Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)

The purpose of this thesis is to address key questions concerning the status and roles of enslaved groups (thralls) in Viking-Age Scandinavia. The thesis focuses on the lives of thralls at two levels; first within the local context of the household and farm (described here as the ‘microenvironment’), and second within the wider ‘macroenvironment’ of Scandinavian society. In particular, the study seeks to uncover the different practical and economic roles that were fulfilled by thralls within these contexts, and in doing so to explore how slaveholding communities benefitted from the exploitation of these people. In order to address these issues, the thesis critically examines the archeological material associated with thralls and discusses the various issues associated with the interpretation of this evidence. Given the inherent difficulty of identifying thralls in the archaeological record, this study also utilizes a range of contemporaneous and later medieval textual sources, including the Icelandic sagas and the earliest surviving Scandinavian law codes, as a means of contextualizing the discussion of material evidence. In exploring the diverse range of archaeological evidence and textual sources available to us, the author concludes that thralls played a significant role among Scandinavian communities as a source of both domestic and economic labor. Through this, they also involuntarily helped Scandinavian communities to mount and sustain trading, raiding and settlement activity in Europe and beyond. In reaching this conclusion, the author draws upon a number of sources pointing to a significant need for (unfree?) labor, for example in tasks such as textile production. When combined with a high-level of access to slaves through raiding and trading activity, it seems logical that Viking-Age communities would have exploited thralls in this way. Given the regular appearance of thralls in both the early Scandinavian law codes and sagas, furthermore, it is likely that these people represented a prominent social group within both social and labor-related contexts.

This public history thesis project experimented with the application of new technology in creating an educational resource aimed at twenty-first century public audiences. The project presents the history, musicology, and historiography of Afro-American slave music in the United States. In doing so, the project utilizes two digital media tools: VuVox, to create interactive collages; and VisualEyes, to create digital visualizations. The purpose of this thesis is to assess how the project balances the goals of digital history, public history, and academic history. During the production of the Afro-American Slave Music Project, a number of the promises of digital history were highlighted, along with several of the potential challenges of digital history. In designing the project, compensations had to be made in order to minimize the challenges while maximizing the benefits. In effect, this thesis argues for the utility of digital history in a public setting as an alternative to traditional, prose-based academic history.

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In the last twenty years, studies in Afro-American slavery have given special attention to the slave community and culture. They have emphasized the slaves' control over their lives, while glossing over the brutality of the institution of slavery. Slave women have been ignored until very recently, and those few historians who studied their lives have applied the same categories of inquiry used by traditional historians with a male perspective. The topic of interracial sexual relations crystallizes this problem. This issue has been left aside in most scholarly studies and, when mentioned, addressed more often than not from a male perspective. As sexual abuse, it exemplifies the harshness of slavery. The oral slave narratives, often referred to by the same historians, are one of the few primary sources by and on slave women. Yet, historians have not used them adequately in research on slave women, primarily because of inadequate conceptual frameworks. / Master of Arts

