This thesis focuses on the domestic use of plant-based medicines within Early Modern English and Colonial American households, and establishes the defining framework of a domestic botanical culture. It reconstructs the relationship between domestic, popular, and learned medical cultures to reveal the breadth of that practice, demonstrating the unique characteristics of the domestic culture which are underpinned by a shared canon of herbs and a high degree of flexible adaptability by individual practitioners. The botanicals (medicinal plants and the remedies made from them) are themselves analysed through the genres of household receipt book manuscripts, private letters, and journals, as well as almanacs, vernacular medical books, travel writing and settler texts in order to explore more fully and expand our understanding of the domestic culture within a broad social setting. Oral, scribal, and print networks are reconstructed in order to demonstrate that domestic medical practitioners shared a distinctive and influential medical construct, commonly portrayed by current scholarship as a mere reflection of popular and learned practices. Close engagement with both Early Modern English and Colonial women’s receipt books in particular reveals a commonality of practice based upon a shared materia medica which was sensitive and responsive to individual adaptation. Old and new world herbs are examined as a means of providing ingress into this shared and communal domestic practice, as well as to highlight the prevalence and importance of household individualization. The clear commonality of plants in trans-Atlantic domestic use demonstrates a continuous, shared, inherited practice which ends only with eighteenth-century Colonial inclusion of indigenous plants not found in the shared canon. Contemporary views of Early Modern and Colonial domestic medical practice are explored in order to argue that far from simply reflecting learned medical thinking and practice, domestic knowledge and use of botanical medicines was uniquely practical, communal, and flexible in its administration and expression.

Past histories have studied the disruptive antiproprietary riots that caused great disorder in colonial New Jersey. This study contextualizes this well-known history alongside other violent events of the Mid-Atlantic region that contributed to eighteenth century antagonisms in East Jersey, such as intercolonial rivalry for authority between administrators of New York and New Jersey and impending war between colonial and Lenape populations. It also looks to earlier periods of East Jersey history to trace the roots of eighteenth century conflicts. Legal confusions resulting from the early proprietary grants, Dutch reconquest, and pre-proprietary settlement created conditions that opponents later challenged. By revealing the tremendously tense and uncertain political, social, and economic circumstances of East Jersey’s early proprietary years, the sense of competition and desperation for stability can be better understood. This master’s thesis argues that early social and legal issues introduced by the early proprietary years persisted beyond the proprietary period and were influential preconditions for later tensions among Euro-American and Native peoples. This study argues that East Jersey’s unique and changing proprietary system created confusion and increasingly divided interests among the people of the Mid-Atlantic. As each of these conflicts remained unresolved within colonial and Native societies for nearly a century, they further frustrated social relations within East Jersey, often leading to violence among local Euro-American and Native groups. I examine this history with expanded temporal analysis, demonstrating that conflicts created by the early proprietary foundations of East Jersey, grew in the late proprietary period and persisted beyond the proprietary years.

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Rethinking Our Outlines/ Redrawing Our Maps: Representing African Agency in the Antebellum South 1783-1829 The lenses through which our common perceptions of African/Black agency in the antebellum period are viewed, synthetic textbooks and maps, rarely reveal the tremendous number of liberating acts that characterized the movements of Black people in the South from 1783 to 1829. During the American Revolution, 80,000 to 100,000 such enslaved Africans threw off their yokes and escaped their bondage. Subsequently, large numbers embarked on British ships as part of the Loyalist exodus from the United States, while others fled to the deep South, to Native lands, to the North, or held their ground right where they were, attempting, as maroons, to establish themselves and survive as free persons. While recent historical scholarship has identified many of the primary sources and themes that characterize such massive levels of proactivity, few have tried to present them as a synthetic whole. This applies to maps used to illustrate the African American history of those regions and times as well. Illustrating these movements defines the scope of this scholarly work entitled Rethinking Our Outlines/ Redrawing Our Maps: Representing African Agency in the Antebellum South 1783-1829. This work also critically looks at several contemporary maps of this period published in authoritative atlases or textbooks and subsequently creates three original maps to represent the proactive movements and relationships of Africans during this period. / African American Studies

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