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The following analysis of antislavery poetry evidences the shared language of abolition that incorporated the societal dynamics of law, gender, and race through shared themes of family, the assumed expectation of freedom, and legal references. This thesis focuses upon four women antislavery poets and analyzes their poems and their individual experiences with their sociohistorical contexts. The poems of Hannah More, Ann Yearsley, Phillis Wheatley, and Sarah Forten show this shared transatlantic language of abolition.

This thesis has investigated slave songs in order to determine how they related to the life of the slave. Songs were examined for examples of discontent with slavery. Slave biographies were read to determine the meaning that the slaves themselves attached to their songs.The songs were classified according to topics. Religious songs were discussed under spirituals and sorrow songs. Slave seculars were divided into three categories -seculars, work songs, and songs of violent resistance. Freedom songs were discussed separately. Examples of each type of song are presented. The contents of the songs are examined for what they reveal about the condition of the slave and the slave's attitudes toward slavery. Slave biographies are used to verify the conclusions gained from the songs.

This thesis explores representations of Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast within the discipline of Anthropology, with particular attention given to Hul’qumi’num’ speaking nations on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands of British Columbia. Through a critical engagement with ethnography, linguistic, archival and oral history sources, I offer a critique of the harmful concepts of war and slave as mistranslations from Hul’qumi’num’ into English. The consequences of this mistranslation and lack of understanding permeate our social, cultural and political lives and relationships with settler society. By looking at the original Hul’qumi’num’ words, our laws, and our stories about inter-village relations, I will provide a healthy alternative understanding to the apocryphal representations of Coast Salish nations in Anthropology. I will conclude this discussion with revival of traditional Hul’qumi’num’ laws and practices of relationality and coexistence in marriage and exchanges. / Graduate / 0326 / 0740 / 0290 / flowersrachel@gmail.com

This thesis is concerned with social aspects of early Christianity. It considers the social origins and careers of the early Christians, as far as they can be traced in the scanty and fragmented evidence. The spread of Christianity is examined in relation to the prevailing social and economic conditions of the Roman world in the first centuries AD, The Christian attitudes to slavery and the penetration of Christianity into the countryside are discussed at some length. The evidence considered does not justify the traditional views which regard early Christianity as a religion of the underprivileged and the oppressed. Except for the imperial slaves and a small number of favourites of Christian masters, slaves, as far as it can be established, were not eager to embrace the new relegion, while in-the countyside, Christianity seems to have found its first adherants among the landowning and Hellenized peasants. In the cities, besides bankers, artisans and prosperous freedmen, Christianity attracted, as it is illustrated, many people of leisure, education and wealth. Overall, it is maintained, that although in principle Christianity drew its members from all social classes and groups, professing egalitarian doctrines, it was in effect more successful with the middle classes of the cities, which it organized under the leadership of wealthy and highly educated church officials. Millennial and prophetic tendencies, with strong social implications, such as were manifest among the first generation of Christians, survived or were revived only as marginal phenomena, especially in the countryside. Mainstream Christianity advocated and encouraged strict observance of the existing social order.

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<p>This dissertation examines the changing concepts and experiences of slavery and freedom in South Carolina from its founding in 1670 through 1747, a period during which the legal status of "slave" became solidified in law. During the course of South Carolina's first eight decades of settlement, the legal statuses of "slave" and "free" evolved as the colony's slaveholders responded to both local and imperial contexts. Slaves and slaveholders engaged in a slow process of defining and refining the contours of both slavery and freedom in law. The dissertation explores how this evolution occurred by focusing on three topics: constant conflict that afflicted the colony, free white colonists' reliance on the loyalty of slaves, and South Carolina's law and legal system. </p><p>Through its use of social and legal history, as well as close reading, the dissertation shows that South Carolina's legal and military contexts gave unplanned meaning to slaves' activities, and that this had the effect of permitting slaves to shape slavery and freedom's development in practice and in law. In various ways, the actions of slaves forced slaveholders to delineate what they considered appropriate life and work conditions, as well as forms of justice, for both slaves and free people. As such, slavery as an institution helped give form to freedom. Drawing on legal records, newspapers, pamphlets, and records of the colonial elite, the dissertation argues that slaves' actions--nonviolent as well as violent-- served as a driving force behind the legal trajectory of slavery and freedom in South Carolina. These processes and contexts change our understanding of colonial America. They reveal that slaves influenced the legal regulation of slavery and that slavery and the enslaved population played a critical role in defining freedom, a central tenet of American democracy. Contrary to modern assumptions about freedom and even the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, this dissertation shows how slavery actually constrained freedom.</p> / Dissertation

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Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Also available in print.