African American Studies Commons^™

The “Peculiar Institution” In And Near Williamsburg, Terry L. Meyers

Arts & Sciences Articles

Excerpt from the article: "Slavery in Williamsburg and nearby—what was it like? Depends on who you ask..."

Disappearing Smoke: Why Black Pitmasters Are Being Left Behind By Commercialization Within North Carolina Whole Hog Barbecue, Charlotte Lucas

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In North Carolina, there is only one Eastern whole hog establishment left that is owned by black pitmasters. As a result of historical context, black pitmasters have been left behind by the recent trend of commercialization within North Carolina whole hog barbecue. This exclusion can be explained by examining the history of whole hog barbecue, the struggles black entrepreneurs face in the restaurant industry, and the role that the media has played in ignoring black pitmasters. Historical background dives into the history of the whole hog from the plantation era to the Civil Rights movement and beyond in North Carolina …

Cultivation Through Excavation: Performing Community And Partnership In The Historic First Baptist Church Project, Eleanor S. Renshaw

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis explores the relationships and partnerships developing around the First Baptist Church -- Nassau Street Archaeology Project in Colonial Williamsburg. Exploring the defining of "descendant community" and the contributions of tourists through the lens of Erving Goffman's stages and participant frameworks, this project looks at the past, present, and future of this project.

The Bodies Politic: Sex, History, And The Promise Of A Black Queer America, Jonathan Newby

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This essay examines and critiques the ways in which Black, Queer, and Black Queer people's culture, politics, and lived experiences are experienced in the United States, historically and in the present day. The Bodies Politics calls for American history and culture to be reoriented to acknowledge and center the contributions of Black Queer people to the nation.

The Enslaved People And The Tylers Too: Why It Is Imperative To Discuss Slavery In Public History, Meredith Jackson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper focuses on the intersection of slavery and public history in the present day, specifically researching how the Tyler family perpetuated slavery and the Lost Cause and the enslaved people at Sherwood Forest Plantation as a microhistory.

"Epic Poems In Bronze": Confederate Memorialization And The Old South's Reckoning With Modernity In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Grace Ford-Dirks

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Scholars of the American South generally end their studies of Confederate memorization just before World War 1. Because of a decline in the number of physical monuments and memorials to the Confederacy dedicated in the years immediately following the war, scholars appear to regard the interwar era as a period separate from the Lost Cause movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, to fully understand the complexity of developing Southern identities in the modern age, it is essential to expand traditional definitions of Confederate memorialization and the time period in which it is studied. This paper explores …

Sea Of Change : Race, Abolitionism, And Reform In The New England Whale Fishery, Justin Andrew Pariseau

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Bound together across lines of color and lass, Nantucket and New Bedford residents pursued the unique economic opportunities presented by whaling during the nineteenth century. Whaling was becoming a major industrial enterprise with few available options to fulfill the labor needs required for the whaling crews, ropewalks, blacksmith shops, and sail lofts that made it possible for Nantucket and New Bedford whaleships to transit the globe. Whaling thus generated the jobs that made it possible for free black communities to thrive. People of color consequently turned the need for labor to their advantage. Drawn by the financial opportunities that the …

Nineteenth Century Enslaved African Americans' Coping Strategies For The Stresses Of Enslavement In Virginia, Allison Michelle Campo

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

The Life And Legacy Of Marie Couvent: Social Networks, Property Ownership, And The Making Of A Free People Of Color Community In New Orleans., Elizabeth Clark Neidenbach

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This dissertation recovers the life of Marie Justine Sirnir Couvent and the Atlantic World she inhabited. Born in Africa around 1757, she was enslaved as a child and shipped to Saint-Domingue through the Bight of Benin in the 1760s. In the tumult of the Haitian Revolution, Couvent fled the island, along with tens of thousands of Saint-Domingue inhabitants. She resettled in New Orleans where she eventually died a free and wealthy slaveholder in 1837. Although illiterate, Couvent left property to establish a free black school in her will. L'Institution Catholique des Orphelins Indigents was founded on her land in 1847 …

