Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Provisioned, Produced, Procured,” And Purchased?: A Macrobotanical Study Of Enslaved Individuals’ Economic Engagement In The Shenandoah Valley, Linda A. Seminario

Graduate Masters Theses

This research investigates enslaved peoples’ economic engagement in the Shenandoah Valley during the first half of the 19th century. In 2017, archaeologists excavated two features at the Belle Grove enslaved quarters in Middletown, Virginia— a root cellar and subfloor pit that were filled in when a log cabin burned down. The preservation of the macrobotanicals has allowed for an in-depth analysis of the plants with which enslaved individuals engaged and the relationship between plant acquisition and enslaved people’s regional formal economic involvement at a 19th-century plantation in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. These data sets have also allowed for an …

Deconstructing Reconstruction: The Portrayal Of The Reconstruction Era In High School History Textbooks, Eleanor Katari

Graduate Masters Theses

This paper examines the persistence of Dunning School narratives of the Reconstruction Era in high school US History textbooks, despite the thorough rejection of those narratives among academic historians at the college level and above. In examining the reasons for the persistence of these narratives, this paper acknowledges some structural elements of the textbook industry before focusing on the role of white women’s parent activism in shaping textbook content and adoption, stretching backwards to the 1890s and the Daughters of Confederate Veterans, and forward to the present day and organizations such as Moms for Liberty. This paper also points out …

“Each Heart Alone Knoweth Its Own Bitterness”: The Jackson Family In Clarke County, Virginia, From Enslavement To Jim Crow, Melanie E. Garvey

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis examines the experiences of three generations of the Jackson family in Clarke County, Virginia, from approximately 1860 to 1915, covering the shift from enslavement to the Jim Crow period. Chapter One introduces the challenges with pre-existing publications on Clarke County and Virginia history. Chapter two focuses on the antebellum period and discusses what enslavement may have looked like in Clarke County. Chapter Three narrows the focus to Charles Jackson, Sr., the family patriarch, who was enslaved at New Market Plantation. Chapter Four looks at Charles Sr.’s son, Charles Jr., and the life he created for himself after enslavement. …

Spirits And Spirituality: Temperance And Racial Uplift In Nineteenth-Century Nantucket, Ma, John T. Crawmer

Graduate Masters Theses

Studies of alcohol consumption have shown alcohol’s role in defining social boundaries based on class and ethnicity, but few have interrogated alcohol in the context of race. During the early-19th century, free black communities were encouraged to refrain from alcohol as part of a larger project of racial uplift. Black societies and churches perceived intemperance as not only immoral but a threat to community survival. Excavations of the Nantucket African Meeting House noted a considerable lack of alcohol bottles, but it was unclear whether temperance was equally observed at the neighboring Boston-Higginbotham House. This research uses a minimum number of …

Northeastern Pennsylvania's Forgotten Labor Massacre: Analysis Pf The English Language Record Of The Lattimer Massacre, Jamie C. Costello

Graduate Masters Theses

The Lattimer Massacre occurred on September 10, 1897, in a small anthracite mining town in northeastern Pennsylvania. The bloody conflict erupted when an unarmed group of mostly Eastern European immigrant mine workers lethally clashed with militantly armed sheriff’s deputies who acted on behalf of private coal companies. Nineteen strikers died at the scene and dozens more were horrifically wounded. Despite the outraged shock of the community clamoring for justice which led to a murder trial that made international headlines, the Lattimer Massacre faded from local and national memory in the following decades. A combination of lingering nativist prejudice curated by …

Centers Of Community: A Spatial Analysis Of The Mid-19th Century Populaton Residing On Beacon Hill, Boston, Ma, Justin Malcolm

Graduate Masters Theses

The first Black church constructed in Boston, and the oldest extant Black church building in America, the African Meeting House was located on the North Slope of Beacon Hill; the predominant residence of Boston’s Black population during the nineteenth century. The African Meeting House has been the subject of several important archaeological investigations. In 1840, a schism within the African Meeting House congregation resulted in the establishment of the Twelfth Baptist Church. Historical contexts suggest that this neighborhood was highly segregated. A geographic and statistical analysis of the unique 1850 Boston City Census, which was made to yield spatial contexts …

