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Between the founding of the French post of Detroit in 1701 and the end of Pontiac's War in 1766, several native American peoples settled in distinct clusters around the French (and later British post) near current-day Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario. Focusing on the interactions among these communities, this dissertation makes two interrelated arguments. It first argues that, although these peoples had been challenged and changed by the forces of colonialism during the seventeenth century, they nonetheless emerged from that century as discrete ethnic, social, and political entities, rather than shattered or disintegrated refugees. A set of interconnected, mutually constituting, and consistent relationships between these separate and autonomous peoples, secondly, shaped affairs in the region just as much as the relationship between Europeans and native peoples. That colonial relationship, in fact, was embedded within and reciprocally tied to the web of relationships between native peoples. Only by understanding both exchanges between French and native peoples as well as modes of interaction between different indigenous peoples can scholars make sense of events at Detroit.;To demonstrate both the survival of these native groups as discrete peoples and the consequences of that survival, each of the first four chapters explores one of the salient relationships between native peoples at Detroit, while the final charts how these relationships shaped one event, Pontiac's War. The first chapter charts the way in which the Huron man, Cheanonvouzon, sought to compensate for his peoples' weakness by forming a "southern alliance" with two powerful groups in the region, the Miamis and Five Nations, or Iroquois. The second chapter investigates how the closely related Anishinaabe peoples---the Ottawas, Ojibwas, and Potawatomis---cooperated to meet the challenge posed by the southern alliance. The emergence of these two rival blocs led to conflict between the Hurons and Ottawas in 1738, and the third chapter places that violence within a longer pattern of competition between these peoples. Chapter Four uses a controversy among the Hurons in the 1740s and 1750s to understand the bonds which held that community together. Finally, the fifth chapter demonstrates how all of these patterns shaped one event, the Anglo-Indian conflict frequently called Pontiac's War, and situates that conflict within a local context. as scholars investigate how these relationships mutually constituted not only one another but also the colonial relationship, intercultural relations at Detroit, as well as the rest of the New World, become at once more complicated and more comprehensible.

Black and white women in Virginia were on the front lines of the struggle over emancipation during and after the Civil War. Between 1861 and 1890, both former slave and former slaveholding women shaped black freedom and thereby re-invented themselves as citizens within their local communities.;Focusing on women who lived in the southeastern and south-central regions of Virginia, this study expands the narrative of Southern history to encompass the vigorous contest between black and white women over the meanings of slavery, the war, and freedom. Based on federal records and private papers, this dissertation assesses women's ideas about the end of slavery and the creation of a free society.;Emancipation was revolutionary for black women and profoundly affected the lives of many white women. For freedwomen, it meant greater control over their family and working lives, education, and community organization, as well as new access to public spaces and a sense of themselves as American citizens. For former slaveholding women, emancipation meant financial loss, fewer household workers, and reduced control over those domestic servants, in addition to a re-appraisal of the benefits of slavery and a stark representation of the destruction of the Confederacy.;As workers and employers after the war, Virginia women transformed the white-owned domestic workplace into one of the most significant and highly politicized venues for negotiating freedom. as skilled workers, cooks and washerwomen gained the most independence among servants. While both workers and employers sought to retain some aspects of slavery, employers' maternalism increasingly came into conflict with workers' communal resourcefulness.;While they interacted as workers and employers, black and white women led separate lives in the civic realm. They did, however, take part in some similar activities there. as engaged citizens, both freedwomen and former mistresses contributed to the public creation of communal histories of the war by participating, respectively, in Emancipation Day celebrations and Lost Cause commemorations. In these civic rituals, Virginia women emphasized racial solidarity and affirmed their national and regional allegiances. The orchestrated transition from slavery to freedom within civic spaces paralleled the struggle to define emancipation within individual households.

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British forts in the colonial American backcountry have long been subjects of American heroic myth. Forts were romanticized as harbingers of European civilization, and the Indians who visited them as awestruck, childlike, or scheming. Two centuries of historiography did little to challenge the image of Indians as noble but peripheral figures who were swept aside by the juggernaut of European expansion. In the last few decades, historians have attacked the persistent notion that Indians were supporting participants and sought to reposition them as full agents in the early American story. But in their search for Indian agency, historians have given little attention to British forts as exceptional contact points in their own rights. This dissertation examines five such forts and their surrounding regions as places defined by cultural accommodation and confluence, rather than as outposts of European empire. Studying Indian-British interactions near such forts reveals the remarkable extent to which Indians defined the fort experience for both natives and newcomers. Indians visited forts as friends, enemies, and neutrals. They were nearly always present at or near backcountry forts. In many cases, Indians requested forts from their British allies for their own purposes. They used British forts as trading outposts, news centers, community hubs, diplomatic meeting places, and suppliers of gifts. But even with the advantages that could sometimes accrue from the presence of forts, many Indians still resented them. Forts could attract settlers, and often failed to regulate trade and traders sufficiently to please native consumers. Indians did not hesitate to press fort personnel for favors and advantages. In cases where British officers and soldiers failed to impress Indians, or angered them, the results were sometimes violent and extreme. This study makes a start at seeing forts as places that were at least as much a part of the Native American landscape as they were outposts of European aggression. at Forts Loudoun, Allen, Michilimackinac, Niagara, and Chartres, Indians used their abilities and influence to turn the objectives of the British fort system upside down. as centers of British-Indian cultural confluence, these forts evoke an early America marked by a surprising degree of Indian agency. at these contact points people lived for the moment. The America of the future, marked by Indian dispossession and British-American social dominance, was an outcome few could imagine.

A detailed study of local Baptist communities in Tidewater Virginia, "Drawn Together, Drawn Apart" explores the interactions of black and white evangelicals both under slavery and following emancipation. Significant bonds of fellowship between black and white Baptists persisted throughout the antebellum years. The majority of black Baptists continued to engage in baptismal, worship, and disciplinary gatherings with their white neighbors. Baptists of both races participated in the national culture of reform through their commitment to temperance, mission work, and other forms of "benevolence.".;At the same time, a pattern of black religious autonomy was developing. as Christian paternalists, white Baptist leaders sought to bolster supervision of black members, but by frequently commissioning black deacons to do the actual work this monitoring entailed, they fostered opportunities for black leadership, preaching, and literacy; several large all-black congregations were founded during the antebellum period.;The aftermath of Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831 plays a central role in this study. Scholars have seen that event as the beginning of a period of repression that lasted until general emancipation. Virginia did indeed adopt much stricter black codes in 1832; these included a complete ban on black preaching, exhorting, and independent religious activity. Yet this dissertation presents many examples of how such practices survived, sometimes with the support of white Baptists. Some blacks continued to preach---a fact of which whites were well aware---and black Baptists increasingly met separately from whites. While white leaders sometimes attempted to provide supervision for such meetings, their efforts were often cursory, leading to the conclusion that they either did not care enough about the law to enforce it or that they disagreed with it in the first place. What did bring an end to interracial religious activity was not the Turner revolt, but rather emancipation. Some church splits were initiated by whites, some by blacks, and some were ironically the result of a cooperative effort.;Through the careful examination of local Baptist records, this work illuminates the varied exchanges that took place between nineteenth-century blacks and whites. Amid an increasingly entrenched slaveholding system and an expanding body of black codes, followed by a cataclysmic Civil War, the ways in which black and white Baptists experienced fellowship---both together and separately---reveal much about the development of southern society before and after emancipation.

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