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2018

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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Entwined Threads Of Red And Black: The Hidden History Of Indigenous Enslavement In Louisiana, 1699-1824, Leila K. Blackbird Dec 2018

Entwined Threads Of Red And Black: The Hidden History Of Indigenous Enslavement In Louisiana, 1699-1824, Leila K. Blackbird

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Contrary to nationalist teleologies, the enslavement of Native Americans was not a small and isolated practice in the territories that now comprise the United States. This thesis is a case study of its history in Louisiana from European contact through the Early American Period, utilizing French Superior Council and Spanish judicial records, Louisiana Supreme Court case files, statistical analysis of slave records, and the synthesis and reinterpretation of existing scholarship. This paper primarily argues that it was through anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity and with the utilization of socially constructed racial designations that “Indianness” was controlled and exploited, and that Native Americans …


Book Review: The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story Of Indian Enslavement In America, Emily A. Willard Dec 2018

Book Review: The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story Of Indian Enslavement In America, Emily A. Willard

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.


Weir Family Collection (Mss 651), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives Nov 2018

Weir Family Collection (Mss 651), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid for Manuscripts Collection 651. Letters and papers of the Weir family of Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, and related members of the Rumsey and Miller families. Well-to-do merchants and farmers, the Weirs were leading supporters of the Union during the Civil War, providing advocacy, financial support, and military service. Includes full-text scans of a letter from the brother of steamboat pioneer James Rumsey defending his legacy as an innovator; James Weir's journal; James Weir's will; the annotated recollections of Edward Weir, Sr.; and two letters from former Weir slaves recolonized in Liberia (Click on "Additional files" below).


A Tangled Web: Quakers And The Atlantic Slave System 1625 – 1770., Kate Freedman Nov 2018

A Tangled Web: Quakers And The Atlantic Slave System 1625 – 1770., Kate Freedman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation re-contextualizes the Quakers’ history as anti-slavery pioneers by exploring the crucial economic role that the slave-based economies of the British West Indies played in establishing the Quakers as a powerful sect in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Atlantic world. Quakers were driven by their faith to foster a spirit of equality inside and outside of their meetings. They were among the first European religious sects to allow women to preach, to oppose violence and war, and, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth-century, to ban the practice of enslaving other human beings within their membership. Yet the Quakers …


The Manuscript Map Of The Dagua River. A Rare Look At A Remote Region In The Spanish Colonial Americas, Juliet Wiersema Nov 2018

The Manuscript Map Of The Dagua River. A Rare Look At A Remote Region In The Spanish Colonial Americas, Juliet Wiersema

Artl@s Bulletin

The Manuscript Map of the Dagua River Region (1764) is a hand-drawn map produced in the Spanish Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada. While created as visual testimony for a land dispute, I argue that a careful art historical reading of the Dagua River Map, considered in conjunction with eighteenth-century archival documents, nineteenth-century explorers’ accounts, and surviving historical maps, reveals other narratives about ethnicity, industry, and society in a remote region of a peripheral Spanish viceroyalty. The Dagua River map highlights the incontrovertible place that geography held for those—namely enslaved and freed Africans—who came to control trade and transport in the region, …


The Origins And Uses Of The Three-Fifths Clause Related To Slavery And Taxation, William F. Hughes Oct 2018

The Origins And Uses Of The Three-Fifths Clause Related To Slavery And Taxation, William F. Hughes

Masters Theses

The Three-fifths clause of the 1787 U.S. Constitution is noted for having a role in perpetuating racial injustices of America’s early slave culture, solidifying the document as pro-slavery in design and practice. This thesis, however, examines the ubiquitous application of the three-fifths ratio as used in ancient societies, medieval governments, and colonial America. Being associated with proportions of scale, this understanding of the three-fifths formula is essential in supporting the intent of the Constitutional framers to create a proportional based system of government that encompassed citizenship, representation, and taxation as related to production theory. The empirical methodology used in this …


[Review Of] From Oligarchy To Republicanism: The Great Task Of Reconstruction. By Forrest A. Nabors (Columbia, University Of Missouri Press, 2017) 358 Pp. $45.00, Mark Wahlgren Summers Oct 2018

[Review Of] From Oligarchy To Republicanism: The Great Task Of Reconstruction. By Forrest A. Nabors (Columbia, University Of Missouri Press, 2017) 358 Pp. $45.00, Mark Wahlgren Summers

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Helm Family Papers (Mss 633), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives Sep 2018

Helm Family Papers (Mss 633), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscript Collection 633. Correspondence, business papers, deeds, and miscellaneous records of the Helm family of Butler County, Kentucky, and related families.


