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Joshua Gordon’S Witchcraft Book And The Transformation Of The Upcountry Of South Carolina, E. Zoie Horecny

Theses and Dissertations

The life of Joshua Gordon and his intellectual product, Witchcraft Book (1784) gives access to the backcountry of South Carolina. Witchcraft Book is exemplary of syncretism in the Atlantic world, influenced by multiple European traditions, understandings of science in the early modern world, indigenous knowledge, and life in North America. After serving in the American Revolution, Gordon transitioned from a small farmer to a slaveholder. He was a part of political and economic processes that unified the backcountry with low country elites in defense of slavery. As a prominent figure in his community and church, he solidified his legacy for …

Memorialization Of J. Marion Sims In Columbia, South Carolina, Nicole Chandonnet

Senior Theses

The Heritage Act in South Carolina prevents the General Assembly from changing historic names of buildings and removing war memorials from the statehouse grounds without a supermajority. This highly controversial bill prohibits altering the landscape of the state and ensures a permanent place for white supremacy. The Repeal the Heritage Act coalition formed in 2020 to challenge this legislation, and this thesis examines one of its most recent targets: the memorialization of J. Marion Sims in Columbia. To this end, this thesis studies the South Carolina Medical Association’s Journal from 1910-1940 to study the legacy of Sims and why he …

Religion, Senses, And Remembrance: Brooklyn’S Sumter Club In Postbellum Charleston, S.C., Michael Edward Scott Emett

Theses and Dissertations

Civil War historians are slowly coming to realize the need to explicitly analyze the senses of those who lived in, and survived, the Civil War era. Although vision has reigned as the “supreme” sense, the nonvisual senses, with the help of historians of the senses, are becoming just as important to Civil War research. However, scholars are still unraveling the lived experiences of Civil War Era Americans and the perceptions and meanings these Americans gave to those experiences, with Northerners receiving comparatively little attention. To understand the world of antebellum and Civil War Americans, we should take them at their …

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 …

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 …

Translating Slavery As Told To My Daughter, Victoria L.A. Carvelli

Theses and Dissertations

I am translating an excerpt of the work L’esclavage raconté à ma fille, by the French Guianese politician Christiane Taubira. A former Minister of Justice of France, Taubira is famous for her legislative work in recognizing slavery as a crime against humanity and instituting national educational efforts on the subject. The book is an exposition of the history of slavery, set in a storytelling, question-and-answer style, which has the merit of bringing a conversational and accessible aspect to a difficult topic.

I chose this work at the recommendation of one of my professors, and when I was unable to find …

Beyond Preservation: Reconstructing Sites Of Slavery, Reconstruction, And Segregation, Charlotte Adams

Theses and Dissertations

The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties define reconstruction as “the act or process of depicting, by means of new construction, the form, features, and detailing of a non-surviving site, landscape, building, structure, or object for the purpose of replicating its appearance at a specific period of time and in its historic location.”1 Reconstruction is a controversial treatment method among historic preservationists, so this thesis seeks to answer the question of why stewards of historic sites still choose to reconstruct nonextant buildings. It explores three case studies: (1) the slave buildings of Mulberry Row at …

Love And Marriage: Domestic Relations And Matrimonial Strategies Among The Enslaved In The Atlantic World, Tyler Dunsdon Parry

Theses and Dissertations

"Love and Marriage: Domestic Relations and Matrimonial Strategies Among the Enslaved in the Atlantic World" argues that the cultural and sociopolitical dimensions of slave marriage were primary issues for diasporic Africans, abolitionists, and proslavery apologists whose lives were intertwined by the cultural and economic connections that framed the Atlantic World throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Through analyzing the interplay between legislation, cultural practice, and political discourse in the early periods of colonial slavery, I first show how matrimonial patterns from Atlantic Africa and Britain were re-imagined by diasporic Africans enslaved in Bermuda, the British West Indies, and colonial …

"Without A Few Negroes": George Whitefield, James Habersham, And Bethesda Orphan House In The Story Of Legalizing Slavery In Colonial Georgia, Tara Leigh Babb

Theses and Dissertations

A 1735 law banned slavery in the new English colony of Georgia. The colony's Trustees considered slavery to be incompatible with their aims of using the colony to provide a subsistence living for England's poor and to provide a buffer between South Carolina and Spanish Florida. In the ensuing years, various parties linked the colony's failure to thrive (and their own failure to succeed within Georgia) to the lack of an enslaved labor force. By 1750, the Board of Trustees relented to pressure and enacted what they considered to be a humane slave code. Evangelist George Whitefield and teacher and …