Digital Commons Network^™

North Of The Grid: The Black Experience Of 17th -19th Century Rural New York City, Stephanie E. Barnes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, transatlantic slavery was a racial project and template for race-making which created a country that relied on institutions that were organized and performed through social stratification. Today, the nation still operates on systemically racist institutions that have benefited whites while disadvantaging ‘others.’ The narratives presented in American history are rooted in whiteness and benefit the white community while marginalizing nonwhites. Over two hundred years of slavery history in this country has been purposely manipulated and left out. My research focuses on using an historical archaeological framework to research and share the lives of free and enslaved …

The Bean Pie: Black Muslims And Identity In Early Twentieth Century Detroit, Alexandra Christine Bicknell

Masters Theses

The bean pie is the product of culinary traditions set forth by the Nation of Islam. Nation members used the navy bean to whip up a custardy dessert utilizing religiously approved ingredients. Milk, eggs, brown sugar, and whole wheat flour transformed a savory, well-cooked bean into a sweet treat. Pies made from beans were not invented by the Nation of Islam, but they became symbolic of the culture and institutions established by Black Muslims in America. The Nation of Islam shaped Michigan and the midwestern region’s social and cultural identity. The Nation promoted that Black people ought to have power …

"I Just Had To Do Most Everything": Gender, Settlement And American Empire In The Far West, Hannah Alexandra Reynolds

Dissertations and Theses

The field of settler colonial studies has made huge strides in recent years toward problematizing the establishment of the United States on stolen land and the nation's steady, violent expansion across the continent. Settler colonial framework provides a rich opportunity for historians of the American West to reframe white settlement on the frontier, especially that which was made possible through land grant legislation such as the Homestead Act of 1862. As the families who took up land grant property sought new opportunities for themselves, they also acted as drivers of U.S. territorial acquisition. This process was inherently gendered, in terms …

Toward An Environmental History Of The First Great Awakening, David Blakely

History Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

The events that came to be known as “The First Great Awakening” began in the wake of Enlightenment ideas that emphasized secular rationalism. Among Christian leaders in the British colonies in North America there was a general perception that passion for religion had grown stale. Itinerant Christian preachers began to travel from town to town and organize large outdoor meetings where they preached forcefully about each individual’s responsibility for their salvation from sin. Many of these revival meetings included spontaneous outbursts of religious fervor from members of the crowd that took the form of shouting, weeping, speaking in tongues, dancing, …

The Hidden Power Of Images: An Allegory Of Chaos And Performance In The Digital Age, Livia Xandersmith

MFA in Visual Art

Within this text, I explore the hidden power of images in American visual culture through painting-based installations. I investigate images of the past and present juxtaposed in a surrealist landscape. Through the use of images in the news, entertainment, advertising, and images within the home, I depict how the problems of the past bleed into our perceptions of the present. I find that this cycle of problem inheritance connects us as humans regardless of time, generation, and place. In my work, I explore the complexity of image culture and its shifting presence within the digital age. Using surrealist collage, I …

Reading The Irony Of American History 70 Years Later, James K.A. Smith

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

The Modern Wesley Class Meeting - Bringing Accountability, Practical Faith, And Personal Connection Into Established Local Congregations, Roger Graham Clayton Jr

Doctor of Ministry Projects and Theses

This paper is an attempt to resurrect the Wesleyan class meeting in to the modern day congregation in order to build stronger and more vibrant communities. By examining the historical footprint of the class meeting in Wesley's Britain and the beginning of the American experiment, the core attributes of the class meeting are extracted to be accountability, vulnerability, and practical faith.

This paper also attempts to show that these core principles of the class meeting are still present in the modern world outside of the church to great success within the military, non-denominational faith groups, and in the battle against …

Isocrates's Place In Postmodern Advertising, Christopher Barkley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study in communication and rhetoric seeks to ascertain constructive applications for distinct advertising practices by examining Isocrates’s work and place in postmodern advertising. The focus uses 5 principles known to Isocrates which are: 1) commonwealths of households, 2) integration of reputation, elegance, substance and style, 3) education and public discourse, 4) phronesis and praxis, and 5) truth and verisimilitude. These 5 principles can form a constructive and practical advertising approach. This study is important. It examines Isocrates through the lens of advertising and extends the research done about him by leading Isocrates scholars who have looked primarily at his …

