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In the antebellum period Richmond, Virginia newspapers ran advertisements for runaway slaves. Most of the ads concerned individuals absconded from outlying counties, distant regions of the state, or nearby states. These short notices have been used frequently to describe and discuss runaways and the link between flight and freedom in Virginia. In contrast to the brief newspaper entries the Daybook of the Richmond Police Guard, 1834--1844 provides names and detailed descriptions of nine hundred-thirty-five runaways all of whom lived in the city and were reported within the city precincts during one ten year period. The Daybook is a hand written record consisting of entries made by the Watchmen on duty each day. its pages are "A Memorandum of Robberies and Runaways" for the whole city and in addition to fugitive slaves list lost and stolen clothing, food, textiles, bank notes, fires and murder. Chapter 1 discusses the historiography of runaway slaves and the ways that the Daybook data allows a close examination of African American resistance in an urban setting. Chapter 2 explores the geography and look of the city of Richmond in the 1830s and early 40s. Chapter 3 closely examines the fugitives themselves, and Chapter 4 explores the context of laws and restrictions under which the black population, slave and free, lived. Chapter 5 describes the varied strategies the enslaved population, bound in kinship and friendship to the free black population, used to successfully hide within the city and segues into the transcribed complete text of the Daybook of the Richmond Police Guard. 1834--1844.

Despite his participation in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, eventually became royal governor of New York (1770-1771), Virginia (17711783), and the Bahama Islands (1787-1796). His life in the British Empire exposed him to an extraordinary range of political experience, including border disputes, land speculation, frontier warfare and diplomacy, sexual scandal, slave emancipation, naval combat, loyalist advocacy, Amerindian slavery, and trans-imperial filibusters, to say nothing of his proximity to the Haitian Revolution or his role in the defense of the British West Indies during the French Revolutionary Wars. Quick to break with convention on behalf of the system that ensured his privilege, Dunmore was an usually transgressive imperialist whose career can be used to explore the boundaries of what was possible in the political cultures of the Anglo-Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century.;Remarkably, Lord Dunmore has not been the subject of a book-length study in more than seventy years. With a few exceptions (the work of African American historians notable among them), modern scholars have dismissed him as a greedy incompetent. While challenging this characterization, the dissertation makes several arguments about the weakness of royal authority in pre-Revolutionary New York and Virginia, the prominent and problematic role of the land grant as a mechanism of political consent, the importance of Dunmore's proclamation of emancipation, and the endurance of British ambition in North America after 1783. It seeks to make a methodological contribution as well. By positioning Dunmore as the epicenter of a web of interrelations, one reflected in a variety of historical texts and involving people at all levels of the imperial social structure, the dissertation suffuses a host of elements and actors within a single biographical narrative. This integrated approach can serve to counter the excessive compartmentalization that has marked some academic history in recent decades.

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Women on Wednesdays presentation.

This dissertation is a cultural history of the making of a Mozambican middle class in the capital city of Maputo. It focuses on multigenerational debates, anxieties, and struggles among men and women over the meanings of, and aspirations for, economic and social inclusion in the modern world. The study spans the colonial-capitalist, socialist, and post-socialist eras in Mozambique’s modern history, and is set in the young city that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as the Portuguese colonial capital of Lourenço Marques, later renamed Maputo in 1976 after independence. The rise of urban African middle classes as the key to modernizing Africa has come to the fore in recent scholarly and popular analyses of the continent’s economic and political future. Debates over how to define the middle class have revitalized the relevance of class analysis for understanding inequality and social change in urban Africa. However, little work has thoroughly examined the central role of changing gender relations in processes of middle-class formation. This dissertation begins to remedy this gap by examining the gendered relationship between class and culture that yields new insights into the lives and experiences that have occupied spaces in between wealth and poverty in an African city. Based on interviews, archival collections, newspapers and other print sources, I argue that Mozambican middle-class culture is the product of stitching together old and new ideas about what it means to live a better life, fueled by gendered debates over the role of “tradition,” and the position of women, in modern urban society. Focusing on debates surrounding assimilation, marriage, public life, and managing the home, I contend that men and women have negotiated, shifted, and redefined possibilities for upward social mobility in pursuit of education, meaningful work, loving relationships, and desires for greater comforts of urban life. The process of middle-class formation in Maputo has reflected shared aspirations among upwardly mobile women and men as stakeholders in colonial and postcolonial promises of “progress” and “development,” and been conditioned by periods of possibility and constraint under Portuguese colonial-capitalist, postcolonial socialist, and post-socialist Frelimo state rule. Ultimately, my research shows that the middle class has been unified over time by ambitions to modernize Mozambique, but fractured by deeply gendered debates over how to modernize.

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