The working assumption in the scholarship on Aristophanes is that fifth-century comic slaves were instantly recognizable in performance through aspects of their body, costume, and/or mask. This project seeks to corroborate the claim that the fifth-century comic male slave was probably not differentiated visually from other types of characters. In so doing, I stake out an additional set of new claims. Since the appearance of a comic actor in the playing space did not seem to instantly announce whether or not he was playing a slave role, slave identities were instead likely inflected through performance. Any delay in the inflection of a character’s identity as a slave would create the opportunity for that character’s identity to be ambiguous. This potential for ambiguity is not exclusive to the comic slave but is rather inherent in the comic male body and costume which, in the fifth century, does not seem to have differentiated social type. Indeed, two early artifacts apparently display a recognition of the potential for the comic body to be ambiguous through depicting comic figures who bear a strong visual similarity to one another in scenes that seem to invite the exploitation of that ambiguity. The bulk of this project explores a range of ways in which that potential for ambiguity is activated and played with in the fifth-century comedies of Aristophanes, in particular in the case of comic slaves. In the first two chapters, I consider how artifacts relating to the performance of comedy and the extant plays of Aristophanes both support the view that the fifth-century comic male slave probably looked like a typical comic character. In the third chapter, I explore the revelation of character identity in the opening scenes of Wasps and Women at the Thesmophoria. Through close readings that seek to reconstruct how these scenes would have unfolded in performance, I argue that where the reader sees slaves clearly in the opening scene of Wasps, the original audience might not have, and, conversely, where the reader tends not to see a slave in the opening of Women at the Thesmophoria, the original audience might have. In both plays, the ambiguities surrounding character identity contribute to a core function of the Aristophanic prologue—capturing audience interest and curiosity. Two chapter length studies on Knights and Frogs follow. In Knights, I argue that the ambiguity of the comic body is politicized through an extensive engagement with oligarchic sentiments and attitudes. By not distinguishing slave from citizen, the ambiguity of the comic body underlies and visually develops the pervasive blurring of legal status categories in this play, while also becoming a sign and symbol of the perversion of social hierarchies that an oligarch might associate with democracy. The ambiguity of the comic body is further exploited in the contest between the Sausage Seller and Paphlagon, contributing to the difficulty in distinguishing whether the Sausage Seller will be similar to Paphlagon or not, as visual differences between the two are collapsed. Ultimately, the engagement with oligarchic sentiments about the perversion of social and moral hierarchies in the democracy are part of an elaborate form of misdirection. The Sausage Seller is not the same as Paphlagon, as he proves through restoring order. In this way, the ambiguity of the comic body is re-politicized as, through the figure of the Sausage Seller, it becomes emblematic of the potential of a citizen in the democracy, a potential that is not constrained by social background. Finally, I argue that it is precisely when legal status boundaries become especially blurred in Athens with the mass enfranchisement of enslaved people who fought at the Battle of Arginusae that we begin to see a visual and verbal contraction of the potential ambiguity of the comic slave in Frogs. This curtailing of the potential for the comic slave to be ambiguous is a key contribution to the later development of the comic slave, as the visual code for the slave becomes much more defined in the fourth century. It is also essential for understanding how this play responds to that contemporary mass enfranchisement of the enslaved people who fought at the Battle of Arginusae.

Thesis (MPhil (Ancient Studies)--University of Stellenbosch, 2007. / The main purpose of this study is to investigate and describe the differences between the fifth-century city states of Athens and Sparta. The approach I use is that of altérité (“otherness”). I look in particular at four of the most important social phenomena: women, slaves, the army and the political structures. In these respects there are extensive differences between the two city states: Athens acquired its slaves through buying them or as spoils of war over time and on an individual basis; Sparta conquered and enslaved a whole nation, the Messenians, early on to serve permanently as their slaves. Athenian women enjoyed no social or legal freedom or rights; Spartan women enjoyed all these rights and could own and inherit property and goods. In Athens, since the time of Themistocles the fleet was regarded as much more important than the infantry; Sparta had very early on developed a professional infantry which was regarded as the best right through the Greek-speaking world. Athens started changing its constitution at a relatively late stage, but once started, continued to work on it until they attained an early form of democracy; Sparta never developed beyond the monarchical stage, but did adapt it to suit their needs. The second purpose of this study is to discover and attempt to explain why the above-mentioned differences are so great. The point here is not so much that Athens was the model city state which everybody tried to emulate, but rather that Sparta was the city state which was significantly different from any of the others.

This thesis is about the social, political, and economic interactions that took place in and around the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in two very different regions: north-eastern Tanzania and Zanzibar. The mission was for much of the period a space in which people could – often inventively – make a living through education, employment, and patronage. Indeed, particularly in the period preceding British colonial rule, most Christians were mission employees (usually teachers) and their families. Being Christian was, in one sense, a livelihood. In this era before the British altered the political economy, education had only limited appeal, while the teaching profession was not highly esteemed by Africans, although it offered some teachers the security and status of a regular income. From the 1860s to the 1910s, the UMCA did not offer clear trajectories for most of the Africans interacting with it in search of a better life. Markers of coastal sophistication, such as clothing or Swahili fluency, had greater social currency, while the coast remained a prime source of paid employment, often preferable to conditions offered by the mission. By the end of the period, Christians were at a social and economic advantage by virtue of their access to formal institutional education. This was a major shift and schooling became an obvious trajectory for future employment and economic mobility. Converts, many of whom came from marginal social backgrounds, sought to overcome a heritage of exploitative social relations and to redraw the field for the negotiation of dependency to their advantage. However, as this thesis shows, the mission also contributed to new sets of exploitative social relations in a hierarchy of work and education.

