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Moral Margins: Ethics And Economics In American Northern Literature, 1837-1900, John Adam Stromski Aug 2016

Moral Margins: Ethics And Economics In American Northern Literature, 1837-1900, John Adam Stromski

Doctoral Dissertations

“Moral Margins: Slavery and Capitalism in American Northern Literature, 1837-1900,” focuses on the intersections of slavery, capitalism, and literature, building on recent historical scholarship on the myriad ways slavery impacted the growth of American capitalism. Nowhere is this relationship more prominent than in the nineteenth century, when slavery experienced its highest levels of economic and political influence. Scholars of capitalism and American slavery have tended to focus on the South, the obvious locus of slavery, but little attention is paid to the North, where this relationship is more veiled. I argue that Northern literature shows the ethical complexities of slavery-based …


Slave Subsistence Strategies At Thomas Jefferson’S Monticello Plantation: Paleoethnobotanical Analysis And Interpretation Of The Site 8 (44ab442) Macrobotanical Assemblage, Stephanie Nicole Hacker Aug 2016

Slave Subsistence Strategies At Thomas Jefferson’S Monticello Plantation: Paleoethnobotanical Analysis And Interpretation Of The Site 8 (44ab442) Macrobotanical Assemblage, Stephanie Nicole Hacker

Masters Theses

Throughout the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, millions of enslaved Africans and African Americans were crucial to the success of plantations in the American South, but despite their numbers little exists in the written record to provide an accurate history for the African American slave community. However, archaeological and historic research shows that even under the constraints of slavery, enslaved African Americans were active in forming their own families and communities, countering ill-treatment and nutritional deprivation, maintaining their cultural and spiritual identities, and establishing ways to enhance their well-being. The research presented in this study emphasizes the utility of studying carbonized …


A Critical Historical Geography Of Slavery In The American South, Matthew Russell Cook May 2016

A Critical Historical Geography Of Slavery In The American South, Matthew Russell Cook

Doctoral Dissertations

In the more than 150 years since the end of the Civil War, Emancipation Proclamation, and 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution that formally brought an end to chattel slavery, people in the United States have done much to downplay, sanitize, and outright forget both the history of slavery—despite its foundational role in the establishment of the U.S. political economy—and the life-altering damage that powerful white men, predominantly, inflicted upon millions of Africans and African Americans through a brutal system that lasted more than 200 years. Contributing to the process of whitewashing the histories and geographies of …


Embodied Social Death: Speaking And Nonspeaking Corpses In Hannah Crafts’S The Bondwoman’S Narrative And Solomon Northup’S Twelve Years A Slave, Rachel Jane Dunsmore May 2016

Embodied Social Death: Speaking And Nonspeaking Corpses In Hannah Crafts’S The Bondwoman’S Narrative And Solomon Northup’S Twelve Years A Slave, Rachel Jane Dunsmore

Masters Theses

Hannah Crafts and Solomon Northup share remarkable similarities in their constructions of social death portrayed through characters’ bodies in images that not only represent this social death but do so in ways that illuminate the forced inbetweenness of slave life in antebellum America. This study looks at how the authors represent social death with figures that I term “speaking corpses” and “nonspeaking corpses” and portray embodiments of a unique type of social nonexistence. In Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the author constructs these images of speaking corpses in characters that are trapped in states of liminality and an existence that …