The Technique Of The Poquoson-Style Log Canoe, David Andrews Moran

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

An Enslaved Landscape: The Virginia Plantation At The End Of The Seventeenth Century, David Arthur Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Lewis Burwell II designed Fairfield plantation in Gloucester County to be the most sophisticated and successful architectural and agricultural effort in late seventeenth-century Virginia. He envisioned a physical framework with the intent to control the world around him so that he might profit from growing tobacco, while raising his family's status to the highest in the colony through the display of wealth and knowledge and the enslavement of both Africans and the natural surroundings. The landscape he envisioned contrasted with those of the enslaved Africans he purchased and put to work in the fields and buildings surrounding his '1694 brick …

Thoroughly Modern: African American Women's Dress And The Culture Of Consumption In Cleveland, Ohio 1890-1940, Deanda Marie Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

African American women have been absent from much of the writing on consumption and the making of modernity. This dissertation responds to these absences, using dress, a highly visible form of consumption, to examine how African American women in Cleveland, Ohio experienced modernity through the culture of consumption from 1890-1940, in the context of urbanization, migration, and the Great Depression.;In looking at African American women's dress during this period, this dissertation will explore the clothed body not simply as a theoretical abstraction, but part of a lived experience in which production and consumption are not mutually exclusive. This will help …

'I Get A Kick Out Of You': Cinematic Revisions Of The History Of The African American Cowboy In The American West, Stephanie Anne Maguire

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Gathering Places, Cultivating Spaces: An Archaeology Of A Chesapeake Neighborhood Through Enslavement And Emancipation, 1775--1905, Jon Jason Boroughs

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This study is a community-level analysis of an African American plantation neighborhood grounded in archaeological excavations at the Quarterpath Site (44WB0124), an antebellum quartering complex and post-Emancipation tenant residence occupied circa 1840s-1905 in lower James City County, Virginia. It asserts that the Quarterpath domestic quarter was a gathering place, a locus of social interaction in a vibrant and long established Chesapeake plantation neighborhood complex.;By the antebellum period, as marriage "abroad," or off-plantation, became the most common form of long term social union within plantation communities, enslaved social and kin ties in the Chesapeake region were typically geographically dispersed, enjoining multiple …

Community Building After Emancipation: An Anthropological Study Of Charles' Corner, Virginia, 1862-1922, Shannon Sheila Mahoney

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The half-century marked by the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I was a critical period of cultural, social, and economic transition for African Americans in the southern United States. During the late nineteenth century, while African Americans were rebuilding communities and networks disrupted by enslavement and the ensuing Civil War, several settlements developed between Williamsburg and Yorktown on Virginia's lower peninsula. One of the settlements, Charles' Corner, is an optimal case study for understanding the gradual process of community building during a particularly challenging period of African American history dominated by systemic racism and …

Derogatory To The Rights Of Free-Born Subjects: Racialization And The Identity Of The Williamsburg Area's Free Black Population From 1723-1830, Rebecca Anne Schumann

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

A Union Of Church And State: The Freedmen's Bureau And The Education Of African Americans In Virginia From 1865--1871, Aaron Jason Butler

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

In 2003, the Virginia Department of Education authorized a committee of 11 teachers to write a report detailing Virginia's public education history. The committee drafted a document that provided a chronological account of the major developments in public education in Virginia from 1607 to 2003. The document provided minimal coverage of the history of Virginia's African American population, specifically during the Antebellum (1830s-1860s) and Reconstruction (1865-1871) eras. The history of public education for Virginia's African American population, 1865-1870, was completely omitted from the document. The post-Civil-War era was a critical time period in both United States and Virginia educational history …

No Longer Lost At Sea: Black Community Building In The Virginia Tidewater, 1865 To The Post-1954 Era, Hollis E. Pruitt

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

...the early people of Gloucester County were English gentlemen and ladies... Many of these fine old families continued wealthy for generations, until about seventy years ago, when a terrible war, known as the War between the States,... deprived them and their present day descendents of their property and wealth, as well as their Negro slaves who were freed at the time of this war.(Gray 66).;All across the post-Civil War South, the newly freed African Diaspora struggled to find ways to maintain their families and to develop communities. Having been systematically denied education, property ownership, political participation and participation in both …

