Digital Commons Network^™

Christianity And Bankruptcy, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

Although the term “bankruptcy” is nowhere to be found in the Bible, debt and the consequences of default are a major theme both in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament. In Israel, as in the ancient Near East generally, a debtor who defaulted on his obligations was often sold into slavery or servitude. Biblical law moderated the harshness of this system by prohibiting Israelites from charging interest on loans to one another, thus diminishing the risk of default, and by requiring the release of slaves after seven years of service. Jesus alluded to the lending laws at least …

Knowledge Networks: Contested Geographies In The History Of Mary Prince, Leah M. Thomas

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

The History of Mary Prince, a West-Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) is the first published woman’s slave narrative. In her History, Prince describes horrendous physical violence to which she and other enslaved peoples of African descent are subjected as well as the corresponding psychological and sexual abuse they endure. While Prince “speaks” the sexual abuse to some extent, how she knows what she knows goes unspoken. She expresses her knowledge of reading and writing and, at times, of the law, but she does not explain how she obtains this knowledge or knows what she knows. Her optimism to …

Racial Prejudice In The Criminal Justice System, Tori Cooper

Jessie O'Kelly Freshman Essay Award

Racial prejudice against African Americans has been the leading cause of high incarceration rates amongst the African American community. Within the United States, the census reported that African Americans make up about 17.9 percent of the population, with one-third of the people making up the incarcerated population in America. The disparity in those numbers highlights the current situation that is plaguing the nation. Blatant cases of racial profiling that have received media attention are a true testament of the broken law enforcement system from coast to coast. Racial prejudice cases have affected the black American community since the beginning of …

Challenging The Architecture: A Critical History Of The Wisconsin Prison System, Jacob Glicklich

Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation I explore the history of the Wisconsin prison system, with an emphasis on 1970 to 2019, Waupun Correctional Institution and Taycheedah Correctional Institution. From this study, I explore the nature of the Wisconsin system and how it has developed. Across this work I argue that the core priority for the WI Department of Corrections has been to maintain and expand its bureaucratic infrastructure, imposing limited recourse on prisoners, and maximizing its own disciplinary flexibility. There have been significant human costs to this system, and my work helps to document these costs, contextualize why they happened, and look …

Freedom Triumphant: Embracing Joyful Freedom But Facing An Uncertain, Perilous Future, Thomas L. Tacker

Publications

The newly freed slaves had almost nothing—no money, no education, and no strong social institutions, including marriage which had often been prohibited, rarely supported by slaveholders. Discrimination was rampant and government was often the worst discriminator. Yet, somehow, they triumphed. They built marriages that were actually slightly more stable than those of white families. The newly free went from virtually zero literacy to at least 50% literacy in a generation. They worked incredibly hard and increased their income about one third faster than white workers. The newly free, anchored in their strong faith, were amazingly forgiving and optimistic. Economics Professor …

“Their Blood Has Flown And Mingled With Ours”: The Politics Of Slavery In Illinois And Missouri In The Early Republic, Lawrence Celani

The Confluence (2009-2020)

The ideas of Illinois and Missouri as divided over slavery masks the fluid nature of support for or opposition to slavery in the two state, as Lawrence Celani explains in this article, the winner of the Morrow Prize presented by the Missouri Conference on History.

An Archaeological Investigation Of Enslavement At Gamble Plantation, S. Matthew Litteral

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I have compiled information from archives, remote sensing, and archaeological excavation to shed light upon an understudied chapter of Florida’s history, specifically, African American heritage components at Gamble Plantation. My goal is to provide a better understanding of the daily lives of enslaved individuals who were held in bondage at Gamble Plantation (8MA100), located along the Manatee River in Ellenton, Fl. Through my work, I hope to engage descendant communities in future archaeological research and promote a more balanced and inclusive historical narrative for Gamble Plantation State Park.