“For The Best Interest Of The Patient And Of Society;” Sterilization In Virginia’S Mental Institutions In The 20th Century, Grace M. Gordon

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

The science of eugenics, or classifying and grouping people into the categories of genetically “inferior” and “superior” for the purpose of better breeding, thrived during the first decades of the 20th century in Virginia. The first recorded instance of eugenic sterilization in a Virginia Mental Institution occurred in 1915 by Dr. Albert Priddy. In 1924, the combined efforts of Dr. Joseph DeJarnette and Dr. Albert Priddy resulted in the passage of a state-sanctioned eugenic sterilization law that was later deemed constitutional in 1927 by Buck v. Bell. The 1924 law gave Western State Hospital, Central State Hospital, Eastern State Hospital, …

“Infantry Would Not Do:” Appalachia, The Environment, And The Evolution Of Mountain Warfare During The American Civil War, Lucas Michael Wilder

Theses and Dissertations

Union General Ambrose E. Burnside launched his invasion of East Tennessee in the summer of 1863. The corps he used consisted of half-infantry and half-mounted units to utilize their speed to overcome mountain obstacles. The successful campaign and the capture of the agriculturally rich region of East Tennessee and its vital East Tennessee & Virginia Railroad deprived the Confederacy of resources, ultimately contributing to Confederate defeat. The American Civil War saw commanders plunge into the mountains of Appalachia and encounter a terrain and a people with which many were unacquainted. This dissertation argues that their tactics and strategies for dealing …

Oxen: Status, Uses And Practices In The U.S.A., Encouraging A Historic Tradition To Thrive, Andrew B. Conroy

Faculty Publications

Oxen in the United States of America have played an important role throughout its history. Unlike other countries,oxen were never completely given up for horses, mules, or tractors. Instead, the culture of keeping oxen has been maintained by a small group of teamsters in the North- eastern states collectively called New England. Their continued presence has been largely due to agricultural fairs and exhibitions where they have been used in competition for the last 200 years. Ox teamsters were sur- veyed in 2021via social media using Qualtrics. The 423 ox teamsters responding owned 1791 oxen in 39 states, with the …

Hall Family Collection - Index To Appendix 1, "Letters From The Attic" And Appendix 2, Postcards, Kyle Ainsworth

Librarian and Staff Presentations

The Hall Family Collection can generally be described in two parts. The first part is Letters from the Attic, which are more than 5,000 documents that Andrena Hall Brunotte transcribed into 16 volumes. Brunotte’s transcription project established an “original order” to this part of the collection that the processing archivist does their best to adhere to. All of these materials were found in one large steamer trunk and organized by Brunotte in chronological order. Boxes 1 to 4 of the collection house the paper transcriptions (3,330 pages). Boxes 5 to 13 contain the documents, which are in chronological order. The …

Florida History In Publications, 2015, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

No abstract provided.

The Hammer, The Sickle, And The Phosphate Rock: The 1974 Political Controversy Over Florida Phosphate Shipments To The Soviet Union, Brad Massey

Florida Historical Quarterly

The price of Florida phosphate rock skyrocketed in the 1970s. Corporate profits soared as well, peaking in 1980-1981 as phosphate-based fertilizers were applied to more and more farms throughout the world. During this boom decade, Florida phosphate companies acquired new lands for strip-mining operations, invested billions in new industrial infrastructure and employee payrolls, and created thousands of jobs. Over 90% of the phosphate rock extracted from the Florida earth was used for fertilizer production, which industry proponents argued was a noble global industrial cause. Florida mining boosters testified that phosphate fertilizers increased farm yields, staving off starvation and food scarcity …

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Weatherford, They Dared to Dream: Florida Women Who Shaped History. by Thomas H. Appleton Jr.; Link, Brown, Ward, and Bone, eds., Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South. by Robert Cassanello; Kvach, De Bow's Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South. by Frank J. Byrne; Pickenpaugh, Captives in Blue: The Civil War Prisons of the Confederacy. by David Carlson; Millner, The Allure of Immortality: An American Cult, a Florida Swamp, and a Renegade Prophet. by Katherine Marra; Bryan, Asylum Doctor: James Woods Babcock and the Red Plague of Pellagra. by Margaret Humphreys; Abreu, Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the …

