African Americans living in the small community of Parting Ways, near Plymouth, Massachusetts, realized their newly achieved independence through the construction of homeplace using the material culture of respectability and socioeconomic integration into the community. I expand upon a previous study of this community, which identified evidence that the former slaves retained African cultural traditions, to analyze material evidence of consumption and subsistence. This study reveals that African Americans living at Parting Ways crafted identities that emphasized independence, refinement, and respectability despite living in a society that stereotyped African Americans as dependent members incapable of full social participation. The archaeological data come from five seasons of excavation, 1975-1978 and 1989, on the properties of two African-American families who lived at Parting Ways. I situate the artifacts together with deed, probate, court, town, and census records to construct a detailed historical context in which to interpret the material practice of daily life, identity creation, and community formation. Paternalism and dependence, features of slavery in New England, continued after emancipation and were seen at Parting Ways through the actions of town leaders who permitted the families to build houses on public lands and also assumed legal and financial guardianship of the families. Within their homes, however, the families participated in the material culture of respectability through the rituals of tea drinking, refined dining, formal clothing, and the use of orthodox medicines. The records reveal that they also participated actively in the town's economic life by exchanging their manual labor for agriculture products like cattle heads and feet. Through their household goods, their customs, and their labor, these families embodied respectability, integrated themselves into the community, and constructed a homeplace--a place of refuge, family building, and identity formation. At Parting Ways, African-Americans worked to negate the implications of their continued dependence on town leaders by developing individual personas that espoused the values of independence, freedom, refinement, and family unity - and in so doing defined their own participation in Plymouth, and American, society.

This presentation explores the role the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (commonly referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau) played in western North Carolina’s reconstruction. It may seem ironic that an agency tasked with aiding the adjustment from slavery to free labor was in the southern mountains, but the irony dissipates in light of the evidence. The Conservative Party’s resumption of local control in 1865 led white Unionists to embrace the Republican Party and black political cooperation two years later, a move that would have been impossible without the Freedmen’s Bureau. Its agents represented the most tangible source of federal power in the mountain counties, and as such helped build relationships between black and white mountaineers that allowed the Republicans to sweep the pivotal local and state elections of 1868.

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This paper examines the way that history and the archive interact with an examination of the civil rights movement in Philadelphia in the 1960s. Lack of accessibility may detrimentally affect historians' analyses. This paper is an assessment of what both writers and archivists can do to help diminish oversights. Included is an investigation of the short-lived Black Coalition and the way the organization is represented in scholarship. How do the representations differ from the story the primary sources tell? Also examined is the relationship between Cecil B. Moore and Martin Luther King, Jr. What primary sources exist that illuminate their friendship? How has their friendship been portrayed in secondary works? The paper outlines the discovery of video footage of the two men and how this footage complicates widely-held perceptions of their association. Lastly, this thesis offers remedies to allow for greater accessibility of primary source documents, most notably the role of digitization within the archive. Included in these suggestions are analyses of existing digital initiatives and suggestions for future projects. Digitization initiatives may be the means by which to bridge the gap currently facing archivists and historians today. / History

The value of Black students knowing about their history has been well-established within the scholarly literature on the teaching and learning of African American history. There is a paucity of empirical studies, however, that examine how exposure to this knowledge informs students’ historical and contemporary understandings. Framed by the theory of collective memory, the purpose of this study was to investigate how two teachers’ contrasting representations of African American history shaped student’ understanding of the Black past and its relationship to the experiences of Black Americans today. To examine this, I conducted an ethnographic study at two school sites that each required students to complete a year-long course on African American history. The participants in this study were two groups of Black high school students and their respective African American history teacher. Analysis of data derived from classroom observations, student and teacher interviews and curricular artifacts (e.g., reading materials, handouts, assessments and writing samples) indicate that teachers’ representations of African American history shaped students’ understandings in distinctive ways. This study contributes to the existing literature by examining students’ interpretations of the Black experience in relation to two teachers’ competing narratives on the meaning and significance of African American history. Findings from this study suggest that we must go beyond advocating for inclusion of African American history curricula and work toward ensuring this is being taught in a way that is relevant and meaningful for students. / Urban Education

“‘Freakish Man’: sexual blues, sacred beliefs, and the transformation of Black queer identity, 1870-1959” investigates how queer Black men expressed their gender and sexual identities. It follows how, from the days of Reconstruction to the modern civil rights movement, queer Black men used various aspects of Black culture—particularly the blues, working-class social culture, and charismatic religion—to form identities that departed from dominant Black and white norms. The “freakish man” emerged as queer Black men cultivated legible, subversive gender and sexual identities in sacred and secular spaces of working-class Black culture that prioritized masculine heterosexuality. Though queer Black men were briefly successful in using their status as taboo but enticing social figures to enter the center of Black culture, they were gradually marginalized by the Black community as it moved towards inclusion into mainstream American society.

Federal interference in the battle for states’ rights in Mississippi during the 1950s and 60s birthed a civil rights movement that made the Department of Agriculture its main opposition. Alongside state-sanctioned organizations like the Citizens’ Council and the Sovereignty Commission, the USDA used their resources to deter civil rights groups, black farmers, and black agents alike from protesting against segregationist policies. Mississippi Mud uses agriculture as a lens to illustrate how the USDA’s refusal to denounce Jim Crow, especially after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, led to black farmers and extension agents pursuing legal action against the Cooperative Extension Service, alleging racial discrimination that impacted black farmers and extension agents throughout the state. Because of this, black Mississippians turned their sights to dismantling the state’s dual system of higher education based on de jure—legally recognized and enforced—segregation. In Mississippi’s agricultural history, this dissertation situates its story within a larger narrative of agrisocial reform.

The problem of this study was to ascertain the status of the teaching of Negro history in American history classes in the public high schools of Texas.