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Many contemporary classical scholars, such as Benjamin Isaac and Denise McCoskey, frame the ancient Athenian attitudes toward their slaves as akin to or the same as White American racism. In this thesis, I argue that Athenian literary representations of slaves, in comparative perspective, are actually only superficially similar to those constructed in White American literature. I survey ancient Greek comedy and tragedy’s representations of slaves and demonstrate that the genres’ slave stereotypes recognise that slaves share with citizens a common humanity. I survey White American literature from the antebellum and Jim Crow eras, and I establish that its stereotyping of Black slaves and freedmen dehumanises them through the construction of racial difference. I argue that this crucial difference between Athenian and White American representations of slaves indicates that the Athenian city-state’s social system did not feature racism as it is articulated by critical race theorists Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Joe Feagin. / Graduate / 0294 / 0591 / 0579 / gbutler@uvic.ca

Thesis advisor: Marc Landy / The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the Civil War was indeed brought about because of the presence of slavery in this country. It is this paper's thesis that not only did slavery provide a demonstrable economic incentive for the South to secede from the Union but also provided a social impetus as well. Slavery created a society in the South that favored the economic independence of states rather than economic integration not just because of a love for state's rights but also because any form of economic integration would diminish returns from the sizeable investment they, slave-owners, had made in slavery. Furthermore, slavery created a type of siege mentality in the South. This mentality, while helpful in muting the class tensions between the slave holding elites and poor whites, created a narrow identity amongst southerners that would have made secession that much easier. This paper will look at how the concepts of social distance and social capital helped make secession a likely outcome for the southern states. With these two factors in play, the cost of leaving the Union, of re-coordinating a new constitutional arrangement, was less costly than it might have been if not for slavery. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

Thesis advisor: Cynthia Lynn Lyerly / My dissertation examines the process of cultural adaption and change. Nineteenth-century Lutherans in many ways were cultural outsiders and a religious minority. They were confessional in a land of evangelicals. A fundamental divide between Lutherans and their evangelical neighbors was that Lutherans did not believe that an emotionally charged conversion experience was necessary in order to obtain salvation. Whereas evangelicals believed individuals had to decide to accepted Jesus as their personal lord and savior in order to receive salvation and grace, Lutherans believed that God made the decisions to save individuals, and they received God's grace and salvation as a totally free and unmerited gift. Lutherans, therefore, had to decide how to respond to the revival movement that swept across the antebellum south. While Lutheran theological tradition focused on a mystical and yet intellectual relationship with God obtained by studying the Bible, the popularity of revivals forced Lutherans to negotiate their religious differences with their evangelical neighbors. Moreover, since Lutherans placed such value on an intellectual relationship with God, they emphasized the importance of education even when those around them were hostile to education. Unlike evangelicals, Lutherans did not have church courts, but they were still very interested in public morality. My dissertation examines how they negotiated their response to the moral dilemmas of their day such as drinking, dancing and dueling, which were important components of honor culture. Lutherans also found themselves separated from their evangelical neighbors due to the fact that they spoke German while the evangelicals spoke English. For many Lutherans the German language and Lutheranism were inseparable. This language barrier not only separated Lutherans from their neighbors but also acted as a wedge between the older Lutheran generations who spoke German and the younger generations that grew up speaking English. Lutherans had to decide whether to give up German, the language of Luther, or risk losing the youth. Upon arriving in North Carolina, they were confronted with the issue of slavery. While evangelicals at first rejected slavery and only slowly embraced it, Lutherans appeared to have no moral qualms with the institution. Finally, North Carolina Lutherans were members of a national Lutheran church at a time when national evangelical churches were being torn apart due to sectional tensions. It was only after the country was at war that a schism finally occurred in the national Lutheran church. My dissertation examines how North Carolina Lutherans and Lutherans across the country were able to hold their church together as long as they did and how this division finalized North Carolina Lutherans' southernization. This project begins with the Lutherans' arrival in North Carolina just prior to the Revolutionary War and concludes with the aftermath of the Civil War. The majority of German Lutherans lived in the piedmont region of North Carolina, and this study focuses geographically on this region. As a social history this project explores questions of how German Lutherans eventually transformed from outsiders to proud members of the Confederate nation. "Adapting to Dixie" examines the dynamics of rapid cultural change in which Lutherans struggled to retain a sense of their separateness while still conforming to the region's mores. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