Dooley's Ferry: The Archaeology Of A Civilian Community In Wartime, Carl Gilbert Drexler

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Warfare and conflict are familiar topics to anthropologists, but it is only recently that anthropological archaeologists moved to create a discrete specialization, known as Conflict Archaeology. Practitioners now actively pursue research in a number of different areas, such as battlefields, fortifications, and troop encampments. These advances throw into sharp relief areas that need greater focus. This dissertation addresses one of these shortcomings by focusing on the home front by studying Dooley's Ferry, a hamlet that once lay on the banks of the Red River, in southwest Arkansas. Before the American Civil War, it was a node in the commodity chains …

Introduction To "The Americans Are Coming! Dreams Of African American Liberation In Segregationist South Africa", Robert T. Vinson

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

For more than half a century before World War II, black South Africans and “American Negroes”—a group that included African Americans and black West Indians—established close institutional and personal relationships that laid the necessary groundwork for the successful South African and American antiapartheid movements. Though African Americans suffered under Jim Crow racial discrimination, oppressed Africans saw African Americans as free people who had risen from slavery to success and were role models and potential liberators.

Many African Americans, regarded initially by the South African government as “honorary whites” exempt from segregation, also saw their activities in South Africa as a …

I'M Really Just An American: The Archaeological Importance Of The Black Towns In The American West And Late-Nineteenth Century Constructions Of Blackness, Shea Aisha Winsett

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Strange Fruit: Images Of African Americans In Advertising Cards And Postcards, 1860-1930, Meghan Brooke Holder

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

A Bold Promise: Black Readjusters And The Founding Of Virginia State University, Leigh Alexandra Soares

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Race News: How Black Reporters And Readers Shaped The Fight For Racial Justice, 1877--1978, Frederick James Carroll

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Between 1877 and 1978, black reporters, publishers, and readers engaged in a never-ending and ever-shifting protest against American racism. Journalists' militancy oscillated as successive generations of civil rights activists defined anew their relationship with racism and debated the relevance of black radicalism in the fight for racial justice. Journalists achieved their greatest influence when their political perspectives aligned with the views of their employers and readers. Frequent disputes, though, erupted over the scope and meaning of racial justice within the process of reporting the news, compelling some writers to start alternative publications that challenged the assimilationist politics promoted by profit-minded …

Black Female Landowners In Richmond, Virginia 1850-1877, Hannah Catherine Craddock

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Bondage On The Border: Slaves And Slaveholders In Tazewell County, Virginia, Laura Lee Kerr

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

C.C Spaulding & R.R Wright---Companions On The Road Less Traveled?: A Reconsideration Of African American International Relations In The Early Twentieth Century, Brandon R. Byrd

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Gaming Among Enslaved Africans In The Americas, And Its Uses In Navigating Social Interactions, Katrina Ann Christiano

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Keep On Keeping On: The Naacp And The Implementation Of Brown V. Board Of Education In Virginia, Brian James Daugherity

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court handed down one of its most important decisions in the twentieth century. Brown v. Board of Education ordered twenty-one U.S. states, including Virginia, to end racial segregation in their public schools.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a nationally-known African American civil rights organization, had led the legal campaign to bring about the Brown decision. After its victory, the organization focused on how to bring about the implementation of the decision in the South in order to effectuate school desegregation. In the later 1950s, the NAACP filed …

Introduction To "Terror In The Heart Of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, And The Meaning Of Race In The Postemancipation South, Hannah Rosen

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

The meaning of race in the antebellum southern United States was anchored in the racial exclusivity of slavery (coded as black) and full citizenship (coded as white as well as male). These traditional definitions of race were radically disrupted after emancipation, when citizenship was granted to all persons born in the United States and suffrage was extended to all men. Hannah Rosen persuasively argues that in this critical moment of Reconstruction, contests over the future meaning of race were often fought on the terrain of gender.

Sexual violence--specifically, white-on-black rape--emerged as a critical arena in postemancipation struggles over African American …