Abstract
This dissertation argues that hunting and fishing became central battlegrounds in the struggle over African-American independence between the end of the Civil War and the 1920s. Throughout that period, those deeply-rooted black cultural traditions, carried through centuries of bondage and further developed after 1865, remained important weapons in African Americans fight to control their own lives and labor. Drawing on narratives of former slaves, sportsmens recollections, records of fish and game clubs and resorts and sporting periodicals, I show that former slaves used hunting and fishing to reduce their dependence on agricultural labor in the service of whites and maximize their freedom. Because they reflected both symbolic and real African-American independence, hunting and fishing became central targets of white efforts to more firmly draw the racial line and protect their own economic and sporting interests.
My project contributes to Southern and African-American historiography by illuminating the overlooked connection between hunting and fishing and the evolution of the Southern racial divide. I show that African Americans right to hunt and fish became real and perceived sources of labor intractability, establish the importance of African Americans to a Southern sporting tourism industry dependent upon the physical and symbolic presence of subordinated former slaves, and expose fear of black independence as an overlooked motive in the rise of the Southern conservation movement. I thus broaden our understanding of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Southern life by showing how African Americans cultivated long-cherished survival mechanisms to meet the changing conditions of freedom. In doing so I clarify how a coalition of whites worked to circumscribe black subsistence for their own ends and illustrate how hunting and fishing played a key role in both processes.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-07182005-121340 |
| Date | 10 October 2005 |
| Creators | Giltner, Scott Edward |
| Contributors | Van Beck Hall, Marcus Rediker, Kathleen Blee, Seymour Drescher |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-07182005-121340/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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