Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Black Press And Late Imperial Russia, Benjamin Pierce

History Undergraduate Honors Theses

For centuries, western observers had looked to Russia and seen a place fundamentally different from their home countries. In their accounts, Russia was distinctly oppressive, a state characterized by tyranny, barbarism, and Mongolian influence. But these accounts were faulty. They were written by merchants, diplomats, and explorers, wealthy white men who had never experienced the kind of repression they witnessed in Russia. When Black Americans looked to Russia, however, they saw a place fundamentally similar to the United States. Both countries were large, multiethnic empires driven by territorial acquisition and fueled by forced labor. By tracing the coverage of Russia …

Black Joining The Ranks Of White: Black Slaveowning In 1800s South Carolina, Zachary M. Saddow

Graduate Theses

Exploring the lives and impact of the Black slaveholders in Antebellum South Carolina is a highly overlooked subject in a sensitive area. The idea of a Black slaveholder stands contrary to the widely held belief of slavery held by a majority in the United States. This realization is also startling as most slaveholders were White, with those in bondage being Black. These Black slaveholders actively took part in the system of slavery including the buying and selling of slaves, the production of cash crops, and even support for the eventual Confederacy. Although many began their life in chains, Black future …

From Enslaver To White Savior: The Blackford Family And The Memory Of The American Colonization Society, Helen Dhue

Student Research Submissions

Part of the same family but with a generation dividing them, Mary Berkeley Minor Blackford and her grandson, Launcelot Minor Blackford Junior, shared much of the same sentiment toward the American Colonization Society (ACS). Mary, active in the ACS before the Civil War, supported the organization despite criticisms wielded by abolitionists of the period. Mary looked to the ACS for salvation from discussions about the morality of enslavement while enjoying the comforts that the thought of an all-white America brought her. Launcelot, writing fifty years after Mary’s passing at the beginning of an emerging national conversation about Black civil rights, …

An Inverted Mirror: Early American Perspectives On The Revolution In St. Domingue, Eric May

Gilder-Lehrman Institute Theses

No abstract provided.

Tracing The Dispossession Of The Enslaves Black Woman And A Potential For Resistance., Lila R. O'Conell

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Black Deathways: An African Methodist History, 1829-1916, Christina M. Varney

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This study will focus on the transformations of death practices and the shifting roles of death workers from 1829-1916. The Postbellum portion of this study will focus on African Methodist communities in the states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee as practices and people moved West to the states of Montana, Colorado, and California. These practices experienced changes as a result of rising literacy rates, the establishment of Black churches, and from the movement of Black people within the South. More changes occurred with the creation of mutual aid societies and Black-owned funeral homes. Black funeral directors …

"Know-Nothingism, Abolitionism, And Fanaticism:" An Analysis Of The Collapse Of The Second Party System In Maine, Justis Dixon

Honors Projects

The 1850s were a tumultuous period in American politics, with a complete partisan realignment fundamentally shifting the balance of power away from the status quo and toward possibilities for change. This paper focuses on the collapse of the Second Party System in Maine, and understanding how we can explain this stunning and rapid shift. The varying factors can be placed into two broad categories First, ethnocultural issues were primarily responsible for much of the growing turmoil within and between the major parties throughout the 1840s, and accelerating greatly in the early 1850s with rising levels of immigration and the increasing …

The Forgotten Faith: The Experiences Of Enslaved Muslims And The Influence Of Islam In The United States From 1730-1864, Amani Altwam

All Theses

Muslims were present in North America before the establishment of the

American/British colonies. The first Muslims in America were not citizens, but

enslaved Africans forced into the slave trade in the eighteenth century. Muslim slaves

in America were much more prevalent than anyone could have imagined and yet, the

religion of these slaves was rarely ever brought to the surface. In this thesis, I argue

that Muslim slaves not only existed in America but most of them were literate in

multiple languages, well-educated, and were capable of holding on to a set of beliefs.

