abstract: This study explores the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century German dramatic genre Sklavenstücke (slave plays). These plays, which until recently have not received any significant attention in scholarship, articulate a nuanced critique of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade and thus bear witness to an early German-language discourse indicative of abolitionist currents.Tracing individual acts of German-language abolitionism, I investigate the correlation between abolitionist movements in the Euro-American space and German involvements in these very efforts. In this sense, I contest the notion of an absence of German abolitionist awareness in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment. My reading of these slave plays contributes to discussions about the transcultural nature of abolitionist discourse and defies the notion that abolitionist activism only emerged within the specific nation-states that have previously been the subject of scholarship. Challenging this layering both theoretically and analytically, then, requires an innovative shift that centers approaches rooted in Black thought and theories, which are the foundation of this study. These concepts are necessary for engaging with issues of slavery and abolition while at the same time exposing white paternalist perspectives and gazes. Plays of this genre often foreground the horrors of slavery at the hands of cruel white slaveholders, and characterize enslaved Black Africans as unblemished, obedient, submissive, hard-working, and grateful “beings” deserving of humanitarian benevolence. Based on these sentiments, an overarching discourse opposing slavery and the transatlantic slave trade emerged by way of German-language theatrical plays, theoretical treatises, newspaper articles, academic writings, travelogues, diary entries, and journal articles that negotiated the nature, origin, and legitimacy of Black African humanity around debates on slavery. Thus, my study demonstrates that these German-language literary contributions indicate inscribed socio-critical commentary and take up transatlantic abolitionist discourses, a dialogue that surfaced under the auspices of the Enlightenment. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation International Letters and Cultures 2020

Thesis advisor: Robin Fleming / This dissertation charts the movement of slaves from Western Europe, through Scandinavia, and into the frontiers of the Caliphate, a movement which took shape in the early 700s and flourished into the late 800s. The victims of this movement are well attested in texts from either end of their journey, and the movement of everyday things allows us to trace the itineraries they followed. Necklace beads—produced in the east, carried to the north, and worn in the west—serve as proxies for human traffic that traveled the same routes in opposite directions. Attention to this traffic overcomes four impasses—between regional particularism and interregional connectivity; between attention to exchange and focus on production; between privileging textual or material evidence; and between definitions of slavery that obscure practices of enslavement. The introduction outlines problems of studying medieval slavery with regard to transregional approaches to the Middle Ages, the transition to serfdom, and the use of material evidence. Chapter One gathers narrative texts previously dealt with anecdotally to establish patterns for the Viking-Age slave trade, with eastward traffic thriving by the late 800s. Chapter Two confirms these patterns by graphically comparing viking violence to reports of captive taking in the annals and archival documents of Ireland, Francia, and Anglo-Saxon England. Chapter Three investigates how viking captive taking impacted Western societies and the creation of written records in Carolingian Europe. Chapter Four turns to the material record, using beads to trace the intensity and flow of human traffic that fed from early viking violence. Chapter Five establishes a corresponding demand for slaves in the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate through Arabic archival, legal, historical, and geographic texts. The conclusion places this research in the context of global history. By spanning periods, regions, and disciplines, this dissertation brings to focus people who crossed boundaries unwillingly, but whose movements contributed to epochal change. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Several historians have identified North Texas as constituting a unique cultural region in antebellum Texas, due to the more limited cotton and slave economies and greater opposition to secession. Different settlement patterns have been put forward as an explanation for the distinct "character" of North Texas, with North Texas being portrayed as being settled largely by migrants from the Upper South while the rest of the state was primarily settled by Lower Southerners. The argument rests on the assumption of differing economic and political cultures between Upper and Lower Southerners. This study investigates migration into North Texas counties and the economic life and secession vote in those counties. It challenges the simplistic dichotomy between migrants from the Upper and Lower South by demonstrating the similar rates at which these two groups grew cotton and owned slaves. It also illustrates how geographic considerations better explain the apparent distinctions between North Texas and the rest of the state. Transportation limitations are likely the reason for the more limited cultivation of cotton and, consequently, the lowered importance of slavery in North Texas. Concerns about Indian depredations following the removal of federal troops in the case of secession also seem to have promoted Unionist turnout in the secession vote. The seemingly unique qualities of North Texas appear to have been more practical than political.

