysis of how Atlantic slavery structured the West’s conceptualization of the abled body. Slavery haunts the aesthetic impulses, discursive engagements, and visual formations that construct both disability and race. Slavery and disability have been historically mutually constitutive, establishing a network of power relations that define how the United States understands citizenship, sovereignty of the body, capital, labor, and bodily integrity. Troublesome Properties’ intervention places photography – specifically nineteenth-century daguerreotypes, cartes de visites, and portraiture –in conversation with race, disability and slavery, inviting a critical look at the social resonance of photographic production. This interdisciplinary project is deeply invested in the nineteenth century and critically considers how visual imagery establishes concepts of disabled and abled bodies. The visual and material analysis of visual culture and photography links my discussion of disability to racially marked bodies, explicitly illustrating how slavery haunts how we see and tie Blackness to disability. The illustrations, photographs, medical records, biographies, and ephemera of conjoined African American twins Millie and Christine McKoy serve as evidence of the troubled definitions of consent, care, property, and exploitation inherent in enslavement, disability, and display. Octavia Butler’s 1979 speculative novel, Kindred, anchors my discussion of the impact of disability on Black disabled women. Black scholars, artists, and historians have consistently employed photography as a visual tool to assert the humanity of Black people. The photographic suite Dorian Gray by Yinka Shonibare, a series that makes overt the parallels between disability and colonialism, are placed in conversation with W.E. B. Du Bois’ American Negro exhibit, demonstrating how race, disability, and the visual construct notions of which bodies matter, when, where, and why. In Troublesome Properties, I argue that we must approach visual production, material culture, and disability studies with the intention to reclaim the marked, raced, gendered, and disabled Black body, using slavery and an optimistic pessimism to construct a complex genealogy for disability studies.Item BETWEEN NORTH AND SOUTH, EAST AND WEST: THE ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT IN SOUTHWESTERN PENNSYLVANIA, 1780-1865(2019) Holness, Lucien; Bell, Richard; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the making of free soil and black freedom, as well as the abolitionist movement in southwestern Pennsylvania. I frame the region as a borderland between the free North and the slave South, where the status of African Americans was somewhere between slavery and freedom, as well as a crossroads between the abolitionist movement in the East and the Old Northwest. By doing so, I hope to understand how geography (physical and political) influenced ideas about race and the types of strategies abolitionists favored in their fight against slavery and for black rights. I argue that the roots of free labor ideology—a belief that emerged in the 1850s that slavery (and, for some whites, free blacks) should be prohibited from western territories in order to allow free white men to earn a living wage—can be traced to the 1780s when southwestern Pennsylvania was one of the first territories opened to westward expansion and where the place of black people in American society remained uncertain. Alongside this nascent idea of free labor emerged an oppositional culture created by African Americans and their white antislavery allies that was shaped by their geographic location, worksites, institutions, and living conditions. This led to the formation of counter ideas about free soil, the west, black freedom, race, and citizenship. Many white southwestern Pennsylvanians adamantly opposed these ideas fearing that interracial social relations, labor competition, and the possible migration of blacks into the region would degrade the economic independence of these households, turning whites into a dependent and degraded class.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 COMMEMORATIVE ACTIVISM: TRACING BLACK NATIONALISM THROUGH CONTEMPORARY CAMPAIGNS TO MEMORIALIZE U.S. SLAVERY, 1991-2017(2018) Fitzmaurice, Megan Irene; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While much of current public discourse focuses on the ways that black activists are working to desecrate or destroy racist memorials, there has been less discussion about the ways that lobbying to produce antiracist memorials can also serve as a form of protest. This study engages three case studies wherein black activist groups fought for the construction of slavery memorials in New York City, Philadelphia, and Richmond. These instances of commemorative activism are the focus of this study, wherein activists challenge existing commemorative culture by engaging alternative memorial practices. The underlying premise of this study is that these slavery memorials and the activists’ rhetoric resisted absent and/or distorted memories of slavery in their communities. This study analyzes the debates surrounding these memorials to demonstrate ways that the activists recirculated historical ideologies of black nationalism in their protest rhetoric. Specifically, the activists engaged themes of self-determination, black liberation, black power, and Pan-Africanism as they sought to challenge a commemorative culture rooted in white supremacy. This study accordingly situates commemorative activism as a contemporary strategy of resistance in the ongoing black freedom struggle. The black activists in this study fought to determine the commemorative landscape, liberate their ancestors’ memories from post-slavery containment, recover memories of black resistance from selective amnesia, and advance global solidarity surrounding memories of the slave trade and ongoing anti-black racism. This study also examines ways that the subsequent commemorations represent enduring repositories of black nationalist ideologies, challenging racist cultural attitudes embedded in the memorials’ environment. Through