Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Botany Bay”: The State Of Society At Union College During The Early Nineteenth Century, Andrew Cassarino

Honors Theses

The history of Union College spans nearly the entire history of the United States. Founded in 1795, the school emerged as one of the nation’s premier educational institutions in the early nineteenth century. The changes occurring on the national stage often entered public life on Union’s campus, and President Eliphalet Nott and students actively participated in the civil discourse of the period. The most prevalent issues on campus included the authority of government, temperance, and the question of enslavement. Historians often like to find commonality among individuals with regards to their views on the most pressing topics of the time, …

The Duality Of Freedom: The Colony Of Rhode Island’S Slave Trade Complex, Thomas Shields

Honors Theses

In the eighteenth century British colonies there existed a duality of freedom, in which salutary neglect facilitated economic opportunism in the form of the slave trade. This paper examines how the colony of Rhode Island was a microcosm of this freedom duality in the merchant capitalist world. The colony became the epicenter of the slave trade in British North America, while also the home to a fervent abolition movement headed by the Quakers. This thesis contends that broad economic and individual freedoms in the colony created the environment where the slave trade prospered, the exact opposite of freedom.

After the …