Henry Louis Rey, Spiritualism, and Creoles of Color in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

Posted in Biography, Dissertations, History, Louisiana, Media Archive, United States on 2012-09-03 23:10Z by Steven

Henry Louis Rey, Spiritualism, and Creoles of Color in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

University of New Orleans
2009-12-20
72 pages

Melissa Daggett

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History

This thesis is a biography of Henry Louis Rey (1831-1894), a member of one of New Orleans’ most prominent Creole of Color families. During the Civil War, Rey was a captain in both the Confederate and Union Native Guards. In postbellum years, he served as a member of the Louisiana House of Representative and in appointed city offices. Rey became heavily involved with spiritualism in the 1850s and established séance circles in New Orleans during the early 1870s. The voluminous transcripts of these séance circles have survived into the twenty-first century; however, scholarly use of these sources has been limited because most of the transcripts and all marginal annotations later written by René Grandjean are in French. The author’s translations of the spirit communications through their entire run reveal insight into the spiritual and material realms negotiated by New Orleans Black Creoles as they weathered declining political and economic fortunes.

Read the entire thesis here.

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Native Guard: Poems

Posted in Autobiography, Books, History, Media Archive, Poetry, United States on 2012-09-02 23:41Z by Steven

Native Guard: Poems

Mariner Books an Imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2007-04-03
64 pages
Trim Size: 5.50 x 8.25
Paperback ISBN-13/EAN: 9780618872657; ISBN-10: 0618872655

Natasha Trethewey, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing
Emory University

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South—where one of the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. Trethewey’s resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.

Excerpt:

Miscegenation

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong – mis in Mississippi.

A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same
as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.

Faulkner’s Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name
for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.

My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name.
I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.

When I turned 33 my father said, It’s your Jesus year – you’re the same
age he was when he died
. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.

I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name –
though I’m not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.

 

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The Aborigines Act, 1911 [Australia]

Posted in History, Law, Oceania on 2012-09-02 23:39Z by Steven

The Aborigines Act, 1911 [Australia]
1911-12-07
Number 1048
Source: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

An Act to make provision for the better Protection and Control of the Aboriginal and Half-caste Inhabitants of the State of South Australia.

  1. This Act may be cited as ‘‘ The Aborigines Act, 1911.”
  2. The Ordinance No. 12 of 1844, being an Ordinance to provide for the protection, maintenance, and up-bringing of orphans and other destitute children of the aborigines, is hereby repealed : Provided that such repeal shall not alter the effect of the doing or omission of any thing before the passing of this Act, and shall not affect any right granted, obligation imposed, liability incurred, or any offence committed by, under, or against the said Ordinance, or any proceedings commenced before or after the passing of this Act with respect to any of such matters or things…
  • 10. (1) The Chief Protector shall be the legal guardian of every aboriginal and every half-caste child, notwithstanding that any such child has a parent or other relative living, until such child attains the age of twenty-one years, except whilst such child is a State child within the meaning of ‘‘ The State Children Act, 1895,” or any Act amending or substituted for that Act. (2) Every Protector shall, within his district, be the local guardian of every such child within his district. (3) Such local guardian shall have and exercise the powers and duties prescribed…

Read the entire act here.

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The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture

Posted in Books, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, United Kingdom on 2012-09-02 18:24Z by Steven

The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture

University of Pennsylvania Press
2000
384 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-3541-8
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8122-1722-3
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8122-0014-0

Roxann Wheeler, Associate Professor of English
Ohio State University

In the 1723 Journal of a Voyage up the Gambia, an English narrator describes the native translators vital to the expedition’s success as being “Black as Coal.” Such a description of dark skin color was not unusual for eighteenth-century Britons—but neither was the statement that followed: “here, thro’ Custom, (being Christians) they account themselves White Men.” The Complexion of Race asks how such categories would have been possible, when and how such statements came to seem illogical, and how our understanding of the eighteenth century has been distorted by the imposition of nineteenth and twentieth century notions of race on an earlier period.

Wheeler traces the emergence of skin color as a predominant marker of identity in British thought and juxtaposes the Enlightenment’s scientific speculation on the biology of race with accounts in travel literature, fiction, and other documents that remain grounded in different models of human variety. As a consequence of a burgeoning empire in the second half of the eighteenth century, English writers were increasingly preoccupied with differentiating the British nation from its imperial outposts by naming traits that set off the rulers from the ruled; although race was one of these traits, it was by no means the distinguishing one. In the fiction of the time, non-European characters could still be “redeemed” by baptism or conversion and the British nation could embrace its mixed-race progeny. In Wheeler’s eighteenth century we see the coexistence of two systems of racialization and to detect a moment when an older order, based on the division between Christian and heathen, gives way to a new one based on the assertion of difference between black and white.