their form and function, these commemorations visualize the continued relevance of self-determination, black liberation, black power, and Pan-Africanism within post-slavery communities. These memorials ultimately reflect the beliefs of the activists who fought for their construction, revealing the radical potential of commemorative activism to challenge racist attitudes, structures, and landscapes.Item "Nothing About the Rape:" Generative Silencing in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber(2014) Webb, Calvin Allan; Wong, Edlie; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project, which focuses on Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber, explores the relationship between storytelling, witnessing, and lived experience. By interrogating the intersection of black feminism, speculative fiction, and slave narratives in the backdrop of the Haitian Revolution, Hopkinson's work shows that some silencing can be constructive, even essential, for survival.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.Item People at Law: Subordinate Southerners, Popular Governance, and Local Legal Culture in Antebellum Mississippi and Louisiana(2012) Welch, Kimberly Mae; Berlin, Ira; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"People at Law: Subordinate Southerners, Popular Governance, and Local Legal Culture in Antebellum Mississippi and Louisiana" uses manuscript civil and criminal court records, church disciplinary hearings, newspaper accounts of trials, and the personal papers of judges and lawyers to investigate the relationship between subordinated people and the law in the Natchez District of Mississippi and Louisiana from 1820 to 1860. This project asks if local courts provided white women and free and enslaved blacks with a platform to improve their lives. Although denied many legal rights and excluded from formal political arenas, white women and African Americans positioned themselves as astute litigators. They frequently went to court to redress wrongs done to them and to make public demands on those in positions of authority. Knowledge of the southern legal system, coupled with the ability to harness their own community networks, gave them a degree of power: the power to improve their immediate situations and, on occasion, the power to bend others to their will. Part of the reason for the success of the challenges subordinates mounted in court against their husbands, masters, and social betters was the limited nature of the challenges themselves. Rather than attempting to confront the planter class directly and dismantle the larger social system, they appealed to notions of justice and fairness that they insisted all southerners shared. When white women and African Americans (male and female) used local courts to constrain the power of their superiors, they in effect confirmed their subordination by making patriarchal marriage and the institution of slavery work according to the highest southern ideal. But in the process, courts disciplined adulterous husbands and brutal masters. Setting limits on the unrestrained behavior of husbands or slaveholders helped uphold the legitimacy of hierarchical marriage and slavery, to be sure. Still, it also allowed wives (white and black), free people of color, and slaves to turn their subordination into a legal strategy. While they did not overthrow the system of power that subordinated them, white women, free blacks, and slaves used the courts to help define what their place in that system would entail.Item "There Slavery Cannot Dwell": Agriculture and Labor in Northern Maryland, 1790-1860(2007-07-26) Grivno, Max L.; Rowland, Leslie S; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)There were many paths from slavery to free labor in the Americas and the Caribbean. In some cases, freedom came with a thunderclap amid civil war and revolution. Elsewhere, governments sounded slavery's knell through a prescribed process of immediate or delayed emancipation. The people of northern Maryland experienced a different kind of emancipation in the decades preceding the Civil War. Final freedom came when Maryland adopted a new constitution in 1864, but slavery along the Mason-Dixon Line had been collapsing under the combined weight of slave flight, manumission, and the interstate slave trade since the 1820s. This dissertation examines the dynamic, multifaceted relationships that developed among northern Maryland's labor regimes during the region's gradual transition from slavery to free labor. Having expanded into the Maryland piedmont during the flush decades of the Napoleonic Wars, slavery experienced a sharp decline in the lean years that followed the Panic of 1819. Faced with mounting slave resistance and stagnant demand for wheat, their primary staple, landowners struggled to forge a more efficient, economical workforce. Many espoused the emerging free labor critique and began to divorce themselves from slavery by liberating their bondspeople or selling them southward. Slavery did not, however, die a quick death. Many owners freed their slaves through delayed manumission agreements, which guaranteed that the institution would linger for several decades. During this extended emancipation, landowners and their free and enslaved workers fought pitched battles over the terms of emancipation and the contours of the emerging free labor regime. Unlike previous scholarship, which tends to examine the various segments of a given workforce in isolation, this dissertation considers the evolving workforce of northern Maryland as a single, unified whole. It examines how landowners cobbled together workforces from a diverse laboring population of apprentices, indentured servants, slaves, and wage laborers. The study also explores how--and why--the composition of the workforce changed over time, and how the region's myriad labor regimes jostled and merged. In tracing the evolution of northern Maryland's kaleidoscopic workforce, the dissertation considers how wage laborers and slaves navigated the treacherous shoals of the rural economy and how workers' gender, race, and status shaped their experiences.