Another Invisible Man: Alexander H. Darnes, M.D., Charles A. Tingley

Florida Historical Quarterly

The term "invisible man" has become a cliche for the evaporative effect of the Jim Crow Era on African American men and women and the memory of their lives.1 This article is the story of one such man of great stature who became invisible. What started as the search for a young slave boy named Aleck turned in to the re-discovery of Dr. Alexander Hanson Darnes, who was taken as a teenager to a U. S. Army cavalry post in the West, went through the Civil War as the personal valet of Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith, gained freedom through …

Runaway Slave Advertisements In Antebellum Florida: A Retrospective, Matthew J. Clavin

Florida Historical Quarterly

As the abolitionist minister's observation suggests, enslaved African Americans were neither content nor happy. Indeed, rom day-to-day acts of covert resistance to brazen acts of open rebellion, slaves in the antebellum United States daily proved the lie of paternalism as even a cursory glance at the historiography of the South over the last half-century attests. Nevertheless, for anyone still unconvinced of the American slaves' thirst for freedom, there is a large cache of historical records that obliterate the myth of black Southerners accepting their enslaved status passively. Published in independently owned newspapers in nearly every significant city and town in …

"The Indians Are Scattering, I Fear": Mobility And Power In The Second Seminole War, Christine A. Rizzi

Florida Historical Quarterly

Five days after Christmas in 1837, Brigadier General Thomas Sidney Jesup wrote a letter to Colonel Zachary Taylor on the subject of cypress canoes. The latter officer was fresh off an engagement against a large band of Seminole Indians. Taylor's force of 800 regular soldiers and volunteers engaged some 400 Seminole warriors and their black allies on the north shore of Lake Okeechobee.1 The Indian group, led by fabled leaders Sam Jones, Alligator, and Wild Cat, retreated across the lake after injuring and killing a significant number of Taylor's detachment.2 With the enemy withdrawing across the large, unfamiliar lake, and …

Interpreting Florida, Its Ninetenth-Century Literary Heritage, Maurice O'Sullivan

Florida Historical Quarterly

In January 1827, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a 23-year-old licensed but not yet ordained minister plagued by religious doubt and failing health, came to St. Augustine. As he wrote in a letter to his brother William, he found himself constantly bored during his two and a half months residence: "What is done here? Nothing .... I stroll on the sea-beach and drive a green orange over the sand with a stick. Sometimes I sail in a boat, sometimes I sit in a chair."1

Historiography Of Nineteenth-Century Florida, James G. Cusick

Florida Historical Quarterly

When the nineteenth century began, Florida, or the two colonial territories that became the modern state, was still under Spanish rule, its residents untouched as yet by coming rebellion and war. When the century closed, Florida was part of the American Deep South, looking to northern financiers for its Gilded Age development while creating Jim Crow laws as a buttress against calls for racial equality.

Sucking, Blood, And Fire: Timucuan Healing Practices In Spanish Florida, Tamara Shircliff Spike

Florida Historical Quarterly

As a colonial holding, Spanish Florida was a provincial backwater. It was located on the periphery of empire and parsely settled. Spain spent comparatively little time and effort developing the infrastructure of the colony.1 However, it is for these very reasons that Florida reflects to a magnified degree a problem in mission fields throughout the Americas during the colonial period: how to combat disease in the mission populations while still working to extirpate Native practices seen as anti-doctrinal. Descriptions of healing rituals by Franciscan friars and other Europeans offer tremendous insight into how the Timucuans of Spanish Florida viewed their …

Between Swamp And Sea: Bahamian Visitors In Southeast Florida Before Miami, Devin Leigh

Florida Historical Quarterly

In 1865, George Franklin Thompson, a representative of the Freedman's Bureau, wrote that southeast Florida could become the "garden of the United States," but only if the water levels of Lake Okeechobee could be lowered by at least six feet.2 In this assessment, Thompson epitomized the nineteenth-century, triumphalist belief that settlement in the region of present-day Miami would depend upon a severe manipulation of the natural environment. According to the Miami metropolitan narrative, this manipulation came in the year 1896, when a widowed heiress and "plucky" pioneer from Cleveland named Julia Tuttle capitalized on the Great Freeze of 1894-1895, and …

Slanders And Sodomy: Studying The Past Through Colonial Crime Investigation, James G. Cusick

