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 domestic areas across dynamic rural plantation neighborhoods. Such neighborhoods came to comprise 1) Sets of interrelated places common across virtually all large Chesapeake plantations, and 2) Sets of social relationships that transcended plantation borders, becoming invested and embedded in local places over time.;This work examines the ways in which structures of community became embedded in a variety of familiar places across the Quarterpath neighborhood as enslaved persons appropriated plantation landscapes through habitual practices and meaningful bodily orientations. It expands the frame of reference beyond the core domestic homesites to embrace the other grounds and places where residents spent much of their time, places in which relationships were built with neighbors performing common tasks on familiar grounds. It offers new insights to archaeological analyses concerning African American domestic sites throughout the African Atlantic diaspora, envisioning home grounds as dynamic social configurations embedded within mosaics of local places that came to embody community, family, and roots. It is an archaeology of a community in transition but it is also an archaeology of landscapes. It adopts a methodologically innovative approach intended to address often overlooked interpretive contexts and horizons of meaning, exploring mechanisms of community development and associated processes of place-making in a pre- and post-Emancipation African American community.

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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Abstract This thesis analyzes lynching and segregation in the American South between the years 1877 and 1951. It argues that these crimes of physical and social violence constitute genocide against black Americans, according to the definitions of genocide proposed by Raphael Lemkin and then the later legal definition adopted by the United Nations. American law and prevailing white American social beliefs sanctioned these crimes. Lynching and segregation were used as tools of persecution intended to keep black people in their designated places in a racial hierarchy in the United States at this time period. These crimes were two of many coordinated actions designed to physically and mentally harm a group of people defined and targeted on grounds of race. These actions of mentally and physically harming members of the group do constitute genocide under both Lemkin's original concept of genocide and the United Nations' legal genocide definition. Studies of the black experience, although starting to gain some research popularity, are virtually absent from genocide historiography. This thesis aims to fill part of that void and contribute to the emerging studies of one of America's "hidden genocides."* * "Hidden genocides" is a term that Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson have used to describe intentional destruction of groups in human history (genocide) that are often denied, dismissed or neglected in popular and scholarly discussions about genocide. [Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson. Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory. New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 2014).

HIV/AIDS became a significant concern in the United States (U.S.) during the 1980s and in recent years has increased the most among people living in underserved urban areas, particularly impacting Black women ages 24-35. Guided by the social learning theory, this phenomenological study explored the lived experiences and behaviors of Black women in the south in order to understand their sexual health decisions and how those decisions impact the spread of HIV/AIDS among this group. The central research question focused on understanding the sexual decision making of Black women in Georgia, from the perspective of the client and provider. Convenience sampling was used to recruit 21 participants at 2 HIV testing facilities. Interview data were collected from 9 clients, consisting of Black women ages 24-35, and 12 providers, consisting of HIV testing coordinators and administrators. Data were subjected to an inductive coding procedure and were then organized around themes. Findings suggest that clients perceived a lack of education and limited access to healthcare, due to socioeconomic status and rising medical costs, as contributing factors to the sexual decisions of Black women. Providers differed in suggesting that community distrust and lack of provider empathy and awareness were the primary factors due to broken relationships between provider and client. By understanding the sexual decision making of Black women in Georgia, this research can foster social change by identifying and creating educational programs heavily focused on the delivery of positive sexual health messages aimed at reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS among this group.

The problem addressed in this thesis is cultivating an answer to the question: what creates or comprises the sum total of my Blackness as a modern American woman living in our current political climate? I primarily use a read/call and response methodology, responding to both lived and hypothetical experiences that explore or demonstrate the ways that identity, race, gender, sexuality, regionality, religion, and the historical thumbprint intersect. The results are this collection of poems that is at times mythological, at times irreverent, both abstract and formal as it seeks to fit these pieces into a singular mosaic. The conclusion drawn at the end of this thesis is that Black women's lives and stories have intrinsic value, interpretation, and are deserving of further exploration in both bibliotheraphy, mainstream, and academic writing.