Orientador: Robert Wayne Andrew Slenes / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campionas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-21T06:00:46Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Scheffer_RafaeldaCunha_D.pdf: 2261654 bytes, checksum: b4286db176e750878ec4ba3ed70f9e30 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012 / Resumo: Analisando a questão do trabalho escravo em Santa Catarina e Rio Grande do Sul, diversos historiadores apontaram a importância do tráfico interno para o fim da escravidão nessas províncias. O presente trabalho visa exatamente dar profundidade a esse tema, analisando o mercado de escravos em diversas cidades sulistas, na segunda metade do século XIX. Investigando o comércio local e interprovincial, procuro calcular seu volume e formas de operação, seu impacto na população cativa dessas províncias e suas conexões com uma cidade importadora dessa mão de obra no Sudeste, Campinas. Busco ainda os comerciantes envolvidos neste negócio, a maneira com que atuavam neste mercado, investigando algumas experiências como negociantes de escravos, de construção de laços e redes comerciais. Para este trabalho, desenvolvi séries com diversas fontes. Registros cartoriais de compra e venda de cativos e procurações que autorizavam a negociação desses trabalhadores foram analisados para todas as cidades selecionadas para estudo. Além disso, anúncios de compra e venda de escravos, impostos sobre a sua comercialização e diversas outras fontes oficiais foram utilizadas para elucidar as questões levantadas. Por fim, explorei fontes judiciais como processos cíveis e criminais para buscar informações complementares sobre os envolvidos nesse comércio e suas práticas. Com essa pesquisa, percebi como o mercado de escravos dessas cidades esteve ligado ao nacional. A compra de escravos nas províncias do Sul do Brasil para a revenda no Sudeste ocorreu de forma constante no período estudado, tendo seu ápice na década de 1870. Enviados em pequenos grupos através de linhas regulares de vapor ou de caminhos por terra, jovens trabalhadores do Sul chegaram em grande número para suprir a demanda de braços de Campinas e região. Diversos comerciantes se envolveram nessas transferências, na maioria das vezes desenvolvido ao mesmo tempo que outras atividades comerciais. O volume desse comércio de escravos de Santa Catarina e do Rio Grande do Sul para o Sudeste foi importante para a localidade importadora estudada, teve reflexos na sociedade escravista do Sul do Brasil, mas seu impacto sobre essas população não parece ter sido decisivo o suficiente para responder sozinho pelo declínio da mão de obra escrava X na região, sendo necessário o estudo da mortalidade e especialmente da alforria para a compreensão do fim da escravidão na região / Abstract: Analyzing the issue of slave labor in Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, many historians have pointed out the importance of internal slave trade for the end of slavery in those provinces. This thesis aims to give depth to this topic, analyzing the slave market in several southern cities in the second half of the nineteenth century. Investigating local and interprovincial trade, I try to calculate its volume and forms of operation, its impact on the captive population of these provinces and their connections to a city that import labor in Southeast, Campinas. I search traders involved in this business, the way they acted in this market, investigating some slave traders experiences and the building of business networks. For this work, I developed series with different sources. Notarial records of purchase and sale of captives and documents that authorize the negotiation of these workers were analyzed for all cities selected for study. In addition, announcements of slave sales, taxes and other official sources were used to elucidate the issues raised. Finally, judicial sources were explored to seek additional information on those involved in this trade and its practices. With this research, I realized how the slave market of these cities was linked to the national slave market. The purchase of slaves in the southern provinces of Brazil for resale in the Southeast occurred steadily during the study period, reaching its height in the 1870s. Sent in small groups through regular lines of steam or paths by land, young southern workers arrived in large numbers to meet the demand for arms at Campinas region. Several merchants were involved in these transfers, mostly developed while other commercial activities. The volume of the slave trade of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul to Southeast locality was important for importing region, it was reflected in the slave society of southern Brazil, but its impact on these people do not seem to have been decisive enough to answer alone for the decline of slave labor in the region, necessitating the study of mortality and especially the freedom papers for understanding the end of slavery in the region / Doutorado / Historia Social / Doutor em História