In the last twenty years, studies in Afro-American slavery have given special attention to the slave community and culture. They have emphasized the slaves' control over their lives, while glossing over the brutality of the institution of slavery. Slave women have been ignored until very recently, and those few historians who studied their lives have applied the same categories of inquiry used by traditional historians with a male perspective. The topic of interracial sexual relations crystallizes this problem. This issue has been left aside in most scholarly studies and, when mentioned, addressed more often than not from a male perspective. As sexual abuse, it exemplifies the harshness of slavery. The oral slave narratives, often referred to by the same historians, are one of the few primary sources by and on slave women. Yet, historians have not used them adequately in research on slave women, primarily because of inadequate conceptual frameworks. / Master of Arts

As a plantation owner, James K. Polk had economic interests which were bound to that peculiar institution. Consequently, many of his decisions as a politician were influenced by his southern background. Although his partiality toward"southern rights" was evident, he did not let his personal bias interfere with his determination to preserve the nation. Throughout his public career, he maintained that slavery was being exploited as a "political question" to divide the United States. Even though his opponents branded him a "sectionalist" for his position on the issues of Texas annexation, the Mexican War, and slavery in the territories, he still remained a staunch nationalist. This study proves that James K. Polk's "southern convictions" were secondary in importance compared to his concern for the preservation of the Union.

Between 1830 and 1842, the United States coastwise slave trade raised several issues and provoked numerous debates in Congress. The purpose of this study is to determine the role of the coastwise slave trade and its effect upon attitudes toward slavery in Congress during this period. The primary sources used include official government documents, unpublished and published papers, correspondence, diaries, speeches, and memoirs. This study concludes that the issues raised by the coastwise slave trade crisis and debated in Congress between 1830 and 1842 contributed to the decline of southern dominance in national politics and provided abolitionists with a vital motivation of antislavery agitation in the United States Congress.

PhD (English) / Department of English / See the attached abstract below

This thesis examines the symbolism of thirty-five slave songs that existed in the pre-Civil War South in the United States in order to gain a more profound insight into the values of the slaves. The songs chosen were representative of the 300 songs reviewed. The methodology used in the analysis was adapted from Ralph K. White's "Value Analysis: The Nature and Use of the Method." The slave songs provided the slaves with an opportunity to express their feelings on matters they deemed important, often by using Biblical symbols to "mask" the true meanings of their songs from whites. The major values of the slaves as found in their songs were independence, justice, determination, religion, hope, family love, and group unity.

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This dissertation is a study of the Afro-American oral tradition with special reference to the formal aspects of the poetry of spirituals. In the introduction. an attempt has been made to take a look at the value of oral tradition; the interplay between oral and written tradition; the use made of orality in a society that was denied conventional literacy; the concept and the definition of the term, “spiritual". The organization of the rest of the essay is as follows: The sections are divided into four chapters. The first chapter concerns the origins of Afro-American spirituals and the anthropological foundations of the Afro-American oral style (anthropology of gesture). In addition, an attempt has been made to place the Afro-American oral tradition vis-a-vis the African oral tradition. The second chapter deals with key characteristics in the expressive phase of the Afro-American slave community with special reference to the dynamics of language usage. In the third chapter, there is consideration in some detail on the Afro-American oral composer and the transmission of the spirituals in an oral style milieu. The fourth chapter investigates stylized expression and is devoted to analyses of mnemotechnical devices within the spirituals. In the concluding chapter, an attempt has been made to take an overall look at Afro-American sacred poetic achievement. I must point out that it is not my intention to embark on any technical analysis of the music form and configuration of the spirituals - that is beyond the scope of this essay. In including "representative" samples of spirituals (and portions of spirituals), I do not intend them to be seen as "islands unto themselves" but rather, each spiritual must be seen as part of the whole corpus of Afro-American sacred oral composition. The question may arise: "Why a study of the Afro-American spirituals when there is so much to be studied on the oral traditions of Southern Africa? My response would be that the spirituals fascinate me for I see in them their widespread influence on the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements in South Africa. The Gospel song, so beloved of Pentecostal congregations, is an heir to the Spiritual. An enquiry on the sacred music and performance styles (improvisation, extemporization, dance, handclapping, shouts, etc.) of Pentecostalism will reveal that much of the Afro-American oral style still exists within the fellowship of Black and, venture to say, all Pentecostal churches in South Africa with obvious nuances that vary from denomination to denomination. But, the spirited and lively sacred music is encouraged and preserved. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1991.

This thesis argues that the significance of pre-Civil War southern opposition to slavery has been largely marginalized and mischaracterized by previous historiography. By contextualizing southern antislavery activism as but a single wing within a broader reformist movement, historians can move beyond simplistic interpretations of these antislavery advocates as fool-hardy and tangential "losers." While opposition to slavery constituted a key goal for these reformers, it was not their only aspiration, and they secured considerable success in other aspects of reform. Nineteenth-century Russians, simultaneously struggling with their own system of bonded labor, offer excellent counterpoints to reorient the role of antebellum southern reformers. Through their shared commitment to reforming liberalism, a preference for gradualism as the vehicle of change, and a shared intellectual framework based upon new theories of political economy, the Russian and southerners' histories highlight a transatlantic intellectual community in which southern reformers were full members. Adapting multiple theories from this transnational exchange of ideas, southern reformers were remarkably liminal figures useful for contemporary scholarly exploration into the nineteenth-century culture of reform. Ultimately, it was this liminality coupled with the inegalitarian nature of their movement that ensured that the southern antislavery movement would fail to secure a gradual demise to slavery. / Master of Arts

Early antebellum defenders of slavery acknowledged that slavery created problems for southern society. They contended, however, that slave society was better and more natural than other forms of social organization. Thomas R. Dew, William Harper, and James Henry Hammond each expressed a social philosophy in which slavery had a crucial role in preserving social order. They argued from the basis of social organicism, the idea that society should have an elite that controlled the masses. For all three men, slavery represented a system of order that helped balance the dangers of democracy. Significantly, however, all three men recognized that the slave system was not perfect, and despite their defense of slavery, argued that it was a human institution and therefore corruptible.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Johannesburg, 2017 / Set within a revisionist and feminist context, this thesis seeks to draw parallels in the autobiographical texts of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) written by an African American ex-enslaved and Schizophrene (2011) penned by Bhanu Kapil, a British born Asian American, a descendant of a generation that live (d) through/with ‘what happened in a particular country on a particular day in August 14th 1947’ (Quaid). These literary representations will constitute the corpus of this research paper as it attempts to examine how these autobiographies draw attention to and break the notion of prevailing dominant geographies of oppression. In both texts, the authors juxtapose appropriation and hegemony with an alternative literary geographic narrative that seeks to recuperate the liminal (black) body and psyche. This research paper will seek to explore the multiple and interrelated ways in which both authors employ certain strategic mechanisms to re-appropriate tools of social power, thus exposing the frailties of their respective oppressive histories by disrupting their continued, albeit imagined stronghold on them. In employing their autobiographies as anthropological arsenals, these authors seem to demonstrate the manner in which history has attempted through its numerous sites of oppression not only to construct black victims and mere black bodies but also to un-write and evacuate its untidiness. These autobiographies will be employed to reconstruct and re-imagine the authors but symbolically the collective black body as more than objects but rather as humans with subjectivities and self-assertion. The paper further seeks to understand how these autobiographies tend to a vicious past of slavery and partition and how they translate these memories, remembering the depth of their experiences whilst also being haunted by their contemporary echoes. An accent will be given to the ambivalence, perversions and anxieties of these autobiographies. / XL2018