Anthropology

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Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    African Americans and Appomattox Manor Within the Structured Landscape of the Eppes Plantation
    (2000) Brown, Gail W; Shackel, Paul A.; Orr, David; Blades, Brooke
    The Civil War brought about many changes in Virginian society, including the area around City Point, Virginia. These changes greatly effected the manner in which plantation owners managed their farms. Plantation owners had to find new ways of obtaining and exploiting their labor, and protecting their resources. The goal of this report is to explore those changes between the years 1851 and 1872 on the Eppes' plantations. I examine how Dr. Eppes structured his landscape to aid in controlling his productive resources, and the relationship he held with African-Americans. Part of exploring that relationship will be examining the living conditions of African-Americans on the Eppes' plantations as slaves and freedmen laborers. Dr. Eppes' home, Appomattox Manor, and its grounds now make up the City Point Unit of the Petersburg National Battlefield. This report will place the City Point Unit into its larger historic context. Though the unit is best known as the location of General Grant's headquarters during the Siege of Petersburg, its history is far more extensive. In this report, I place City Point and Appomattox Manor in the plantation context which surrounded them before and after the war. It will show how the Civil War was not an isolated event, but was effected by and affected the social world around it.
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    "To Dwell, I'm Determined, on That Happy Ground": An Archaeology of a Free African-American Community in Easton, Maryland, 1787-Present
    (2020) Jenkins, Tracy H.; Leone, Mark P; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    As early as 1787, free African Americans began making homes in the Easton, Maryland, neighborhood known as The Hill. Over successive generations, The Hill became the cultural and residential center of Easton’s African-American community. The families, businesses, institutions, social fabric, and cultural values that the first generations of free African Americans in Easton created on and around The Hill greatly influenced the development of African-American culture through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in terms of family and household structure, childrearing, religious life, and the memory and meaning of military service. Tracing these developments, with a focus on how African Americans and some white supporters worked together to combat slavery, racism, and other oppressions, illustrates how the politics of the freedom struggle were coded into everyday life. This investigation has also supported local grassroots efforts to preserve the legacy of that struggle on The Hill through public scholarship and practice, historic preservation, and community revitalization.
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    Double "Double Consciousness": An Archaeology of African American Class and Identity in Annapolis, Maryland, 1850 to 1930
    (2015) Deeley, Kathryn Hubsch; Leone, Mark P; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation explores the intersections of race and class within African American communities of the 19th and early 20th centuries in order to expand our understanding of the diversity within this group. By examining materials recovered from archaeological sites in Annapolis, Maryland, this dissertation uses choices in material culture to demonstrate that there were at least two classes present within the African American community in Annapolis between 1850 and 1930. These choices also show how different classes within this community applied the strategies advocated by prominent African American scholars, including Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Nannie Helen Burroughs, as ways to negotiate the racism they encountered in daily lives. One class, the "inclusionist" class, within the community embraced the idea of presenting themselves as industrious, moral, clean, and prosperous to their White neighbors, a strategy promoted by scholars such as Booker T. Washington and Nannie Helen Burroughs. However, another group within the community, the "autonomist" class, wanted to maintain a distinct African American identity that reflected the independent worth of their community with an emphasis on a uniquely African American aesthetic, as scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois suggested. The implementation of different strategies for racial uplift in daily life is both indicative of the presence of multiple classes and an indication that these different classes negotiated racism in different ways. This dissertation explores the strategies of inclusion and exclusion African American scholars advocated; how African Americans in Annapolis, Maryland implemented these strategies in daily life during the 19th and early 20th centuries; and how debates over implementing these strategies are still occurring today.