Florida Historical Quarterly

Between 1784 and 1821, Spanish officials in St. Augustine regularly launched investigations into crime, covering cases that included slander, theft, burglary, assault, wounding, murder, and sex crimes, as well as specifically military offenses, like desertion. The records of their detective work are contained in the criminal court proceedings of the East Florida Papers, a well-preserved archive of what might be called C-CSI (or colonial crime scene investigation). In contrast to surviving records from earlier parts of the colonial period, which overwhelmingly describe highlevel crimes against Church and Crown such as heresy, piracy, and revolt, the cases in the East Florida …

End Notes, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

The Florida Historical Society Archaelogical Institute (FHSAI); Florida Frontiers: The Weekly Radio Magazine of the Florida Historical Society; Florida Historical Society 2014 Award Recipients; Dorothy Dodd Lifetime Achievement Award; Florida Historical Quarterly Podcasts; Florida Historical Quarterly Joins JSTOR; Florida Historical Quarterly now on Facebook; Timucuan Science and History Symposium; The Lawton M. Chiles, Jr. Center for Florida History Presents the Florida Lecture Series 2014-2015; Guidelines for Submissions to the Florida Historical Quarterly

Perfectly Still No More: Unionists In Confederate Northeast Florida, T. W. Upchurch

Florida Historical Quarterly

James William Allen's career as a Confederate soldier lasted only six months; he doubled over with a hernia and was discharged on the last day of 1861.2 His reaction to this medical condition is unknown since Allen left no letters,journal, or public pronouncement. Did he have dreams of military glory that were squashed by his rather inglorious medical condition? After all, Allen's unit, the St. Augustine Blues, had moved only 60 miles up the road to Fernandina.3 He had not left his home state nor, we assume, had he fired a weapon except to practice his marksmanship. However, judging by …

Florida History In Publications, 2013, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Foster, Climate and Culture Change in North America AD 900-1600. by David McCally; Din, War on the Gulf Coast: The Spanish Fight against William Augustus Bowles. by Kristofer Ray; Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and Their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World. by Jeffrey L. Fortney; Lawson, Jim Crow's Counterculture: The Blues and Black Southerners, 1890-1945. by Court Carney; Reid and Bennett, eds., Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families since Reconstruction. by Dolita D. Cathcart; Boyd, Georgia Democrats, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Shaping of the New South. by Sarah H. Brown; De …

Nature On A Leash: Tourism, Development, And The Environment On Amelia Island, Florida, Patrick H. Cosby

Florida Historical Quarterly

In the 2002 film, Sunshine State, writer and director John Sayles fictionalizes the recent history of Amelia Island, Florida. Sayles tells the tale of how unscrupulous developers attempted to acquire the most valuable beachfront properties from local African-American residents to build condominiums and golf courses, transforming Florida's weather and environment into a commodity to be sold to northern retirees and vacationers. Like the developers in Sunshine State, the Amelia Island Plantation sold dreams of "nature on a leash."1 Beginning in the early 1970s, the Amelia Island Plantation and its planners imposed a meticulously crafted, and prohibitively exclusive, version of living …

Race, Education, And Regionalism: The Long And Troubling History Of School Desegregation In The Sunshine State, Irvin D. S. Winsboro

Florida Historical Quarterly

In 1845, as Florida joined the Union, the state legislature promulgated a law which stated that any "assemblies ... by free negroes and mulattoes, slave or slaves, shall be punished ... with a fine not exceeding twenty dollars, or stripes, not exceeding thirty-nine." This measure, along with extensive and punitive slave codes, virtually eliminated opportunities to establish African American schools in the newest slaveholding state. Florida, true to the code of the white South, wanted to eliminate opportunities for slaves and free blacks to congregate and to pursue education for their children. Although based on the pervasive racial norms of …

The Role Of Cattle Ranching In The 1656 Timucuan Rebellion: A Struggle For Land, Labor, And Chiefly Power, Justin B. Blanton

Florida Historical Quarterly

Late in the spring of 1656, the principle cacique of Timucua, Lucas Menendez, led a group of twenty Indians on an attack of the La Chua cattle ranch of north Florida.1 The raiding Indians murdered a Spanish soldier and two African slaves in addition to slaughtering all the cattle. Lucas Menendez spared the surprised ranch owner, Juan Menendez Marquez, but ordered him to abandon the ranch and leave Florida for Spain.2 These events, together with four other murders in the Western Timucua mission province, are known as the Timucuan rebellion.