<p>In my dissertation, "The Kongolese Atlantic: Central African Slavery & Culture from Mayombe to Haiti," I investigate the cultural history of West Central African slavery at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the late eighteenth century. My research focuses on the Loango Coast, a region that has received little scholarly attention despite the fact that it was responsible for roughly half of slave exports from West Central Africa at the time. The goal of my dissertation is to understand how enslaved Kongolese men and women used cultural practices to mediate the experience of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic world. To do so, I follow captives from their point of origin in West Central Africa to the Loango Coast and finally to the French colony of Saint Domingue in order to examine these areas as part of a larger "Kongolese Atlantic" world. </p><p>My dissertation begins by exploring the social and political history of the slave trade in the Loango Coast kingdoms, charting the structural changes that took place as a result of Atlantic trade. Next, I use historical linguistics to investigate the origins of captives sold on the Loango Coast. I find that the majority of captives came broadly from the Kongo zone, specifically from the Mayombe rainforest and Loango Coast kingdoms north of the River Congo. I then use a sociolinguistic methodology to reconstruct the cultural history of those groups in the near-absence of written documents. In the last chapter of the dissertation, I follow enslaved Central Africans from the Loango Coast to Saint Domingue, examining how they used specific and identifiable north coast cultural practices in the context of slavery. I find enslaved Central Africans used north coast spiritual tools such as divination, possession, trance, and power objects to address the material problems of plantation life. Finally, I argue the persistence of these spiritual practices demonstrates a remarkable durability of Kongolese ontology on both sides of the Kongolese Atlantic world.</p><p>My research produces new information about the history of the Loango Coast as well as the colony of Saint Domingue. The north coast origin of captives which I establish using historical linguistics contradicts earlier arguments that slaves traded on the Loango Coast originated from Kingdom of Kongo or from the inland Malebo Pool or Upper River Congo trade. I show inhabitants of the coastal kingdoms and Mayombe rainforest were not mere middlemen in the interior slave trade as previously thought, but were the victims of new mechanisms of enslavement created as a result of the erosion of traditional political institutions due to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The north coast origin of Loango Coast captives has repercussions for the cultural history of the Americas. It means that captives were not "Atlantic Creoles" with prior knowledge of European culture and religion. I argue historians can only understand the meaning of the cultural practices of Africans in the Americas by understanding where Africans came from and what cultural and linguistic tools they brought with them. The use and transmission of Kongolese ritual knowledge and spiritual technologies in Saint Domingue challenges historians of slavery to move beyond the false dichotomy that culture originated in either Africa or on the plantation and forces a fundamental reassessment of the concept of creolization.</p> / Dissertation

Over the course of the nineteenth century, Southerners of color flocked to northern free soil by the droves. Seeking refuge from a slaveholding society intent on subordinating those of African descent, many established new homes in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and places north. Many others, however, carved their own lands of freedom within the slaveholding South. This study explores the free Southerners of color who maintained communities in Kentucky’s borderland, occupying a purgatorial position between freedom and slavery. Maneuvering the anti-black laws and sentiments of their society, the individuals in this study remained rooted in a slaveholding society, despite relative proximity to northern free soil, and made their own freedom in an unfree region. The freedom that they made for themselves was in fact freer than anything the North had to offer. They conscientiously determined that the freedom provided by their own local community and social capital was more valuable than any freedom law could provide elsewhere. In effect, free Kentuckians of color in the Ohio River Valley forged their own free soil from the very land of their bondage.

No description available.

This research presents a comprehensive narrative of the development of slavery in early Indiana history. It chronicles the evolution from a French system of slavery to one influenced by Virginian legal code. In exploring the nature of the practiced slavery and the obstacles to slavery’s implementation, the evidence demonstrates that while Indiana did practice slavery, the state was never at risk of developing a plantation-style slave society. The 1820 Indiana Supreme Court case Polly v. Lasselle, which officially ended any legal form of slavery in the state, exemplifies the evolution of slavery and the constantly changing power relationship between owner and slave. By means of previously unused primary sources, this thesis creates a new account of the court case and places it within the context of Indiana’s slavery history. / Department of History

This dissertation aims at studying underlying cultural conflicts in Corinth and Paul's approach thereto. Firstly, the cultural underlays in the congregation of Corinth are revisited, with special reference to the presence of Greeks, Romans and Jews in the congregation which came into being there. This theme is explored by studying the meaning of culture, the archaeological data, as well as Biblical data and other historical data regarding these cultures and Corinth. Furthermore attention is given to the way in which these three cultures were reflected in Paul's own background. In conclusion Paul's approach to the conflict is delineated in terms of positive and negative renderings of the concept "becoming a slave to fellow humans". Special focus is given to 1 Corinthians 9:19-23 as a key pericope in this regard. The deduction made in this dissertation is that Paul disregards his own cultural heritage and makes himself a slave to people on behalf of winning people for Christ, without allowing people (or cultural groups) to rule him as masters. / Thesis (M.Th. (New Testament))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2006