Changing To Stay The Same: Spatial Analyses Of Tobacco Pipes From 18th- And 19th-Century Eastern Pequot Households, Stephen P. Anderson

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis examines indigenous smoking practices using European white ball clay pipe disposal patterns on the Eastern Pequot reservation in North Stonington, Connecticut. The Eastern Pequot used European-made smoking pipes in their day-to-day life during the 18th and 19th centuries. Material and spatial analyses of pipes and their disposal patterns detail how Eastern Pequot smoking practices changed and continued in the North American colonial world.

Smoking and tobacco use are unique in North American colonialism as the practice originates with the continent’s Indigenous people and was transformed by the English. Questions around cultural change and continuity in smoking due to …

Acknowledgment Of Culture And Stereotypes: Black Participants’ Perceptions Of Specific Therapist Behaviors, Tsotso T. Ablorh

Graduate Masters Theses

Mental health disparities for Black people of diverse ethnicities compared to people of other racial identities has been well-documented (Alegría et al., 2008; Maura & Weisman de Mamani, 2017). Research addressing this pervasive systemic and interpersonal problem often focuses on client-related factors that create or intensify barriers to care. However clinician-related factors (i.e., racial identity, multicultural training, implicit biases, behavior, etc.) also have a significant impact on barriers to care, retention in therapy, and clinical outcomes for people of African descent (Larrison & Schoppelrey, 2011; Owen, Imel, Adelson, & Rodolfa, 2012). Researchers suggest that the favoring of historically white perspectives, …

Creating Community: Examining Black Identity And Space In New Guinea, Nantucket, Jared Muehlbauer

Graduate Masters Theses

In the late 18th century, the abolition of slavery through manumission initiated a period of enormous change in the lives of people of African descent living on Nantucket, MA. Newly free, people of color living on the island immediately began to establish families and purchase property. At the end of the 1700s, they founded the community of New Guinea, located on the southwestern edge of the town of Nantucket. Though enslavement had been abolished and the whaling industry brought economic opportunity to Nantucket, the people of New Guinea continued to experience evolving forms of racial inequality, discrimination, and violence. To …

Migration And Identity In Host-Communities: Global North And South Influence On Ecuadorian Identity, Jefferson F. Cruz Ruales

Graduate Masters Theses

In the South American region that encompasses Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, patterns of human mobility have been predominantly influenced by various forms of internal conflict and limited economic prospects. The relative political, social, and economic stability which Ecuador has experienced in the region since the beginning of the 21st century, however, has made it a desired destination for many of its neighbor’s displaced populations and opportunity seekers. Similar factors have also enticed certain populations proceeding from areas of higher global development to settle into the nation’s tranquil environment. These Ecuadorian circumstances allow two very distinct groups of individuals, who exist …

The Boston Black United Front And Community-Centered Alternatives To The Carceral State, Joseph W. Sikowitz

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis is a history of the Boston Black United Front’s (BBUF) activities combatting the growing carceral state in Massachusetts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The BBUF was an “umbrella” organization within Boston’s Black community during the Black Power era and was particularly active on issues of police shootings, court appointments, prison reform, and street crime. This thesis examines these aspects of the carceral state, the network of criminal justice institutions that arose following World War II in Boston, and shows that the BBUF were responding to the early stages of this trend. Committees, rallies, and ideology were …

More Than Just A School: Medicinal Practices At The Abiel Smith School, Dania D. Jordan

Graduate Masters Theses

The Abiel Smith School, located on the North Slope of Beacon Hill in Boston, Massachusetts, is one of the oldest Black schools in the United States in one of the oldest free Black communities. The Abiel Smith School was constructed between 1834 and 1835 as a means to resist racial discrimination in the public school system. The Smith School is central to Beacon Hill’s Black history because it helped Black Bostonians advance in society and mitigate against the effects of racism through education. However, the Smith School may have served a dual role in the Black community. Medicinal bottles excavated …