This study argues that Catholicism informs a major genre of African American literature in ways and with a significance that has gone largely unrecognized. Since their emergence in the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary narratives of slavery have challenged the traditional historiography of American slavery, radically revising how we remember that "peculiar institution." These fictional works disrupt the form and content of slave autobiography, suggesting that the conventions of Enlightenment rationalism to which antebellum texts were bound could not adequately represent the experience of enslavement. Scholarship on the genre has thus tended to focus on the way it undermines the rationalizing impulse of Enlightenment discourse, which in the U.S. as well as in Europe was determined by the ideals of the Protestant Reformation. But while the scholarly attention to Protestantism has yielded valuable insights regarding the contemporary slave narrative’s critique of the "unreason" of slavery, it cannot account for the striking presence of the Catholic themes and images at the margins of these texts that this dissertation uncovers, nor for the way that the religion is imaginatively linked to radical moments of historical revision. I argue that Catholicism undergirds the imaginative ways the genre expresses the inexpressible horror of enslavement and the legacy of those horrors in the present day. Because of its historical association with irrationality, superstition, and an aberrant supernaturalism, Catholicism is thus marshaled—with justified political hesitation—in the contemporary slave narrative as an oppositional category of discourse through which African American authors break with the historiographical methods of the Enlightenment and, in particular, with the rationalization of slavery characterizing the period. Chapter One analyzes two novels by Toni Morrison, Beloved and A Mercy, and her concept of "rememory." In Chapter Two, I examine the trope of spirit possession in Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Leon Forrest’s Two Wings to Veil My Face. My final two chapters address temporal disjuncture in contemporary narratives of slavery: Chapter Three comprises readings of Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata and Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale, while in Chapter Four I focus on Edward P. Jones’s The Known World. / 2017-11-18T00:00:00Z

The aim of this study is to examine John Chrysostom’s views on slavery, specifically in his homilies on the Pauline Epistles and Hebrews. Roman slaveholding is approached as a complex habitus, and Chrysostom’s negotiation with and reimagination of this habitus is examined. The method of enquiry used is a cultural-historical analysis, and the theories of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu are extensively utilized. Moreover, based on the work of Jennifer Glancy, slavery is approached as a corporeal discourse – one focused on the slave as a body. The discursive formation of the slave-body is further deconstructed into four related corporeal discourses – namely the domesticity, heteronomy, carcerality and commodification of the slavebody. The study commences by revisiting and re-reading Hellenistic, early Roman, Judaistic, and early Christian sources on slaveholding from a cultural-historical perspective in order to reconstruct the main discursivities of the habitus of Roman slaveholding. Then, the first question asked is how Chrysostom understands the domesticity of the slave-body. Based on his exegesis of the haustafeln, it is concluded that Chrysostom negotiates and reimagines the discourse in three ways: a) he proposes a shift from strategic to tactical slaveholding; b) he formulates his theology, especially hamartiology and eschatology, on the Stoic-Philonic metaphor of domestic slavery; and, c) he advises that domestic slaves be reformed by being taught Christian virtue and trades. Secondly, Chrysostom accepts the heteronomy of all bodies, and hence uses slavery as a basis for his ethics. The body is either ruled by God or sin/passions, and the problem of institutional slavery is downplayed. Thirdly, Chrysostom affirms that slaves should remain in their carceral state and stay obedient to their masters, while masters ought to treat slaves justly since they are also slaves of God. Finally, Chrysostom sees slaves as both economic and symbolic capital, and the shift to tactical slaveholding supports his more general vision of promoting a popular asceticism in the city. Chrysostom does not simply accept, ameliorate or reject slaveholding – we rather see sophisticated discourses of negotiation and reimagination of slaveholding to fit in with his wider programme of social and ascetic reform among Christian households. / Thesis (DLitt)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Ancient Languages / unrestricted

Up until the mid 1860s, an overwhelming majority of blacks in the US South were held in chattel slavery, from which they were freed after a Civil War (1861-1865). A recurring argument in institutional economics is that the institution of slavery did not disappear, but took other forms, e.g. segregation and violence. This is explored here, looking at the unsettling level of lethal violence against the black population 1875-1930. Literature empirically testing the legacy of slavery is hitherto scarce. I use a generalized difference-in-differences model to look at the effect of separate coach laws and disenfranchisement laws on lynchings and executions, respectively. All estimations are separated between blacks and non-blacks. I find precise and negative effects of disenfranchisement on executions of blacks and precise and positive effects of separate coach laws on executions of blacks. The same pattern holds true for lynchings of blacks, but only the estimate for separate coach laws is precise. No estimates are precise for lethal violence against non-blacks. This study lends support to the idea that lethal violence was used as an instrument to control the African American population.