The American Whig Party And Slavery, Mitchell Rocklin Sep 2018

The American Whig Party And Slavery, Mitchell Rocklin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explains why the American Whig Party consisted of the most anti-slavery and pro-slavery segments of American politics during the Second Party System (1834 to 1854), as well as why it broke up. I argue that slavery was a major reason for the creation and continuation of the party, particularly in the South. A common Whig political culture – economically capitalistic while also emphasizing the integrity of the “social fabric” over individualism – helped spur both northern and southern Whigs to oppose Democrats over slavery from opposite perspectives. Southern Whigs honestly and understandably saw themselves as more pro-slavery, prioritizing …


Alexander, Ingram, 1772-1841 (Sc 3250), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives Aug 2018

Alexander, Ingram, 1772-1841 (Sc 3250), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 3250. Deeds (5), land survey, and will related to Ingram Alexander, Cumberland County, Kentucky.


Parting The Waters Of Bondage: African Americans’ Aquatic Heritage, Kevin Dawson Aug 2018

Parting The Waters Of Bondage: African Americans’ Aquatic Heritage, Kevin Dawson

International Journal of Aquatic Research and Education

Since the 1960s, when the United States Center for Disease Control began compiling racial statistics on drowning death rates, it has been painfully obvious that African Americans are far more likely to drown than their white counterparts. While segregation denied black people access to most public swimming pools and racial violence transformed natural waterways into undesirable places for swimming a leisure, perceptions that swimming as an “un-black” or “white” pursuit have marginalized its acceptability within African American communities. “Parting the Waters of Bondage” is an original article based on decades of the author’s historical scholarship. It seeks to reduce the …


Faulkner, Richard C., 1792-1867 - Letters To (Sc 3242), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives Jul 2018

Faulkner, Richard C., 1792-1867 - Letters To (Sc 3242), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and typescripts (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3242. Letters, 16 May 1818 and 4 July 1819 to Richard C. Faulkner, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, from a brother, possibly named Thomas. Writing from King and Queen County, Virginia, he laments his inability to sell a mill that was part of their father’s estate, refers to the settlement of the estate of another brother, John, and relates items of local news. The second letter answers Richard’s query about the price of slaves, makes observations about the local economy, and urges Richard to forward a deed for the mill, …


Capwell, Franklin Wall, 1823-1889 (Sc 3232), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives Jun 2018

Capwell, Franklin Wall, 1823-1889 (Sc 3232), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid, scan and typescript (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3232. Letter, 10 January 1845, of teacher Franklin W. Capwell to his parents in Wyoming County, New York. Writing from Mortonsville, Kentucky, he describes the circumstances of his decision to teach at a seminary there, listing his subjects and fees. He finds Southern women unsuitable for their lack of education, but declares that their wealth makes them good marriage prospects for other Northern men. He also comments on the reliance on slaves for ordinary labor, the defense of slavery by ministers, and the fear of slave …


Warren, Kaye (Fa 1150), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives May 2018

Warren, Kaye (Fa 1150), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 1150. Student folk studies project titled “From Slavery to Freedom for the Negro Race in Logan County [Kentucky]” which includes survey sheets with a brief description of African American life in Logan County, Kentucky. Sheets may include interviews, written records, photographs, informant’s name, age, and address.


Community Through Consumption: The Role Of Food In African American Cultural Formation In The 18th Century Chesapeake, Alexandra Crowder May 2018

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. …


The Relationship Between The Methodist Church, Slavery And Politics, 1784-1844, Brian D. Lawrence May 2018

The Relationship Between The Methodist Church, Slavery And Politics, 1784-1844, Brian D. Lawrence

Theses and Dissertations

The Methodist church split in 1844 was a cumulative result of decades of regional instability within the governing structure of the church. Although John Wesley had a strict anti-slavery belief as the leader of the movement in Great Britain, the Methodist church in America faced a distinctively different dilemma. Slavery proved to be a lasting institution that posed problems for Methodism in the United States and in the larger political context. The issue of slavery plagued Methodism from almost its inception, but the church functioned well although conflicts remained below the surface. William Capers, James Osgood Andrew, and Freeborn Garrettson …


Rewriting History: A Study Of How The History Of The Civil War Has Changed In Textbooks From 1876 To 2014, Skyler A. Campbell May 2018

Rewriting History: A Study Of How The History Of The Civil War Has Changed In Textbooks From 1876 To 2014, Skyler A. Campbell