When he began his journal seaman Hugh Calhoun had high hopes for the outward-bound voyage ahead of him. Ship-of-the-Line Ohio was back from the Siege of Veracruz, being prepared for her next mission, and the War was at its height. The cruize, as he called it, did not turn out as eventful as he expected it to be and yet he was nevertheless able to produce a book which bountifully embodies a short but fruitful chapter of maritime literary history. Serio-Comic Journal of a Cruize, On Board of the U. S. Ship Ohio, Commencing from New York June 23d 1847, with its full name, is a shipboard diary kept by an ordinary seaman during the Mexican-American War. The 148-page manuscript volume, located at the archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, is a product of the maturity phase of American sea writing as Calhoun, self-consciously a Jack Tar and an American, was representing a trained, well-read and well-influenced generation of sailor-authors who lived and recorded the final years of America under sail. The past three decades have seen a progressive conceptual expansion of the themes involving the ways in which literate sailors viewed the world they lived in. Scholars of early American literature, maritime history and culture have explored the meanings and information provided in the textual products of seamen. Upon comparison with similar material found at the archives of maritime museums and historical societies, and discussions with leading maritime historians, Serio-Comic Journal proved to be a meaningful source text which, through scholarly treatment, can benefit research in multiple disciplines due to the significance of its production date and the diversity of the topics and literary forms found in it. This edition aims to provide related fields of study with a historically contextualized shipboard document in the light of these latest findings. The transcription of the complete text is presented with glossarial, historiographical and geographical notes, whereas the introductory chapters discuss several key subjects to form a framework for the better evaluation of not only the source text of the edition but the sea journal genre as a whole.

This thesis consists of the two opening chapters of American Odyssey, a nouveau plantation novel that has its roots in two American fiction traditions---the nineteenth-century plantation novel and the twentieth-century neo-slave narrative. It is 1855 and Charles DeCoeur's only motivation to remain Riverwood's owner and master is that his widowed mother and sickly sister rely on the profits of the estate. Charles chafes under the responsibility and physicality of plantation life, unable to reconcile himself to the role of master of a cotton estate in the forgotten heart of East Florida. Then a female Negro, Hellcat, wanders onto the Riverwood estate. Attracted to the woman's unusual appearance and disposition, Charles readily claims her as his property. It is not long before Charles channels his ennui into a renewed interest in Riverwood's workings, a thinly-veiled attempt to hide his growing obsession with the mysterious slave woman. However, tensions are mounting all around Charles. The estate is approaching bankruptcy, the overseer and slaves believe Hellcat has dark intentions, and Charles' mother believes the slave is a bastard child from her husband's scandalous past. But Charles refuses to listen to those around him and continues to let his desires guide his actions, while Hellcat's presence at Riverwood opens new wounds that threaten everyone around her.

"Scenes of Reading: Forgotten Antebellum Readers, Self-Representation, and the Transatlantic Reprint Industry" argues that African-American and white working-class people participated in transatlantic antebellum literary culture in a far more central and sophisticated manner than has been assumed. Employing "scenes" of reading--self-representations of what, where, how, and why African Americans and the white working classes read--as primary texts, this dissertation asserts that these groups, in differing degrees and under distinct circumstances, were able to learn to read, to appropriate reading materials from mainstream literary culture, and, most importantly, to transform their acts of reading into acts of politicized self-representation. Their literary practice was possible because of the transatlantic reprint industry that flourished during the antebellum era resulting from the lack of a copyright agreement between Britain and America. This meant that in both nations, texts from across the Atlantic could be reprinted and sold more cheaply than domestic texts, making novels, poetry, and non-fiction available to wider readerships. Reprinted texts in multiple inexpensive formats were ubiquitous, allowing even marginalized readers to encounter them in the context of everyday life. More importantly, reprinted texts legally belonged to no one, meaning that they could be appropriated by anyone, including black and working-class groups whose political values threatened to undermine accepted social hierarchies. With no permission or payment required for reprinting, reprints were easily grafted into new ideological contexts, meaning that black and working-class newspapers had access to free literary content that they could employ toward counter-hegemonical self-representations. The practices and implications of reprinting enabled free blacks, slaves, and white workers to participate in mainstream literary culture subversively through "underground literacy": set of literary practices that were counter-cultural yet also dependent upon the apparatus of mainstream print culture in order to carry out subversive aims. Reading reprinted texts and assimilating them into the context of their everyday lives, African Americans and the white working classes in America and Britain formed similar strategies for practicing literacy beneath the surface of a transatlantic print culture. This dissertation examines scenes of reading that exemplify these underground reading strategies and represent the literacy of these groups. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / English / PhD; / Dissertation;