This study is an attempt to uncover the considerable contribution to antebellum reform made by a small unassuming frontier community in Indiana, That this community has been largely neglected in social histories of the United States is probably because the region did not produce any nationally outstanding figure as well-'known as William Lloyd Garrison., Elijah Love joy,, Theodore Weld, James Birney or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This dissertation is an in-depth look at a group of so-called ordinary men and women who were really rather extraordinary in the enlightened positions they took.The two decades, 1826-1846, were the major years of Newport's ascendancy as a leading community in antebellum reform, Newport was made up largely of members of the Society of Friends, many of whom had migrated to the area from the Carolinas and other parts of the South to escape the spreading institution of slavery. Their opposition to slavery, then, was part of their religious tradition, and included aiding runaways to reach free soil. I t was only, however # among the more activist Friends, centered mainly in Newport that organized efforts to manage more efficiently antislavery activities resulted in that community being dubbed the "Grand Central Station" in the Underground Railroad.The outstanding individual in these efforts was Levi Coffin, reputed "President of the Underground Railroad," His coming to Newport in 1826 marked the beginning of organized, wisely managed efforts to oppose slavery. This included such activities as an antislavery tract society, an antislavery library, antislavery newspapers, antislavery societies (including also a young men's antislavery society and a female antislavery society), schools for free blacks and fugitives, as well as the free Produce Movement, an attempt to encourage abstension from the purchase of goods produced by slave labor.In this, Coffin and the Newport reform leaders were opposed by many, a vast majority at first, who felt their direct action methods were too revolutionary and disruptive and as a result were counterproductive, So severe was the disagreement that a rupture of eleven years took place in the Indiana Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends. By 1846, public toleration of abolition was such that Newport leaders felt little imperative to continue agitation for antislavery causes, instead, they centered their efforts in the political solution offered by the formation of the Liberty Party.The Newport community led in other popular contemporary reform movements including temperance, women's rights, education, and the peace movement. This comprehensiveness of 2lewport antebellum reform was consistent with antebellum reform in general. All the reforms were interrelated, all part of a larger pattern of moral planning. The cause of human rights embraced not only the freeing of slaves from bondage, but also the liberating of women from the bonds of less than equal status with men, the freeing, of the uneducated from the restrictions imposed by ignorance, the prohibition of the abuse of alcohol which shackled man's reason and will, and tie lifting from man of the curse of war.The Newport reformers believed in racial equality as tenaciously as did the Garrisonians or the Weld abolitionists. They seemed to have recognized that rhetoric, as ennobling and inspiriting as it can be, can also grow shrill and tiresome in its self-righteousness. Their reform was the kind of responsible reform directed at those around them--their family, friends, and neighbors--rather than at the faraway "demon" at whom shots can be taken with relative assurance he cannot immediate retaliate.

The overall aim of the study is to investigate how a social and collective memory is mobilized by the directors’ depiction of ethnicity and gender roles from a post- colonial and gender perspective. The thesis focuses on how ethnicity and gender roles are depicted in each movie and how this results in a mobilization of a social and collective memory. The results show that Django Unchained mobilizes a memory by its use of the invective nigger and iconic acts of slavery, such as whipping and cotton picking. From a gender perspective, the results show that men worked with jobs that required more strength, compared to the jobs of women and thus mobilizes a memory of how we remember the gender roles of slaves. Nevertheless, these memories can result in traumas and to recover from them, memories must be revisited. Similarly, yet differently, the results show that 12 Years a Slave mobilizes a memory by its use of the invective nigger and by the use of songs that solidified the hierarchy present during slavery. In other words, these songs were used to exhibit the level of supremacy Caucasians possessed from a post-colonial perspective. The conclusion drawn in the study is that 12 Years a Slave, as a historical source, provides audiences with considerably more authenticity compared to Django Unchained. Therefore an individual might feel as if he or she has lived the life of Solomon Northup and experienced and endured everything he did.

Enlightenment philosophers had long feared the effects of crisscrossing boundaries, both real and imagined. Such fears were based on what they considered a brutal ocean space frequented by protean shape-shifters with a dogma of ruthless exploitation and profit. This intellectual study outlines the formation and fragmentation of a fluctuating worldview as experienced through the circum-Atlantic life and travels of merchant, slaveowner, and slave trader Zephaniah Kingsley during the Era of Revolution. It argues that the process began from experiencing the costs of loyalty to the idea of the British Crown and was tempered by the pervasiveness of violence, mobility, anxiety, and adaptation found in the booming Atlantic markets of the Caribbean during the Haitian Revolution. Tracing Kingsley’s manipulations of identity and race through his peripatetic journey serves to go beyond the infinite masks of his self-invention and exposes the deeply imbedded transatlantic dimensions of power.

This dissertation is an examination of the interactions of enslaved body servants with their Texas Confederate masters from the American Civil War through the early twentieth century. The seven chapters of this study follows the story of these individuals from the fires of the Civil War, through the turbulence of Reconstruction in Texas, the codification of "Lost Cause" memory in the American South, and the exploitation of that memory by both former body servants and their ex-Confederate counterparts. This study demonstrates that the primary experience of blacks in the Confederate service was not as soldiers, but as enslaved laborers and body servants. Body servants, or camp slaves, were physically and in some cases emotionally close to their enslavers in this war-time environment and played an important part in Confederate logistics and camp life. As freed peoples after the war, former body servants found ways to use the bonds forged during the war and the flawed ideas of Lost Cause memory as a means to navigate the brutal realities of life in post-Civil War Texas. By manipulating white conceptions of former body servants as "black Confederates," some African Americans effectively "passed as gray," an act that earned money, social recognition, and a semblance of security denied to African Americans that did not have any association to former Confederates. This study further reorients how scholars in the twenty-first century examine the myth of the "black Confederate" from simply a lie propagated by whites to validate their memory of the Civil War to a lens that can reveal yet another avenue through which dauntless African Americans used to survive, and in some cases thrive, in the depths of Jim Crow rule in the American South.

Thesis (M. Div.)--Emmanuel School of Religion, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-84).