Editor's Introductory Essay: Race, Rights, And Reparations, Regennia N. Williams

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

Complicating The Narrative: Using Jim's Story To Interpret Enslavement, Leasing, And Resistance At Duke Homestead, Jennifer Melton

Theses and Dissertations

In the antebellum South, an enslaved person was more likely to be leased out than to be sold during his or her lifetime. Despite its ubiquity, leasing of enslaved people is rarely interpreted at historic sites and is not widely understood by the general public. In this project, I examine leasing and resistance to slavery in North Carolina through the lens of Jim, an enslaved man leased by Washington Duke at the property that is now Duke Homestead State Historic Site. While Duke is famous in North Carolina as founder of the American Tobacco Company, he was a yeoman tobacco …

Bate Family Papers (Mss 673), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 673. Correspondence, business, and legal papers of various members of the Bate family of Sumner County, Tennessee. Some of the children are located in San Augustine, Texas. Most of the correspondence centers around the mother, Ann Franklin (Weatherred) Bate and her children, particularly Eugenia Patience (Bate) Bass Bertinatti and Humphrey Howell Bate, and to a lesser degree their siblings. Includes extensive documentation about the financial and legal condition of Bertinatti after the Civil War. The originals are in the Tennessee State Library & Archives, Nashville, Tennessee.

Knott Family Papers (Mss 675), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid for Manuscripts Collection 675. Papers and photographs of James Proctor Knott, Lebanon, Kentucky, and his wife Sarah "Sallie" (McElroy) Knott. Includes two journals of Sallie Knott covering the first eight years of their marriage (Click on "Additional Files" below to view typescripts), and miscellaneous papers of a related family, the Clarks.

Representations Of Domestic Workers In Modern Arabic Fiction, Samaher Aldhamen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this study, I have examined the representations of domestic workers in a number of Arabic mid-century and contemporary novels, using feminism and intersectionality as my overarching framework. I employed several scholarships of feminism such as Marxist and postcolonial feminism to examine the discourse on working-class women. The initial assumption of this study is that there is a noticeable invisibility of domestic workers in Arabic novels. If these characters manage to find their way into a text, they are typically ahistorical figures whose subjectivity is not centered.

Among the Arabic novels I have examined, I found that the tradition of …

Wyandot, Shawnee, And African American Resistance To Slavery In Ohio And Kansas, Diane Miller

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

From the colonial period, enslaved Africans escaped bondage. Colonial records and treaties reveal that they often sought refuge with Indian tribes. This resistance to slavery through escape and flight constituted the Underground Railroad. As European colonies developed into the United States, alliances of subaltern groups posed a threat. Colonizers and settlers aimed to divide and control these groups and arrived at the intertwined public policies of African chattel slavery and Indian removal. Tribal abolitionism and participation in the Underground Railroad was more pronounced than scholars have recognized and constituted an important challenge to the expansion of slavery.

Encounters between fugitive …

Walking On A Chessboard: Ohio Catholicism And The Challenges Of Slavery And Immigration, Corrigan M. Irwin

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Undying (And Undead) Modern National Myths: Cannibalism And Racial Mixture In Contemporary Brazilian Vampire Fiction, Jacob C. Brown

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

Contemporary cultural media illustrates the vampire as an important symbolic figure in the Brazilian imaginary. For example, in twentieth and twenty-first century Brazilian fiction, television, and political discourse, vampires have risen from their supposedly European origins as expressions of urban decay, comic excess, and government corruption in Brazil. Beyond these representations, I focus on three contemporary novels in which the vampire also plays a starring role. O vampiro que descobriu o Brasil (1999) by Ivan Jaf, Aventuras do vampiro de Palmares (2014) by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, and Dom Pedro I Vampiro (2015) by Nazarethe Fonseca stand out from other creative reimaginings …

Displaced, Charlene Browne

I2

No abstract provided.

Edwards, John, 1748-1837 (Sc 3417), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid, scan and typescript (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3417. Letter, 12 December 1824, of John Edwards, Lexington, Kentucky to George W. Williams, Paris, Kentucky. The former U.S. senator offers to discuss the terms on which Williams is to hire out slaves for Edwards’s factory business, but declines his request to train them in cigar-making. He also reports on his law studies, his hopes for financial success, and on a recent visit to Frankfort, Kentucky, where he found state legislators to be “mere factionists,” “without intelligence, without principle, dignity, [or] virtue.”