History books and previous literature have …

Praying For The South: Catholics And The Confederacy, Thomas Richardson

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This thesis examines the distinctiveness of Southern Catholic support of the Confederacy during the American Civil War, with a geographic emphasis on Virginian Catholics. During the antebellum decades, the Catholic Church in America thrived despite facing increasing hostility from the largely-Protestant United States. In response to these challenges, Catholics learned to support their state and federal governments whenever and wherever they could as a means to defuse anti-Catholic attacks. This led Catholics to condone (and involve themselves in) American racialized slavery, even after the Church itself condemned the practice. Seen in this light, Catholics who fought for and supported the …

The Significance Of Abolitionism And The Underground Railroad, In The Buffalo Area, 1840-1860, Timothy J. Nixon

History Theses

The movement to end slavery is commonly known as the abolitionist movement. As a city located next to the Canadian border, Buffalo was a major route on the Underground Railroad. Sadly, when researching abolitionism and the Underground Railroad, national research seems to gloss over Buffalo. If Buffalo makes an appearance in national history books on this topic it is usually only a mention of being an Underground Railroad route into Canada. If historians mention Upstate New York, they usually focus on Frederick Douglass’s home of Rochester. Using the accounts of abolitionists, fugitive slaves, newspapers, community activists, and guest speakers, it …

Johnson V. M'Intosh: Christianity, Genocide, And The Dispossession Of Indigenous Peoples, Cynthia J. Boshell

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Using hermeneutical methodology, this paper examines some of the legal fictions that form the foundation of Federal Indian Law. The text of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1823 Johnson v. M’Intosh opinion is evaluated through the lens of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to determine the extent to which the Supreme Court incorporated genocidal principles into United States common law. The genealogy of M’Intosh is examined to identify influences that are not fully apparent on the face of the case. International jurisprudential interpretations of the legal definition of genocide are summarized and used as …

The Spark That Lit The Match: The Use Of Petitions And The Emergence Of Antislavery Politicians In The Movement To Abolish Slavery In The District Of Columbia, 1816-1829, Timothy Brown

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The United States capital, Washington, D.C., became the focus of antislavery advocates in their quest to eliminate the domestic slave trade and slavery. By the War of 1812, the domestic slave trade was thriving in the capital. However, many saw it as particularly embarrassing to a nation predicated on the concept of freedom. This embarrassment was even felt by proslavery Southerners. Beginning in 1816, an attempt to restrict the trade in the Capital occurred when Virginia Congressman John Randolph called for the destruction of the domestic slave trade there. Despite being proslavery, he argued that the federal government, as the …

From Half-Free To Property: The Evolution Of Slavery In Dutch New Netherland And English New York, 1621-1712, Sarah E. Hendrickson

Theses and Dissertations

Between 1621 and 1712, Dutch and English colonists imported African slaves to present-day New York to help create a profitable colony. This thesis explores why the Dutch created a society with slavery and how the English transformed New York into a slave society during this period.

Mammy And Aunt Jemima: Keeping The Old South Alive In Popular Visual Culture, Angela G. Athnasios

Honors College Theses

Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth century, American popular visual culture produced racist portrayals of Black Americans. Literature, illustrations, minstrelsy, film, and television are notorious for promoting such unflattering images. Each of these media typified African Americans as exaggerated caricatures with dark skin, bulging eyes, bright-red lips, and goofy smiles. The creators of these stereotypes project their racist beliefs into popular culture. This in turn heavily influences the way other races view people of African descent, as well as how Black people view themselves. From mammies, to Jezebels, to pickaninnies, and everything in between, the message ultimately conveyed in these …

Racial Terror Lynching In Northwest Arkansas: Recounting Of The Story Of Three Enslaved Males Lynched In 1856 In Washington County - Documentary, Obed Lamy

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

While Northwest Arkansas is considered as diverse and progressive today, it also shares a common history of racial violence, and yet almost unknown, with the Southern United-States. Little is being said about the slave plantations in Elkins, racial cleansing in Springdale, or public spectacle lynchings in Fayetteville. This is because white people who hold political and economic power also control how history is written and decide what is to be learned from their perspectives. Marginalized communities, especially Black people, have not always had agency to tell their own stories. The lynchings of three enslaved males, Anthony, Aaron, and Randall, in …

