All across the world, people struggle daily to create and enhance their sense of identity. Such struggles are waged in many ways, including through the process of rediscovering and reinterpreting history. Mt. Sinai Baptist Church, an African American congregation in a suburb of Atlanta, is engaged in a search for its church cemetery, lost when the land was sold to the military during the nation’s mobilization for World War II. The church’s efforts are analyzed in the context of identity creation -- a search for links to a mythic and self-sufficient past. Archaeological methods reveal compelling evidence that the cemetery lies in a location previously unknown to the community. Through a collaborative process, the church community and the investigator identify the possible cemetery location and develop plans to institute reforms that are sustainable and agreeable to all parties.

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.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 254-262). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 473-509). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2001. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 213-223).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Notre Dame, 2003. / Thesis directed by Antonette Irving for the Department of English. "September 2003." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 36-37).

While scholars have carefully and rightly noted the profound influence that More’s abolitionist writings had on both the abolition movement and the developing women’s rights movement, they omit what is an essential examination of her poetics, particularly the self-conscious poetic form that she develops in her poem, “Slavery, A Poem” (1788). In conjunction with noting the rhetorical and textual devices that More implements in “Slavery” to illustrate the art of self-conscious poetics, this paper explores these same devices in a later satirical essay of More’s entitled Hints towards forming a Bill for the Abolition of the White Female Slave Trade, in the Cities of London and Westminster (1804), arguing that, by comparing the rhetorical points of overlap in these two pieces, we can identify that More’s contribution to her contemporary literary culture transcended mere female participation and publication. More importantly, through “Slavery” and Hints, More develops a unique rhetoric – a poetics of control – with which to discuss the physical constraints of slavery, the trope of the individual versus the collective, and the essential poetic and rhetorical practice of blending authorial creativity with conventional constraint. / text

Government / Controversies regarding the slavery and the Constitution often turn on investigation of original intent: Is the Constitution an antislavery or proslavery document? The arguments of West, Storing, Graber, and Finkelman show that scholarly opinion is greatly divided on this issue. This study, however, will present the case that the status of the document need not be resolved in order to determine whether the Constitution inaugurated a proslavery or antislavery project. Instead of attempting to determine the intent of the founders or to derive constitutional principles directly from their document a different task will be undertaken here. This paper will examine the “political logic” of the Constitution, both in terms of specific clauses and the structure of the whole. This study shows that the political logic of the Constitution is hostile to abolitionist paths of national, political development. Instead of setting in motion a project that places the institution of slavery on the road to elimination, the Constitution’s concessions to slavery provided a permanent privileging of slaveholding interests in the further development of the polity. / text

Revisiting the American Gothic via Julia Kristeva's theory of "the abject" demonstrates how Gothic strategies expose the historical contradictions of race in works by Mark Twain, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Toni Morrison. As theorized by Kristeva in Powers of Horror, the archaic process in which the subject attempts to constitute itself as homogeneous by casting off or "abjecting" all that cannot be assimilated to the self-same necessarily opens the way to repeated returns of the abject(ed) and the "horror" it provokes. Because the Gothic enacts the return of the abject, it was itself abjected from the literary canon until recently. In American literature, especially since Reconstruction, Gothic horror subverts and reverses the process through which the new subject-nation mythologized itself as blameless by abjecting the African presence and the nightmarish history of slavery. Twain's The Tragedy of Puddn'head Wilson, Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, and Morrison's The Bluest Ey e and Beloved all deploy Gothic strategies to give voice to the unspeakable experiences associated with slavery and contest the rationalist discourses that enforce and legitimate racism. Twain's narrative celebrates the subversive Gothic storytelling of the slave Roxana but ultimately betrays the author's ambivalence toward racial identity. Chesnutt's use of the Gothic more decisively reverses racist abjection through the encounter between the ex-slave Julius, with his conjure tales, and the white Yankee investor John, who tries to understand Julius but cannot. In the twentieth century Gothic narratives by black writers focus on internalized racism. In Morrison's The Bluest Eye Claudia's abject-writing exposes the deadly effects of mainstream mythology and internalized abjection in Pecola's destruction. In Beloved Morrison uses the Gothic to create an alternative world and suggest a means of healing the effects of slavery through the ghostly figure of Beloved. These narratives exemplif y the increasing power of Gothic to create an alternative perspective on the racist history and culture of America.