Mansfield Park By Kate Hamill (And Jane Austen), Christopher Nagle

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This article reviews the world premiere of Kate Hamill's Mansfield Park directed by Stuart Carden and produced for the Northlight Theatre in Chicago in November and December 2018. Hamill’s bold new adaptation is notable for foregrounding the contexts of empire and the slave trade undergirding the novel, and in ultimately offering a feminist fairy-tale of radical self-assertion and self-determination for its heroine.

Looking Through The Grille : An Analysis Of Ursuline Religious Agency In An Early French Colonial Context., Molly If Laporte

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

This thesis focuses on the agency of the Ursulines in French New Orleans from 1727 to 1732. It analyzes the letters of Marie Hachard and several other documents from the Ursuline archives and places them within the context of French colonial New Orleans. The Ursulines’ establishment in Louisiana and their missionary efforts were situated in a larger colonial context of violent conflict between the French and the native populations, the colonists’ endless struggles to develop an economy and secure funds to survive, and the slow evolution of official systems of power. The Ursulines’ decisions to leave their homes for the …

Clothing The Black Body In Slavery: What They Wore And How It Was Made, Wanett I. Clyde

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

After suffering the traumas of capture, enslavement and the ship's journey from their homeland, newly arrived Black people, along with struggling to understand and cope with their reduced circumstances, were often pulled in multiple directions with regard to their appearance. Stripped of garments that represented their native culture and forbidden to practice their personal grooming habits, slaves were now reliant on their owners for care. Once a slave was purchased, it was in the best interest of the master and mistress to protect their investment by providing them with the essentials. Chief among those necessities were clothing.

This thesis will …

Dissonances Of Dispossession: Narrating Colonialism And Slavery In The Expansion Of Capitalism, W. Oliver Baker

English Language and Literature ETDs

This project studies how ethnic American literature of the long nineteenth century represents the relationship between the dispossession of lands and lives—the histories of settler colonialism and slavery—and the making of democracy and capitalism in the United States. We often think of this relationship in terms of temporally distinct stages in which the formal equality of democracy and the marketplace overcome and thus leave behind the direct domination of colonization and enslavement. However, I focus on how the early novels of Indigenous, African, and Mexican American writers from the period of manifest destiny to the New Deal era represent the …

Racial Hierarchies In Latin America That Affected My Black Experience, Tiye Gardner

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

I was able to study abroad three times, as well as study away. I went abroad to Buenos Aires, Argentina (fall 2016 for three months); Oaxaca, Mexico (fall 2017 for three months); New York City, New York (spring 2018 for four months); and Heredia, Costa Rica (winter 2019 for three weeks). These opportunities have changed my life tremendously. But no one told me what all going abroad entailed. When a person goes abroad, they do not have a bubble around them that shields them from the way that country operates. Students all over the world learn about Christopher Columbus but …

Responsibility And Obligation In The Face Of Modern Day Slavery: The Demands On Global Citizens To Fight For Justice For Slaves, Tiffany R. Beaver

Theses and Dissertations

There are likely more than 45 million slaves in the world today. Economist Kevin Bales defines slaves as people whose freedom and autonomy have been denied, who are paid nothing above subsistence, and who are maintained in these conditions through violence or the threat of violence. I am especially concerned with exploring the nature of the various relationships that everyday citizens share with these modern slaves, and establishing what, if any, obligations such citizens have to act on behalf of modern slaves.

Contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre asserts that humans are storytelling beings caught up in real stories (i.e. narrative quests) …

An Example Of Reinterpretation In American Historic House Museums, Victoria Vanzomeren

Senior Theses

Despite their past importance, historic house museums have lost struggle to remain interesting to the general public because of the refusal to tell stories beyond those of wealthy, white men. In their 2018 restoration project on the Hampton-Preston Mansion, the Historic Columbia Foundation demonstrate how historic house museums can update their narratives to include the stories of marginalized people through the reinterpretation of their two Edward Troye paintings. This reinterpretation allowed Historic Columbia to tell a story that is not often told and represents the shift in new expectations for historic house museums in order to provide something meaningful to …

The Proving Ground: The Decline Of Slavery And The Emergence Of Black Codes In Antebellum Delaware, Justin Muchnick

Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

This paper focuses on the oft-neglected First State in the pre-Civil War years. It explores the economic and social factors in Delaware through the first half of the nineteenth century that led to widespread voluntary emancipation of slaves in the state without resulting in the official legal abolition of the institution of slavery. From here, this paper shows how this strange tension created an environment hospitable to some of the nation’s first black codes, which can be seen as ideological forerunners to postwar systems of racial control such as vagrancy laws and convict leasing in the Deep South.

Callis, Caius Marcellus, 1804-1863 (Sc 3364), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid, scan and typescript (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3364. Letter, 8 July 1849, of C. M. Callis, Hopkinsville, Kentucky to his brother-in-law Thomas Garland, Charlottesville, Virginia. He refers to the affection of his young son for his late mother’s family, and expresses concern over the financial consequences of Virginia’s establishment of free schools. He also reports on the anticipated discussion of slavery at Kentucky’s upcoming constitutional convention and to Senator Henry Clay’s proposal for gradual emancipation, which is favored by a “respectable minority.” He expects the convention merely to prohibit the importation of slaves, …

1849 - Address To The Inhabitants Of New Mexico And California On The Omission By Congress To Provide Them With Territorial Goverments And On The Social And Political Evils Of Slavery

Miscellaneous Federal Documents & Reports

This August 1849 letter, signed by twenty-one abolitionists, in which they wrote concerning the Southern States refusal to provide New Mexico and California with the advantages and protection of civil government. The authors detailed the sequence of events leading up to the annexation of New Mexico and California and the efforts to ensure that the new territories would permit the ownership of slaves. The letter discusses the morality of slavery.

Shifting Interpretations: Unionism In Virginia On The Eve Of Secession, Matthew B. Gittelman

James Blair Historical Review

In the winter of 1861, the citizens of Pittsylvania County, Virginia, met to discuss the question of secession. They adopted a set of motions drafted by Judge William Marshal Treadway, which chiefly criticized northern states for refusing to uphold the Fugitive Slave Act and alleged that they were the true violators of the Constitution. If “Mr. Treadway's Resolution” is treated as a microcosm of Virginian thought on the eve of the Civil War, then the document raises serious questions. This paper evaluates the contentions of the Resolution and weighs evidence that both supports and contradicts the subversive claims it contains. …

Human Capital: The Moral And Political Economy Of Northeastern Abolitionism, 1763–1833, Michael Crowder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Human Capital” explores the relationships between the moral imperatives of the antislavery movement in the New England and the mid- Atlantic, and their connections to evolving manufacturing and agricultural political economies premised on free labor regimes. Tracing the sweep of history from the British-American imperial crisis through the American Revolution, and into the Early American Republic, “Human Capital” argues that northeasterners like Rhode Island textile capitalist and abolitionist Moses Brown, radical democrats like Thomas Paine, and political economists like Tench Coxe developed visions of capitalism in which chattel slavery’s gradual abolition in the northeastern states acted as a spur to …

Mitchell, Samuel Williamson, 1833-1902 (Sc 3324), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid, scan and typescript (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3324. Letter, 24 December, 1856?, of Samuel W. Mitchell, Danville, Kentucky (where he graduated from Centre College in 1857 and from the theological seminary in 1860) to H. B. Craig, Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. Mitchell tells of his profitable resale to area Presbyterians of books purchased from an agent, and of meeting a “very fine” young lady. Describing Christmas in Danville, he notes the noisy firecrackers and the visibility of local African Americans, who uncharacteristically venture into the cold under the “impulse” of the liberty granted them during …