The Legend Of Neptune: A Portrait Of Enslavement And Emancipation In 18th-Century Worcester County, Massachusetts, Brigitte Lewis

Honors Theses

“The Legend of Neptune” tracks the life of a man named Neptune, who was enslaved at my childhood home in Still River, MA 01467 for fifteen years during 1742-1757. The general topic of this undergraduate thesis is slavery in seventeenth and eighteenth-century central Massachusetts; the main topic is uncovering the voice, history, and stories of an identified enslaved and then free Black man named Neptune. The project uses a vast array of primary sources to construct a narrative that centers Neptune’s life and experiences, supported by secondary historical research. This project also tells a counternarrative to the official history of …

"I Am A Arkansas Man:" An Analysis Of African-American Masculinity In Antebellum Arkansas, Tye Boudra-Bland

ATU Theses and Dissertations 2021 - Present

This thesis examines the experiences of African-American men in the years leading up to and through the American Civil War in order to understand how they constructed their own sense of manhood. Contemporary slave narratives and abolitionists’ expositions routinely tailored their definitions of manhood to white notions of gender in order to garner white support. Prominent abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass tailored their language of resistance against slavers to cast them as honorable martyrs as opposed to vengeful slaves so as to undermine racist caricatures of brute violence. But black southern men struggled against the confines of their bondage and …

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 …

Evangels Of Emancipation: Missionary Activity In Postemancipation Sierra Leone, Jamaica, And The United States, Rowan Mcgarry-Williams

Pomona Senior Theses

White missionaries shaped the development of social relations and the political economies of post-emancipation Anglo-American societies. They imbued their destinations with a particular logic of freedom, stemming from a shared language of evangelicalism, liberalism, and white supremacy. For missionaries in Sierra Leone, Jamaica, and the United States, freedom meant the ability to engage in Christian worship and market relations. Freedom from Christianity or freedom from the market, however, did not factor into the missionary idea of what freedom entailed. In the face of conflict with formerly enslaved people and a hostile planter class, missionaries ultimately abandoned egalitarian and optimistic visions …

The New Monumental Era: Daniel Webster And The Commemoration Of Compromise In The Age Of Disunion, 1853-1865, Michael James Larmann

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Professional Paper 1:

This professional paper is an in-depth analysis of a statue of Daniel Webster erected in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1859. Daniel Webster was a congressman for Massachusetts who became a controversial figure after he spoke in support of the Fugitive Slave Law as part of the Compromise of 1850. This paper analyzes the Daniel Webster statue and argues that the fractured politics of Union politicized public commemoration in the late antebellum period after the Compromise of 1850. This paper furthermore analyzes one of the first debates surrounding the public commemoration of a controversial historical actor with close ties …

Sweetened Blood, Sweat And Tears, Nathan Celestine

All Theses, Dissertations, and Capstone Projects

Of the transatlantic diffusion of culture, there is no better example than what developed out of Caribbean enslavement. The loss of African identity among slaves with a common, methodically destroyed ancestry, along with the diversity inherent to the different groups of Africans and Europeans and their respective cultural elements and identities resulted in a complex homogeny of culture, race, nationality, and socioeconomic status that has continued its development since the introduction of slaves to West Indian soil. It was this same soil that would cause the demand for slave labor to explode throughout European-controlled Caribbean islands, from the addition of …

Reconstructing The Black Family: How The Freedmen’S Bureau Sought To Shape Black Family Structures After Emancipation, Megan R. Busby

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Safekeeping: Slavery, Capitalism, And The Carceral State In Washington, D.C., 1830-1863, Brandon Wilson

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

By the 1830s, incarceration emerged as a two-pronged solution for racial control and economic expansion. Local and federal government built jails around the District of Columbia to detain "rowdy negro boys," men, and women, as a means to stymie their rapid movement and fuel a burgeoning domestic slave trade. People were jailed, fined, and often sold to the Deep South, providing a wellspring of capital for enslavers, justified through the lens of criminality. For the crime of petty theft, missing free papers, or in at least one case "using foul language," black people of the Washington region could find themselves …

