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This dissertation examines discourses and experiences of reproduction in Virginia, 1630-1785. I define reproduction as an experiential reality that contoured women's lives in specific ways, as a central demographic phenomenon that shaped colonial populations, and as a discourse of power in the colonial project. Informed by feminist theory, queer theory, and postcolonial theory, the dissertation examines the relationship between reproduction and colonialism in the development of a plantation economy in Virginia. I draw on a varied archive of court documents, colonial records, newspapers and other print culture, plantation records, diaries, letters, and medical texts. Chapter 1, "'A considerable parcel of breeders': Reproduction and Discourses of Racial Slavery in Colonial Virginia," examines the ways that development of racial slavery in Virginia was based, in part, on the appropriation of black women's reproduction. I examine the roots of the 1662 law that defined slavery as a condition of birth, finding the legal and cultural precedent for the law in the conflation of servitude and bastardy. I further examine the vernacular discourses of slavery that used reproduction to define enslaved people (especially women) as a kind of property legally similar to livestock. I close the chapter with a discussion of the Virginia House of Burgesses debates around defining slaves as real or personal property, and I argue that these debates were a consequence of defining slavery as a status of birth. In Chapter 2, "Wicked, Dangerous, and Ungoverned: The Transgressive Possibilities of Reproduction," I examine the ways that childbearing could transgress colonial hierarchies and boundaries, especially in cases of bastardy and interracial birth. Throughout the chapter, I am particularly interested in understanding the relationship between domination and transgression, and the specific ways that reproduction could inhabit the space between those two poles. In Chapter 3, "Knowledge 'not fit to be discust publiquely': Colonialism and the Transformation of Reproductive Knowledge," I examine the ways that colonialism transformed Virginians' reproductive episteme. I attempt to reconstruct knowledge about reproduction in this space and time, and I show how childbearing became a potent intimate zone for the negotiating of colonial power relations. In the final chapter, '"She lives in an infant country that wants nothing but people': Discourses of Reproduction, Print Culture, and Virginia's Colonial Project," I examine the competing discourses of reproduction that informed Virginia's colonial project. I argue that two competing discourses about reproduction - one that privileged "prolific reproduction" and another that privileged "rational reproduction" - show the ways that the experience of colonialism transformed ideas about reproduction. This transformation occurred because the exigencies of the colonial project prioritized the maintaining of colonial boundaries and hierarchies over the early notion of peopling a "virgin" land.

...the early people of Gloucester County were English gentlemen and ladies... Many of these fine old families continued wealthy for generations, until about seventy years ago, when a terrible war, known as the War between the States,... deprived them and their present day descendents of their property and wealth, as well as their Negro slaves who were freed at the time of this war.(Gray 66).;All across the post-Civil War South, the newly freed African Diaspora struggled to find ways to maintain their families and to develop communities. Having been systematically denied education, property ownership, political participation and participation in both the social and economic life of the society built largely upon their labor and hardships, and those of their ancestors, for most of the "Freedmen," the first fruits of Liberty were uncertainty and impoverishment. This study will examine how blacks in Gloucester County responded to the challenges of freedom in different ways and through institutions. at the outbreak of the Civil War, Gloucester County, Virginia, was home to a large population of enslaved Africans and a number of free blacks and free mulattoes. In the aftermath of the War, these groups formed a number of vibrant and, initially, highly successful communities. The collective and individual agencies that led to creation of social, economic, religious and educational institutions as infrastructure for community development will be explored. The study will utilize an interdisciplinary approach to the creation and evolution of churches, schools and cemeteries to trace the impact of such institutions within the history of blacks in the County. Sources will include legal documents, census data, church histories, literary texts, newspaper articles, oral histories, photos and site examinations.;Currently, beyond documents largely generated by the heirs of the Planter Class, there are only minimal records or studies pertaining to the sociocultural processes that guided the formation of Gloucester County's African American communities. The enslaved communities had few institutions through which to stamp their identities upon the region they occupied, in which they labored and died. Dead slaves were buried with little ceremony and no markers. Hence, in areas like Gloucester County, where colonial churches, and their elaborate and ornate cemeteries, commemorate the slave owning community, and where restored plantation "Big Houses" are placed on the "National Register of Historic Sites," or hidden from scrutiny by private ownership, little marks the antebellum presence of the African Diaspora. Thus, the long march of time has eroded the histories of the institutions and individuals that were the chief agents for the growth of Gloucester's African American communities, but did not obliterate them.;This research will focus on a small segment of the African American Diaspora as it moves to establish and stabilize itself in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Thus, by the very nature of Diasporas, it is study of the confluences of agency and accommodation, cooperation and resistance, and of perseverance as well as change and as elements of an overarching survival strategy. Gloucester County's African American communities established churches, cemeteries, domestic burial fields and schools. These institutions and sites became and, in many instances, remain sources of documentary, literary, historical and material evidence of the former richness and continuing importance of Gloucester County' African American past.

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During Jim Crow, the sport of baseball served as an important arena for African American resistance and negotiation. as a (mostly) black enterprise, the Negro Leagues functioned as part of a larger African American movement to establish black commercial ventures during segregation. Moreover, baseball's special status as the national pastime made it a significant public symbol for African American campaigns for integration and civil rights.;This dissertation attempts to interrogate the experience and significance of black baseball during Jim Crow during the first half of the twentieth century. Relying on newspapers, magazines, memoirs, biographies, and previously published oral interviews, this work looks at resistance and political critique that existed in the world of black sport, particularly in the cultural production of black baseball.;Specifically, this dissertation argues that in a number of public and semi-public arenas, African Americans used baseball as a literal and figurative space in which they could express dissatisfaction with the strictures of Jim Crow as well as the larger societal understanding of race during the early twentieth century. African Americans asserted a counter-narrative of black racial equality and superiority through their use of physical space in ballparks and on the road during travel, through the public negotiation of black manhood on the pages of the black press, through the editorial art and photography of black periodicals, and through the employment of folktales and nicknames.;The African American experience during Jim Crow baseball and the attendant social and cultural production provide a window into the subtle and unstated black resistance to white supremacy and scientific racism. Thus this dissertation explores and identifies the political meanings of black baseball.

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