Uncommon Ground: Pawtucket-Pennacook Strategic Land Exchange In Native Spaces And Colonized Places Of Essex County And Massachusetts Bay In The Seventeenth Century, Kristine Malpica

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis analyzes the historical, legal, and cultural dimensions and processes of land exchange between the Pawtucket-Pennacook and English colonists of Massachusetts Bay Company/Colony, in the seventeenth century. A close reading of colonial archives, reveals political and socio-economic factors, which initially motivated the Pawtucket-Pennacook to trade, share their homelands and ally with the English, forging a brief middle ground period. Through re-interpretation of legal documents and colonial sources, this study illustrates how the Pawtucket-Pennacook attempted to maintain sovereignty and territorial autonomy over Native spaces, which became some of the earliest colonized places in Massachusetts Bay. This research updates and adds …

Washed Away: Native American Representation In Oklahoma Museums And High Schools, 2000 – 2020, Catherine E. Thompson

Graduate Masters Theses

Each state in our union has a unique history and story as it plays into the formation of the United States; one of the unique and historically relevant narratives to United States is that of Oklahoma. The state of Oklahoma has gone through a multitude of changes over the last several centuries. Unfortunately a significant part of the history that has made Oklahoma so singular continues to be overlooked by the public and through education. Native Americans were forced off their ancestral lands and moved to Oklahoma. The state was then developed through a series of federal acts and invasive …

Form, Function, And Context: Lithic Analysis Of Flaked Stone Artifacts At A 17th-Century Rural Spanish Estancia (La 20,000), Santa Fe County, New Mexico, Clint S. Lindsay

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis examines the flaked stone artifact assemblage recovered from LA 20,000, a 17th-century (ca. 1630-1680 AD) rural Spanish colonial estancia located near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Settlements like LA 20,000 were important locations of cultural interaction between Spanish colonists and local Indigenous peoples who often worked and lived together in multi-cultural households. By analyzing the procurement, production, and use of flaked stone artifacts to identify choices and activities performed at the site by the people who lived and labored there this study helps to fill gaps in the knowledge and understanding of 17th-century flaked stone artifact production and use …

Small Towns And Mining Camps: An Analysis Of Chinese Diasporic Communities In 19th-Century Oregon, Jocelyn Lee

Graduate Masters Theses

Chinese Diaspora archaeology has focused historically on urban contexts or in-depth case studies, with minimal comparative studies. To expand such research, this thesis is a multisited analysis in Oregon using archaeological assemblages from the Jacksonville Chinese Quarter and four remote Chinese mining camps, museum material collection from a Chinese store in John Day, and store ledgers written in Chinese and English dating to the late-19th century. By situating the research in the framework of race, this thesis seeks to understand the ways that race and racialization impacted market access and affected consumption choices for Chinese immigrants in different classes. Chinese …

Set In Stone: Recontextualizing The Lithic Assemblage Of A Seventeenth-Century Storage Cellar In Charlestown, Massachusetts, Anna M. Greco

Graduate Masters Theses

Feature 43 is a domestic structure that belonged to the wealthy seventeenth-century merchant community of Charlestown, Massachusetts, and was excavated in the early 1980s as part of the Maudlin Archaeological District. The extant collection has remained in storage for the last thirty years, demanding a recontextualization of the site, both in provenience and in historical context. Primary sources portray an image of a predominantly European settler household; however, a counter-narrative emerges from lithics found within the assemblage. While the ultimate goal is to analyze the patterns of lithic sourcing and production in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the findings hinge on …