Peculiar Pairings: Texas Confederates and their Body Servants is an examination of the relationship between Texas Confederates and the slaves they brought with them during and after the American Civil War. The five chapter study seeks to make sense of the complex relationships shared by some Confederate masters and their black body servants in order to better understand the place of "black Confederates" in Civil War memory. This thesis begins with an examination of what kind of Texans brought body servants to war with them and the motivations they may have had for doing so. Chapter three explores the interactions between master and slave while on the march. Chapter four, the crux of the study, focuses on a number of examples that demonstrate the complex nature of the master slave relationship in a war time environment, and the effects of these relationships during the post-Civil War era.

The Civil War and Reconstruction remade the United States. The defeat of the Confederacy, end of slavery, and postwar amendments to the Constitution inaugurated a new stage in national life. The most commanding histories of the period have presented the regional and national contests over the legacies of the war. Yet, the forces shaping the nation’s transformation and the effects this process unleashed were not confined within American borders. Drawing on British, American, and Irish archives, this dissertation reveals international influences and consequences at the core of the nineteenth-century reconstitution of the United States. The legal transformation of the United States after the Civil War required the assertion of American federal sovereignty in the international sphere. Fulfillment of key aspects of Reconstruction depended upon recognition by other nations and empires. Certain subjects, such as the terms of United States citizenship, were by definition international matters and necessitated coordination with the laws and policies of foreign powers. Other fundamental issues of Reconstruction, though not intrinsically international, also compelled attention to precedents, developments, and potential ramifications abroad. Agents of the United States government could not resolve the central issues of Reconstruction unilaterally. Their debates and decisions had consequences abroad, particularly in the British Empire, during a critical period of state-building worldwide. Each chapter of this dissertation examines international dimensions of a key question of governance and canonical subject of Civil War and Reconstruction scholarship – emancipation, land reform, democracy, citizenship, treason, and federalism – to gauge the far-reaching factors that shaped American policymaking and its results. The analysis demonstrates the multiple layers of the questions the war unearthed. It also establishes that changes in constitutional and other domestic law were inextricable from the nation’s relations with foreign powers, particularly Britain. This approach captures Reconstruction as the internationally disruptive event that it was and allows for a more complete accounting of what the Civil War and Reconstruction did and did not accomplish. Developments during these years destabilized the nation’s position and commitments in the international realm but did not provide a clear path forward. The transformation of the United States’ role and power in the international realm proved more gradual and restrained than many Americans and Britons anticipated. Divisions over the Constitution as well as challenges emanating from abroad impeded the assertion of federal power both within and beyond the nation’s borders.