On December 20, 1860, South Carolinians voted to abandon the Union and sparked the deadliest war in American history. Led by a proslavery movement that viewed Abraham Lincoln’s place at the helm of the federal government as a real and present danger to the security of the South's system of slavery, southerners—both slaveholders and nonslaveholders—willingly risked civil war by seceding from the United States. Rather than staying within the fold of the Union and awaiting the new president’s conduct regarding slavery in the territories and in the slave states, secessionists took bold action to change their destiny. By acting on their expectations of what the new president would do instead of waiting for his actual policy initiatives, they wagered on the possibility of a different future. This dissertation contends that the southern fear of slave insurrection, which was influenced by the Haitian Revolution, and the belief that northern antislavery forces would use violent uprising to end southern slavery shaped the planter ethos over the arc of the antebellum period, affecting national politics. Furthermore, this project explains why secessionists viewed Abraham Lincoln's support of the Wilmot Proviso as a valid reason for disunion.

While the migration of Abraham Lincoln’s family to the Northwest has often been documented as a significant event of his youth, historians have neglected the powerful repercussions this family decision had on Lincoln’s assessment of the South and the secession crisis in 1860 and 1861. Lincoln’s years living and working in the Northwest from 1831 to 1861 exposed him to the anti–slave system ethos of that region’s southern-born migrants. Sensitive to the restraints they believed the social system of slavery placed upon their own liberties, these former southerners simultaneously despised the slave system, hated African Americans, and sympathized with white slaveholders and nonslaveholders who remained in the South. After building his initial sense of southern society from these migrants, Lincoln spent his years as a U.S. congressman learning the significance of the Northwest Ordinance in creating the free society in which they had thrived. Emphasizing Thomas Jefferson’s role in conceiving the Northwest Ordinance and utilizing statistical evidence to prove the superiority of free soil over slave, Lincoln’s colleagues further expanded Lincoln’s conception of the South. All these influences combined to produce Lincoln’s uniquely northwestern approach to slavery, the South, and the secession crisis. Believing that the self-interest of white nonslaveholding southerners naturally propelled them away from the South and toward free society, Lincoln perceived the slave South as a vastly unequal society controlled by a minority of aristocratic slaveholders who cajoled or chided their nonslaveholding neighbors into accepting a vision of the South’s proslavery, expansionist future. As president-elect, Lincoln therefore overestimated the Unionist sentiment of southerners before and during the secession crisis. He remained convinced that the majority of white nonslaveholders would not support a secessionist movement that he believed countered their own self-interest. With time, and through careful communications with the South, he remained convinced that he could settle secessionist passions and bring southerners to trust him and the Republican Party. This northwestern perception of the South therefore explains, in part, Lincoln’s silence and his refusal to compromise during the secession crisis.

abstract: During the 1850s, Indian policy objectives pursued by the civil and military branches of government in New Mexico would have a lasting impact on future relations between the two cultures. Many later policies originated in this antebellum period, but often receive only a summary analysis by scholars who focus on the more popular post-Civil War period. Debates over proper policies and enforcement would proliferate in the 1850s as military and civil officials vied with one another over their own perceived authority. Many officials pursued viable policies, but did not remain in office long enough to ensure their implementation. Additionally, personal egos and stubbornness often undermined interagency cooperation. An overall cultural misunderstanding regarding Apache tribal structure and the inability to distinguish between subgroups exacerbated the conflict. Anti-Indian sentiments prevailed in the military, which often contradicted the more humanitarian approach advocated by the Indian Department. As a result, a contention for power and prestige emerged on three separate fronts: civil government leaders, military leaders, and within the Apache tribe. This thesis offers a contextualization of events that transpired during the 1870s and 1880s by demonstrating how these three entities contended amongst each other for power, undermining policy objectives in the antebellum era. Americans sought to conquer and control--to exert authority and power--over all components of the western landscape in order that they might realize its full economic potential. The Apaches formed a part of this landscape much the same as lofty mountain ranges, raging rivers, and parched deserts. All of these required conquering before that nineteenth century American dream could be fully imbued in the Southwest, and over the several decades following Kearny's arrival countless individuals streamed westward in torrents intent on accomplishing just that. The Apaches, like all western tribes, thus fell into an unstoppable cycle of conquest driven by an insatiable Anglo-American obsession with exerting control. Just as swarthy lawyers challenged claims to gain legal dominion over western tracts of land; just as engineers constructed dams and sought ways to manipulate streams and rivers; just as the plow tilled millions of acres of raw lands; just as the miner's pick slowly chipped away at formidable peaks; so too did the United States Army subdue the Apaches, all of these being a means towards a common end for the American West. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. History 2011