Tools Of Teaching: Metal At Magunkaquog, Nadia E. Waski

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis provides the results of a comprehensive analysis of the metal artifact assemblage from Magunkaquog, a mid-17th- to early-18th-century “Praying Indian” community located in present-day Ashland, Massachusetts. Magunkaquog was the seventh of fourteen “Praying Indian” settlements Puritan missionary John Eliot helped in gathering between the years of 1651-1674 as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s attempts to convert local Native American populations to Christianity. Originally the site was discovered during a cultural resource management survey conducted by the Public Archaeological Lab (PAL), and further investigated by the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research (then known as the Center for Cultural …

Community Through Consumption: The Role Of Food In African American Cultural Formation In The 18th Century Chesapeake, Alexandra Crowder

Graduate Masters Theses

Stratford Hall Plantation’s Oval Site was once a dynamic 18th-century farm quarter that was home to an enslaved community and overseer charged with growing Virginia’s cash crop: tobacco. No documentary evidence references the site, leaving archaeology as the only means to reconstruct the lives of the site’s inhabitants. This research uses the results of a macrobotanical analysis conducted on soil samples taken from an overseer’s basement and a dual purpose slave quarter/kitchen cellar at the Oval Site to understand what the site’s residents were eating and how the acquisition, production, processing, provisioning, and consumption of food impacted their daily lives. …

Observing The Experience Of Racism Through Social Background, Leïla J. Dieye

Graduate Masters Theses

This study explores racism through the eyes of the one that experiences it. If different types of racism have already been established, the initial premise of the study is that some factors make its experience unique, such as one individual’s markers of identity and his history.

Data have been collected from in-depth interviews with ten participants belonging to five ethnic groups (Latino, African American, Asian, African and Middle Eastern). Those participants were asked to reflect on a specific moment when they witnessed racism, and on why it made them think that event in particular was racist. Then, they were asked …

Smoking As A Form Of Persistence In A Christian Nipmuc Community, Jessica Ann Rymer

Graduate Masters Theses

The goal of this thesis is to determine the role that smoking played in the gatherings taking place at the Sarah Burnee/Sarah Boston farmstead and what its presence meant for the Nipmuc who gathered there. Previous work has firmly established that the farmstead functioned as a site of communal feasting for the Hassanamesco Nipmuc using ceramic and faunal evidence, and Heather Law in her 2008 thesis suggested that the site may have operated as an “informal tavern” based on her analysis of the glass assemblage. In all of these studies clay tobacco pipe fragments were utilized for stem bore diameter …

Seeing The Forest And The Trees: Tracing Fuel Use And Landscape Change On The Eastern Pequot Reservation 1740-1850, Kalila Herring

Graduate Masters Theses

Gathering fuel wood was a regular chore for most people throughout time and certainly was a part of life for people living in 18th- and 19th-century Connecticut. During this period, the landscape was being altered due to rapidly expanding agriculture and, by circa 1850, would be at the peak of deforestation. During this period, the Eastern Pequot, a Native American nation in North Stonington, were living on their reservation (established in 1683) in a colonial environment and dealing with timber theft, a reduced land base, overseer control, and the overall environmental changes occurring in Connecticut. This thesis examines the charred …

The Integration Of African Americans In The Civilian Conservation Corps In Massachusetts, Caitlin E. Pinkham

Graduate Masters Theses

The Civilian Conservation Corps employed young white and black men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. In 1935 Robert Fechner, the Director of the Civilian Conservation Corps, ordered the segregation of Corps camps across the country. Massachusetts’ camps remained integrated due in large part to low funding and a small African American population. The experiences of Massachusetts’ African American population present a new general narrative of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The Federal government imposed a three percent African American quota, ensuring that African Americans participated in Massachusetts as the Civilian Conservation Corps expanded. This quota represents a Federal acknowledgement …

Native Interactions And Economic Exchange: A Re-Evaluation Of Plymouth Colony Collections, Kellie J. Bowers

Graduate Masters Theses

This research furthers our understanding of colonial-Native relations by identifying and analyzing artifacts that indicate interaction between Native Americans and English settlers in Plymouth Colony archaeological collections. This project explores the nature of these interactions, exposing material culture's role in both social and economic exchanges. Selected 17th-century collections were excavated in modern Plymouth, Massachusetts, and nearby Marshfield and Kingston. My examination includes identifying materials exchanged between the Wampanoag and English settler groups in archaeological collections through scholarly literature and comparative 17th-century sites. This project draws on the documentary resources to provide contextualized insights on the relationships formed by and around …

