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Full-Text Articles in Black History
"By The Sweat Of His Brow"?: Master Mechanics And Class Position In Antebellum New Orleans, Caleb G. Roark
"By The Sweat Of His Brow"?: Master Mechanics And Class Position In Antebellum New Orleans, Caleb G. Roark
LSU Master's Theses
This thesis argues that New Orleans’s skilled laborers profited alongside or from enslaved laborers. Proponents of free labor ideology, largely relegated to the North, charged that the skilled mechanic was the prototypical “free laborer.” In contemporary and modern portrayals, the systems of free and enslaved labor were considered antithetical. This thesis posits that these views are incorrect. Free and enslaved labor flourished together in the Crescent City. Despite their absence in historical understandings of the antebellum South, skilled laborers succeeded in New Orleans. I track societal debates across Louisiana’s newspapers concerning the status and success of mechanics across the state. …
"Cap No Belong To Busha:" Property-In-Labor And Apprenticeship In Jamaica, 1834-1838, Ashley S. Getting
"Cap No Belong To Busha:" Property-In-Labor And Apprenticeship In Jamaica, 1834-1838, Ashley S. Getting
Dissertations and Theses
The four-year period of apprenticeship in Jamaica was a critical period in the transition of labor relations between enslaver/enslaved and master/apprentice. This study examines the Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833 and colonial office records to consider the ways masters and apprentices interpreted property-in-labor and how they employed those interpretations to begin negotiation what a 'free labor' sugar economy might look like post-apprenticeship. Using the lens of freedom practices to examine colonial dispatches and court records, I construct the apprentice understanding of their new labor relation. Apprenticeship meant a new legal status where individuals were no longer chattel, and the …