Without Personhood: The Missing Point Of Slaves In Missouri's Emancipation-By-Residency Freedom Suit Jurisprudence, 1824-1837, Jacob Alfred Brandler

MSU Graduate Theses

From 1824 to 1837, the Supreme Court of Missouri developed a sophisticated caselaw establishing emancipation-by-residency—where a Missouri court could liberate an enslaved petitioner because of their residence in a free jurisdiction—as a basis of freedom suits. In 1852, however, the Court undermined the precedential value of those decisions and dismantled this basis when deciding Dred Scott’s case, Scott v. Emerson. Scholarship on Missouri’s freedom suits has highlighted how partisanship and the political atmosphere in Missouri as well as across the nation contributed to this outcome. This study adds to the historiography how the previous caselaw itself predisposed the result; …

Slavery And Confederate Military Strategy And Policy, 1860–1865, David M. Campmier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis places slavery at the center of all aspects of the Confederate war effort; from the beginning of the war until its end, the Rebel leadership in Richmond, in the army, and in the states prioritized protecting slavery.

Historians of the Civil War and the Confederacy agree that the war began when southern states declared secession to preserve the institution of slavery. When examining the war, scholars tend to not analyze slavery and its impact on Confederate military strategy, logistics, conscription, and military policy. This lack of study stands in stark contrast to how historians of the Union war …

Red Sea, White Tides, And Blue Horizons, John P. Devine

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Eric Hobsbawm, in his effort to explain the fundamental divide which produced the Second World War, convincingly argues that “the crucial lines in this civil war were not drawn between capitalism as such and communist social revolution, but between ideological families: on the one hand the descendants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the great revolutions including, obviously the Russian revolution’, on the other hand, its opponents.” This thesis argues that the American Civil War was a “great revolution” that represented a crucial transformative point in the formation of these two waring factions. The struggle was especially influential on the theory …

Fear And Rebellion In South Carolina: The 1739 Stono Rebellion And Colonial Slave Society, William Stanley

Masters Theses, 2020-current

The Stono Rebellion was a rebellion of enslaved people outside of Charleston, South Carolina, that occurred in early September 1739. Exploring the event and its surrounding context helps historians to understand how the rebellion was the result of political institution and exploitative social practices. This work is a history of colonial South Carolina through the rebellion, asking questions of what led to the rebellion, how the rebellion fit into the broader history of resistance, and what events compounded the rebellion in the historical record. Chapter one is a survey of the origins of South Carolina, and the development of its …

Reconciling With Slavery In The United States: An Evolving Narrative, Jamie Phlegar

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This project addresses two strands of inquiry that spring from this issue of evolving race relations in the U.S. First, I examine how Americans talk about the history of slavery in the U.S. What rhetorical strategies are employed when slavery is discussed and/or debated in public history contexts and beyond? Second, I examine talk about the future of race relations in the context of the legacy of slavery. Specifically, I am interested in exploring what rhetorical strategies are employed when discussing the potential for reparations in mainstream arenas.

Shackles And Servitude: Jails And The Enslaved In Antebellum Savannah, Haley E. Osborne

Honors College Theses

My research centers around the use of jails in relation to the African American community in Savannah. I will describe the evolution of the publicly funded jail system and explain how it was used to sustain the institution of slavery.

Dreams Of Industrial Utopias: Leading Manufacturers Of The Deep South And Their Mill Towns During The Civil War Era, Francis Michael Curran

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Broadly speaking, this dissertation explores the intersection of industrialization and social reform in the nineteenth-century American South. It focuses on leading manufacturers of the Deep South and their mill towns during the Civil War era. More precisely, it investigates the relationship between these industrialists, their mill towns, and social reform efforts of the period. In the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, William Gregg, Daniel Pratt, and Barrington King created and managed some of the largest and most financially successful manufacturing establishments in the entire South. These men, however, were more than simply industrialists. They were also idealistic and steadfast social reformers …