Altered Lives, Altered Environments: Creating Home At Manzanar Relocation Center, 1942-1945, Laura W. Ng

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis seeks to understand how individuals exiled from their homes due to racial prejudice cope with institutional confinement. Specifically, this study focuses on the World War II mass incarceration of individuals of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast of the United States after Japan's attack on the American naval base Pearl Harbor. Under the guise of national security and without due process, the United States government forcibly removed over 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes and imprisoned them in camps spread throughout the country. This thesis examines institutional confinement at one Japanese American carceral site: an incarceration camp …

“So Succeeded By A Kind Providence”: Communities Of Color In Eighteenth Century Boston, Eric M. Hanson Plass

Graduate Masters Theses

The Freedom Trail has become an iconic symbol and major tourist attraction in the City of Boston. Yet since its Cold War-era inception, the Freedom Trail has remained problematically focused on a consensus history of leading white men who brought forth the American Revolution. Other heritage trails - most notably the Black Heritage Trail - have been established to correct the deficiencies of the Freedom Trail. These organizations have attempted to provide a revisionist counter-point by telling stories of internal struggle and by exploring groups traditionally overlooked by historians. However, with so many trails possessing so many particularized foci, many …

Final Rest At The Hilltop Sanctuary: The Community Of Mount Gilead Ame Church, Meagan M. Ratini

Graduate Masters Theses

The Mount Gilead AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church, perched on a mountain in Buckingham, Pennsylvania, has been a focal point of African American heritage in the area for over a hundred and seventy-five years. Though the second church building, dated to 1852, is still standing with its cemetery beside it, very little about its history has been thoroughly explored. Oral histories link the church with the Underground Railroad, a highly clandestine operation--yet the church itself was built of stone and advertised its location during the height of the movement of self-emancipated people out of the South. While it is said …

Germs, Pigs And Silver: King Philip's War And The Deconstruction Of The Middle Ground In New England, Benjamin M. Roine

Graduate Masters Theses

Early in the seventeenth century Algonquians peoples of southern New England and English colonists built a middle ground which benefitted both groups. Trade, the existence of competition from Dutch and French colonies and powerful Algonquian tribes maintained this middle ground. However, as trade items, such as beaver pelts and wampum became rare or lost value and continued English immigration to New England weakened Dutch claims to the area, the middle ground began to crumble. As English-style farms and livestock changed the ecology of New England and the colonists sought to assert their will, Algonquians lost the ability to live as …

Understanding Slave Subsistence In The Context Of Changing Agricultural Practices: Paleoethnobotany At Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest, Samantha J. Henderson

Graduate Masters Theses

During the 18th and 19th centuries, enslaved people at Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest utilized provisioned, gardened, and wild plants from local environments surrounding their homes to provide for their own subsistence. The Wingo's quarter was home to a number of these enslaved individuals at the end of the 18th century. Using macrobotanical data, I describe the subsistence strategies of the people living at this quarter, showing how enslaved Africans and African Americans at Wingo's utilized different sources of food to shape their foodways. Additionally, edible and inedible botanical remains provide a picture of the local environment around Wingo's within which …

Cultural Continuity In A Nipmuc Landscape, Joseph Bagley

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis examines the lithic assemblage from the 2005-2012 field seasons at the Sarah Boston site in Grafton, Massachusetts. The Sarah Boston site is associated with a multi-generational Nipmuc family living on the site during the late 18th through early 19th centuries. In total, 163 lithic artifacts, primarily quartz flakes and cores, were found throughout the site with concentrations north of a house foundation associated with the Nipmuc family. Reworked gunflints and worked glass were examined as examples of lithic practice associated with artifacts that are conclusively datable to the period after European arrival. Presence of quartz artifacts in an …