This dissertation proposes and tests a theory that investigates the political process of modern property formation in land in postcolonial societies of the New World. Specifically, it examines how land tenure systems of private property -- that is, a statutory tenure in which individual property rights are specified, allocated, arbitrated by the state -- are designed and executed in contexts of limited state capacity and land abundance. It draws on extensive, under-tapped archival evidence from Imperial Brazil (1822-1889), the largest postcolonial state of the southern hemisphere. The data, collected over a year of rigorous and systematic archival research, include original ledgers of rural estates surveyed and recorded at the parish (i.e., sub-municipal) level; church inventories of slaves; economic and health-related data of slaves populations; agricultural and land prices; roll call votes and transcripts from parliamentary sessions; and biographical information on Brazil's most prominent elites. My dissertation argues that exogenous, disruptive events that abolish labor-repressive relations of production, such as slavery or the slave trade, open up an opportunity for central governments to bargain for the creation of systems of freehold tenure with local traditional elites. Many countries of the New World were unable to pursue liberal reforms that commodified land and dismantled land-related colonial privileges because of the lack of professional surveyors and cadastral technologies to survey, title, and register parcels accurately. Moreover, high land-to-man ratios turned land into a factor of production with little commercial value and did not offer clear incentives to local elites to demand secure and complete property rights. My dissertation argues that, when local elites' depend on forced or servile labor for production, abolition can make them prone to support a statutory yet highly stringent system of freehold tenure that legally blocks access to land to wage laborers. A system of freehold tenure in times of abolition can attain two goals. First, to close off alternatives to wage labor in the agricultural sector by assembling ownership statutes that exacerbate conditions of tenure insecurity. Second, as local elites controlling servile labor have higher stakes in the survival of labor dependence in agriculture, it can enhance quasi-voluntary compliance with new property rules that intend to avert squatting and keep rural labor inexpensive and abundant. By willingly demarcating boundaries, titling, and paying taxes, local elites cooperate with the new land statutes. In turn, central state officials can secure the logistical resources they need (i.e., fiscal revenue, documentary evidence of ownership, spatial coordinates of rural estates) to distinguish occupied from unoccupied tracts, police the hinterlands, carry out evictions, and formulate policies (e.g., employer subsidies) that would bias labor markets in favor of elite interests. I test these propositions by examining how a powerful class of plantation owners in Imperial Brazil supported the creation of, and quasi-voluntarily complied with, the Land Law of 1850 (the country's first modern property law in land) in response to the exogenous abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1831. I show that parliamentarians who were also planters favorably voted for the bill that introduced the Land Law in the Chamber of Deputies. Moreover, I show that, once the new law had been approved, local parishes that had a greater proportion of slaves were more likely to experience higher rates of regularization. Untaxed and unbounded plantations that long benefited from Portuguese medieval traditions ended up being regularized as self-demarcated, taxable private freeholds. My analysis of Imperial Brazil yields three main insights about how property formation in the New World was carried out. First, and in contrast to the European experience, the advent of private property in land in polities of Australasia or Latin America was not a top-down phenomenon but the result of an arduous political negotiation and patterns of societal co-production between rulers and traditional landlords from the colonial era. Second, land abundance, not scarcity, threatened landlords' material wealth: by promising independent, small-scale cultivation to free rural workers, it threatened landlords with labor shortages. Finally, and even though individual and absolute proprietorship was made the hegemonic form of tenure, national policymakers enacted provisions that neglected property rights to marginalized populations such as freed slaves, immigrants, convicts, or peons. Therefore, the recognition of individual property rights in these societies was highly selective and did not follow the liberal, egalitarian principle of equality before the law.

Magister Artium - MA / I read representations of Sojourner Truth in her Spiritual Narrative, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth with a focus on the portrayal of her unconventional character, through a close analysis of language, structure, photographs and narrative voice. Truth’s editor Olive Gilbert’s raises questions about whether the daguerreotype offers a more accurate form of representation than text. I explore the similarities and differences between visual and written portraits in representations of Truth as a unique figure. I question critical readings of Sojourner Truth’s dress in photographs as conservative, reading instead for a combination of conservative and subversive elements. I suggest that her interest in aesthetic forms such as dress and décor is symbolic of her yearning for home, her heritage, her agency, and unique taste. Her many references to her family indicate that she was more than just an empowered figure, but also one who still grieved. I read Truth’s description of domestic space as representing ambivalently, both her sense of loss, and her attempts to acquire agency. I consider how Truth attempts to recreate a sense of family and belonging through fragments of memory. In my reading of how she questions and extends conventional notions of family and community, I explore how she adapts and includes song, and quotations from the Bible in her sermons, by drawing on elements of African folktale and music. Most critics focus on Truth’s strong voice as an activist, there is little attention to the significance of spiritual solitude for her reimagining of community. I suggest that Truth offers alternative ideas of community as fluid rather than as fixed in one place. I explore how her ideas challenge the notion of nation as exclusive. I consider the genre of The Narrative by analyzing Olive Gilbert’s role as editor and writer. I propose that her role in The Narrative is a more complex one than suggested by critics, as it challenges conventional concepts of autobiography creating a conversation between two voices and lives.