The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era

History textbooks provide an interesting perspective into the views and attitudes of their respective time period. The way textbooks portray certain events and groups of people has a profound impact on the way children learn to view those groups and events. That impact then has the potential to trickle down to future generations, fabricating a historical narrative that sometimes avoids telling the whole truth, or uses selective wording to sway opinions on certain topics. This paper analyzes the changes seen in how the Civil War is written about in twelve textbooks dated from 1876 to 2014. Notable topics of discussion …


Condemning Colonization: Abraham Lincoln’S Rejected Proposal For A Central American Colony, Matthew Harris May 2018

Condemning Colonization: Abraham Lincoln’S Rejected Proposal For A Central American Colony, Matthew Harris

The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era

This article focuses on a proposal by Abraham Lincoln to settle freed African Americans in Central American countries. The backlash from several countries reveals that other countries besides the warring United States were also struggling with reconciling racial issues. This also reveals how interwoven racial issues were with political crises during the Civil War because it not only effected domestic policies but also international relations.


The Devil In Cartagena: Slavery, Religion And Resistance In Seventeenth-Century Caribbean Colombia, Daniel James Dawson May 2018

The Devil In Cartagena: Slavery, Religion And Resistance In Seventeenth-Century Caribbean Colombia, Daniel James Dawson

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

This thesis examines the role of religion in African communities in seventeenth-century Caribbean Colombia, and the tensions between the system of racial and religious hierarchy imposed by the Catholic Church and Spanish authorities and the everyday religious life of free and enslaved Africans and their descendants. It will examine interactions between African religion and Christianity and African resistance to Spanish Catholic authority. It will examine Spanish-Catholic thought on African spirituality, and investigate the relationship between African subjects and Catholic authorities in the Spanish Atlantic. It explores the goals of Catholic authorities in relation to African subjects, and the various methods …


Between The World And Them, Jeffrey L. Lauck May 2018

Between The World And Them, Jeffrey L. Lauck

The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History

The first time I learned the story of the Bryan family and their Gettysburg farm was when I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. For Coates, there was something poetic about the fact that the climax of the Civil War’s bloodiest and most well-known battle—a moment forever enshrined in Confederate memory thanks to the likes of William Faulknerand Ted Turner—occurred on land owned by a free black man and his family. Pickett’s Charge—the greatest symbol of Confederate martial honor in the Civil War canon—had been repulsed on property that represented so much of what its participants fought …


The Second Great Awakening And The Making Of Modern America, Kerry Irish May 2018

The Second Great Awakening And The Making Of Modern America, Kerry Irish

Faculty Publications - Department of History and Politics

In the decades before the Civil War which began in 1861, the Second Great Awakening was the most powerful social movement in America. It inspired the conversion of millions of Americans to faith in Jesus Christ. And that faith motivated many of those people to attempt to transform the moral habits of the nation. Slavery was ended, consumption of alcohol reduced, women’s rights, though often opposed by people of faith, were set on a path that would result in woman’s suffrage in the early Twentieth century. A host of other reforms, too many to list, were instigated. It is not …


Picturing A Nation Divided: Art, American Identity And The Crisis Over Slavery, Louise Michelle Hancox May 2018

Picturing A Nation Divided: Art, American Identity And The Crisis Over Slavery, Louise Michelle Hancox

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 1859, Arkansas artist Edward Payson Washbourne produced a lithograph entitled the Arkansas Traveler. Based upon a popular folktale originating twenty years earlier, Washbourne used the image to convey his understanding of the crisis over slavery in the western territories. Artists in north and south responded to the slavery debate with differing visions of the western landscape; one characterized by free labor, the other slave. Westward expansion also highlighted debate about Indians, long relegated to the role of the savage other by the myth of the frontier. Yet, on the southern frontier, the conversation was different, as slaveholding Cherokees claimed …


Frontier Capitalism And Unfree Labor In Middle Appalachia: The Development Of Western Pennsylvania And Maryland, 1760-1840, Nathaniel Conley May 2018

Frontier Capitalism And Unfree Labor In Middle Appalachia: The Development Of Western Pennsylvania And Maryland, 1760-1840, Nathaniel Conley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Slavery and unfree labor have been a subject of growing interest for historians, particularly when dealing with frontier areas and the rise of capitalism. Recent studies have shown that slavery and unfree labor existed well into the antebellum period in the North despite the lack of legal support for the institution. Few historians have identified the importance of slavery in the development of western areas, however, particularly in the Appalachian regions of western Pennsylvania and Maryland. As a result, concerted study of slavery in rural, western areas is lacking, particularly in the borderland region between slavery and freedom along the …


