African American Studies Commons^™

"The Imagination And Construction Of The Black Criminal In American Literature, 1741-1910", Emahunn Campbell

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation examines the origins of the perception of black people as criminally predisposed by arguing that during eighteenth and nineteenth-century America, crime committed by black people was used as a major trope in legal, literary, and scientific discourses, deeming them inherently criminal. Furthermore, I contend that enslaved and free black people often used criminal acts, including murder, theft, and literacy, as avenues toward freedom. However, their resistance was used as a justification for slavery in the South and discrimination in the North. By examining a diverse set of materials such as confessional literature, plantation management literature, (social) scientific studies, …

To "Plant Our Trees On American Soil, And Repose Beneath Their Shade": Africa, Colonization, And The Evolution Of A Black Identity Narrative In The United States, 1808-1861, Edward Jason Vickers

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work explores the role that ideas about Africa played in the development of a specifically American identity among free blacks in the United States, from the early nineteenth century to the Civil War. Previous studies of the writings of free blacks in the Revolutionary period, and of the American Colonization Society (ACS), which was devoted to removing them back to an African homeland, have suggested that black discussions of Africa virtually disappeared after 1816, when the colonization movement began. However, as this work illustrates, the letters, books, newspapers, and organizational records produced by free blacks in the antebellum era …

Burbridge, Richard And Doris Interview 2, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

INTERVIEWER: Mark Naison, Natasha Lightfoot, Brian Purnell

INTERVIEWEE: Richard Burbridge, Doris Burbridge

SUMMARY BY: Patrick O’Donnell

Richard and Doris Burbridge conduct genealogical research in order to find out more about their respective families’ history. Richard’s mother was from New Orleans and his father was from Biloxi, Mississippi. The couple met in Biloxi, and moved to New York, where Richard and his two siblings were born. Upon taking a genealogy class at the Queens Public Library in 1992, Richard decided to conduct some research on his own roots. He soon found out that his family also had roots in Kentucky: his …

Slavery On Their Minds: Representing The Institution In Children's Picture Books, Raphael E. Rogers

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines how slavery is represented in contemporary children’s picture books. Given that many primary and secondary school teachers are committed to using picture book fiction to teach students about slavery, it is necessary to explore how slavery is depicted in these texts. One of the goals of this study is to contribute to the discussion about how the featured picture books engage with and respond to the early historiography of slavery, which asserted that Black slave were content and docile and that slave owners were kind and paternalistic. This study seeks to analyze how the picture books that …

Creating Difference: The Legal Production Of Race In American Slavery, Shaun N. Ramdin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the legal construction and development of racial difference as considered in literature written or set during the final years of American slavery. While there had consistently been a conceptual correspondence between black skin and enslavement, race or racial difference did not become the unqualified explanation of enslavement until fairly late in the institution’s history. Specifically, as slavery’s stability became increasingly threatened through the nineteenth century by abolitionism and racial slippage, race became the singular and explicit rationale for its existence and perpetuation. I argue that the primary discourse of this justificatory rationale was legal: through law race …

“Servants, Obey Your Masters”: Southern Representations Of The Religious Lives Of Slaves, Lindsey K.D. Wedow

The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era

This paper focuses on how representations of the religious lives of slaves, specifically their abilities to comprehend the Bible and flourish spiritually, became an issue that not only propelled the North and South toward the Civil War, but also perpetuated the conflict. Using original documents from the collections housed at Chicago’s Newberry Library, predominantly sermons written by proslavery ministers as well as documents published by missionary organizations, this paper explores the fierce defense of the institution of slavery mounted by proslavery Christians. Specifically, this paper’s interest is in how the representation of slaves by proslavery evangelical Christians as incapable of …

Assessing Reconstruction: Did The South Undergo Revolutionary Change?, Lauren H. Sobotka

Student Publications

With the end of the Civil War, came a number of unanswered questions Reconstruction would attempt to answer for the South. While the South underwent economic, political and social changes for a short period, old traditions continued to persist resulting in racist sentiment.

Art, Artifact, Archive: African American Experiences In The Nineteenth Century, Shannon Egan, Lauren H. Roedner, Diane Brennan, Maura B. Conley, Abigail B. Conner, Nicole A. Conte, Victoria Perez-Zetune, Savannah Rose, Kaylyn L. Sawyer, Caroline M. Wood, Zoe C. Yeoh

Schmucker Art Catalogs

Angelo Scarlato’s extraordinary and vast collection of art and artifacts related to the Civil War, and specifically to the Battle of Gettysburg, the United States Colored Troops, slavery and the African American struggle for emancipation, citizenship and freedom has proved to be an extraordinary resource for Gettysburg College students. The 2012-14 exhibition in Musselman Library’s Special Collections, curated by Lauren Roedner ’13, entitled Slaves, Soldiers, Citizens: African American Artifacts of the Civil War Era and its corresponding catalogue provided a powerful and comprehensive historical narrative of the period.

This fall, students in my course at Gettysburg College “Art and Public …