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 legal persecution.;A majority of Charles' Corner residents made their living as self-employed farmers and oysterers, work which provided them with a significant level of economic stability and autonomy. The neighborhood continued to flourish until the United States government commandeered the property in 1918 in order to create a naval facility fronting on the York River. Residents were forced to relocate and abandon the property where they had invested decades of physical labor and built substantial social and economic networks. Fortunately, their farmsteads were preserved as archaeological sites which may be eligible for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places as an archaeological district, due to their integrity and historical significance.;Archaeological assessments at four sites located at Charles' Corner provided an opportunity to address research questions and themes critical to the archaeology of African American life in the South after Emancipation. Questions focus on the establishment of socioeconomic networks after the Civil War, episodic displacement, and their role in the community building process. Addressing these questions through the application of an anthropological model for community building emphasizes the role of a diversified economy and construction of networks on a path of self-determination.;This dissertation is a response to critiques about the need to understand transformative periods in African American history. A study of Charles' Corner demonstrates the process of community building for one neighborhood during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the application of data from the archaeological record, historical documents, and oral histories. Furthermore, the residents' compelling narrative demonstrates the ways that rural African Americans contributed to the black freedom movement.

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 that bound the British Atlantic World together through the production and exchange of cotton for finished goods from the United Kingdom and northeast United States.;The war drastically altered the community in different ways. The site lost community members to military service, displacement, and emancipation. Those who remained were forced to find new ways to cope with the deprivation brought about by the collapse of antebellum trade networks that supplied them with food and finished goods. The residents also faced increasingly complex and ambiguous relationships to government and the Confederate Army.;For four years, the College of William & Mary and the Arkansas Archeological Survey investigated the archaeology of Dooley's Ferry using multiple excavation and remote sensing techniques. The results characterized the distribution of historic residences at the site, established their temporal affiliations, and allowed archaeologists to draw start to understand how we may study the home front archaeology and add substantially to an under-studied aspect of Arkansas's past.

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Thesis (M. A. (History)) --University of the North, 2000 / Refer to document

Informal relations between American merchant traders and the Sultanate of Oman in the port of Zanzibar began with the landing of the first American merchants about 1828. At the same approximate time, Sultan Said bin Sultan moved his official residence from Muscat, Oman, to Zanzibar, underlining the importance of Zanzibar to the administration of his territories on the East African coast. Relations were formalized by the Treaty of 1833 between the United States and Oman, and the U.S. established a consular mission in Zanzibar in 1837 and in Muscat in 1838. The growth of the Omani Empire under Sultan Said expanded and prospered during the period examined in the present research (1828-1856). Oman's growth and prosperity, resulting primarily from its possession of Zanzibar and ports on the East African coast, roughly parallels the expansion and prosperity of the Zanzibar trade to American merchant traders. After Said's death, the Omani Empire was divided in a bitter succession battle (abetted by the British, who enjoyed military dominance in the region), and this point marked the beginning of the decline of the Oman as a regional economic and political power. The present study surveys these two parallel developments over the critical 28-year reign of Sultan Said. The survey finds that, as with much economic development in the "third world" in the nineteenth century, Oman's enormous growth and prosperity during this period was directly linked to the growth and prosperity of commercial interests of a "developed" Western nation (in Oman's case, the United States). The study found that political developments between the two countries followed, and were informed and directed by, commercial developments. America's first three consuls to the Sultanate of Oman in Zanzibar were New England merchant traders more focused on their own commercial interests than on political concerns. That both parties (American traders and the Omani government) ultimately prospered is testimony to the complementary nature of their respective economic goals and foreign policy objectives.

Introduction Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel? An' Why Not Every Man: Black Theodicy in the Antebellum United States and the Problem of the Demonic God is an ambitious attempt to construct a coherent narrative that spans many centuries and connect numerous historical persons and figures in recent scholarship. I set out to understand how an enslaved person could have faith in the goodness of god despite their oppressed condition. I learned that most enslaved Africans first encountered Christianity when they became the “property” of Christians. Then, in a revolutionarily creative move, the Black community re-signified Christianity from a religious system synonymous with oppression to a theology of liberation. The Black community claimed they knew the real Christ, embodied by Jesus, the suffering servant. They discovered an intimate spiritual connection with the Children of Israel, delivered from slavery by the grace of God. Black people of the Christian faith created thousands of Spirituals lamenting their suffering and celebrating the promise of a liberated future on Earth and in God's heaven. Not everyone accepted Christianity, however. Many enslaved or otherwise oppressed people found much to be cynical of in those who claimed to be Godly; corruption, hypocrisy, violence, inhumanity. These skeptical voices speak to us through Slave Narratives and records of preachers who documented a certain humanistic doubt in the antebellum Black community. The lyrics of the Seculars, non-theistic music produced at the same time as the Spirituals, express humor and irony in reaction to the absurd nature of life as experienced by a Black person during slavery. I went on to explore contemporary critiques of the emancipative potential of theodicy, ending up mostly won over

Situated within the fields of diplomatic history and comparative genocide studies, this thesis examines the German colonial period from the standpoint of German-British relations before, during and after the Second Boer War in British South Africa (1899-1902) and the Herero and Nama War in German South West Africa (present-day Namibia, 1904-1908). I contend that German and British diplomatic efforts at cordiality functioned as a means of tacitly condoning each power’s humanitarian abuses—or at least “letting them slide”—for the sake of stability both on the European Continent and within the colonies. Despite activism against reported maltreatment and violence—even among citizens of “the perpetrating power” and among those of “the observing power”­—neither the German nor the British government was willing to chastise the other openly, for fear of alienating a key ally. Only with the advent of the First World War, when the former allies became enemies, did an explosion of criticism of each other’s maltreatment of their colonial subjects erupt. In the wake of German defeat, the British victors reaped the spoils of war—including the ability to shape perceptions of what had happened nearly two decades before in the African colonies—and succeeded in expropriating the German overseas territories in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. From this narrative the following conclusion emerges: German and British official responses to humanitarian concerns in the colonies were dictated not by morality or compassion but rather by realpolitik expediency. And, as often in history, the one-sided narrative that emerged from this rather hypocritical series of events continues to skew perceptions of both British and German colonialism today. Thus, as a whole, this thesis poses broad theoretical questions regarding the politicization of morality and the social construction of genocide classifications, as well as the extent to which changing perceptions of violent conflicts have played a role in how the international community has categorized these conflicts through legal means in the wake of the Holocaust.