Tracing Dominican Attitudes Towards Race: A Historical Analysis, Marcos Polonia May 2018

Tracing Dominican Attitudes Towards Race: A Historical Analysis, Marcos Polonia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The common misconception is that all Dominicans are racist – that Dominicans live in a Fanonesque reality where we believe we are white, but we clearly inhabit black bodies. These attitudes permeate Dominican society from the highest echelons of power to the everyday experiences of Dominicans on the street. The notion that Dominicans are racist is widespread among Latinos and African-Americans as well. Recently, global attention was focused on the Dominican Republic as the country changed its constitution in order to prevent Dominicans of Haitian descent from becoming Dominican citizens. But, where do these notions of race come from? This …


Pond, Noah Sherman, 1815-1892 (Sc 3203), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives Apr 2018

Pond, Noah Sherman, 1815-1892 (Sc 3203), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and full text of letters (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 3203. Four letters, 1836-1837, of Noah S. Pond to his sister and brother-in-law in Washington, Connecticut. Writing from New Design, Trigg County, Kentucky, where he is working as a peddler, Pond describes many aspects of life in frontier Kentucky: changeable weather, agricultural practices and prices, lay preaching, voting, and the lives of slaves, who he believes are well treated and better off than the poor in the North. He describes selling to a Dutchman who dislikes “Yankees,” notes recent political developments, and finds Kentucky …


“Pain Had A Face, Indignity Had A Body, Suffering Had Tears:” Evaluating The Role Of Colonial Williamsburg In Portraying Narratives Of Enslavement, Sarah Kolenbrander Apr 2018

“Pain Had A Face, Indignity Had A Body, Suffering Had Tears:” Evaluating The Role Of Colonial Williamsburg In Portraying Narratives Of Enslavement, Sarah Kolenbrander

History Honors Projects

This thesis analyzes how Colonial Williamsburg presented African American history from its opening in 1934 to 2018. Through archival research, historiography, and oral histories, I contend that Colonial Williamsburg perpetuates the ideological separation of African American history from mainstream American history. Segregated programming and a central narrative of white exceptionalism and patriotism maintain this divide. I conclude by introducing the concept of Emotional Humanity as an alternative interpretive method for guiding presentations of slavery at living history museums such as Colonial Williamsburg.


Journalism And Human Rights: From The Abolition Of The British Slave Trade, The Aids Crisis, And Injustices Beyond And In-Between, Andrew Henderson Apr 2018

Journalism And Human Rights: From The Abolition Of The British Slave Trade, The Aids Crisis, And Injustices Beyond And In-Between, Andrew Henderson

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The conception of human rights is one that is enshrined within the shared, collective history of humanity. Encompassing secular traditions, Asian religions and traditions, and monotheistic religions and perspectives as a base for what would come to evolve into universal human rights. Throughout history these traditions and religions have all played a role in shaping where we are at today in terms of human rights. Yet the road which led to a universal declaration of rights was not paved with ease. From the onset of Aristotle, Plato, Hammurabi, other secular authors, and culminating to the end of the French Revolution …


“Botany Bay”: The State Of Society At Union College During The Early Nineteenth Century, Andrew Cassarino Apr 2018

“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, …


Raising Questions: Gettysburg Rising’S Confederate Flag Forum, Olivia Ortman Mar 2018

Raising Questions: Gettysburg Rising’S Confederate Flag Forum, Olivia Ortman

The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History

On March 3, Gettysburg Rising–a group that encourages civic engagement by sharing information–hosted a forum on the Confederate flag. It drew a modest, yet eager crowd. The goal of the event was to create an opportunity for people to come together and share their thoughts and feelings about the flag. After Professor David Hadley delivered a brief history of the flag, the attendees took the mic. [excerpt]


The Long Legacy Of White Citizen Police: A Recap Of The 12th Annual Gondwe Lecture, Jeffrey L. Lauck Mar 2018

The Long Legacy Of White Citizen Police: A Recap Of The 12th Annual Gondwe Lecture, Jeffrey L. Lauck

The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History

Last week, the Gettysburg College Africana Studies and Economics Departments sponsored the 12th annual Derrick K. Gondwe Memorial Lectureon Social and Economic Justice. This year’s lecture featured Dr. Edward E. Baptist, a Durham, North Carolina native currently teaching in the History Department at Cornell University. His lecture, “White Predators: Hunting African Americans For Profit, From the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act to Lee’s 1863 Invasion of Pennsylvania,” painted the picture of a centuries-long instinct among white Americans to police black Americans. [excerpt]