Table of Contents

  • List of Illustrations
  • Introduction. The Empire of Climate: Categories of Race in Eighteenth-Century Britain
  • 1. Christians, Savages, and Slaves: From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic
  • 2. Racializing Civility: Violence and Trade in Africa
  • 3. Romanticizing Racial Difference: Benevolent Subordination and the Midcentury Novel
  • 4. Consuming Englishness: On the Margins of Civil Society
  • 5. The Politicization of Race: The Specter of the Colonies in Britain
  • Epilogue. Theorizing Race and Racism in the Eighteenth Century
  • Notes
  • Index
  • Acknowledgments
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Households and Neighborhoods Among Free People of Color in New Orleans: A View from the Census, 1850-1860

Posted in Census/Demographics, Dissertations, History, Louisiana, Media Archive, United States on 2012-09-01 17:58Z by Steven

Households and Neighborhoods Among Free People of Color in New Orleans: A View from the Census, 1850-1860

University of New Orleans
2010-05-14
58 pages

Frank Joseph Lovato

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History

Historians have debated to what extent the free people of color in New Orleans were members of a wealthy privileged elite or part of a middle or working class in the South’s largest antebellum city. This study steps outside the debate to suggest that analysis of the censuses of 1850 and 1860 shows correlations between neighborhoods, household structures, and occupations that reveal a heterogeneous population that eludes simple definitions. In particular this study focuses on mixed-race households to shed light on this segment of the free colored population that is mostly unstudied and generally misrepresented. This study also finds that immediately prior to the Civil War, mixed-race families, for no easily understood reason, tended to cluster in certain neighborhoods. Mostly this study points out that by the Civil War, the free people of color in New Orleans had evolved into a diverse mostly working class population.

Table of Contents

  • List of Figures
  • List of Tables
  • List of Maps
  • List of Census Form
  • Abstract
  • Introduction
  • Origins of the Free People of Color in New Orleans
  • Historiography of the Free People of Color in New Orleans
  • Methodology Used for Data Gathering
  • Economic Role of the Free People of Color in Ante-Bellum New Orleans
  • Community Organizations
  • Neighborhoods and the Free People of Color
  • Free People of Color and the Prelude to the Civil War
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • Tables
  • Maps
  • Census Forms
  • Vita

List of Figures

  • Figure 1 – 4th Ward Mixed-Race Couple Distribution
  • Figure 2 – 5th Ward Mixed-Race Couple Distribution
  • Figure 3 – New Orleans Population in 1850 & 1860
  • Figure 4 – New Orleans Colored Population in 1850 & 1860
  • Figure 5 –Population Density of Colored Males in 1850 & 1860

List of Tables

  • Table 1 – 1850 New Orleans Census
  • Table 2 – 1860 New Orleans Census
  • Table 3 – Population Density for Colored, Mulatto and Blacks in the 1850 New Orleans Census
  • Table 4 – Population Density for Colored, Mulatto and Blacks in the 1860 New Orleans Census
  • Table 5 – Property Values of the Free People of Color in 1850 New Orleans
  • Table 6 – Property Values of the Free People of Color in 1860 New Orleans

List of Maps

  • MUNICIPALITIES and WARDS 1847
  • WARDS 1852
  • Neighborhoods in New Orleans

List of Census Forms

  • Title Page 1st and 4th Wards (1st Municipality)
  • 1st Ward, 1st Municipality – 1850
  • 9th Wards -1860

Read the entire thesis here.

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Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal people and the Australian Nation

Posted in Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Oceania on 2012-09-01 02:37Z by Steven

Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal people and the Australian Nation

Aboriginal Studies Press
September 2011
288 pages
230 x 152mm; b/w Illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 9780855757793

Russell McGregor, Associate Professor of History
James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

McGregor offers a holistic interpretation of the complex relationship between Indigenous and settler Australians during the middle four decades of the twentieth century. Combining the perspectives of political, social and cultural history in a coherent narrative, he provides a cogent analysis of how the relationship changed, and the impediments to change.

McGregor’s focus is on the quest for Aboriginal inclusion in the Australia nation; a task which dominated the Aboriginal agenda at the time. McGregor challenges existing scholarship and assumptions, particularly around assimilation. In doing so he provides an understanding of why assimilation once held the approval of many reformers, including Indigenous activists.

He reveals that the inclusion of Aboriginal people in the Australian nation was not a function of political lobbying and parliamentary decision making. Rather, it depended at least as much on Aboriginal people’s public profile, and the way their demonstrated abilities partially wore down the apathy and indifference of settler Australians.

Russell McGregor is Associate Professor of History at James Cook University in Townsville. He has published extensively on the history of settler Australian attitudes toward Aboriginal people, including the award-winning book Imagined Destinies. His other research interests are in Australian nationalism and environmental history.

Contents

  • Illustrations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Preface
  • Notes on Terminology
  • Abbreviations and Acronyms
  • Prologue: The Crimson Thread of Whiteness
  • Chapter 1: Preserving the National Complexion
    • Managing miscegenation
    • Hiding heredity
    • Opponents
    • Continuities and discontinuities
  • Chapter 2: Primitive Possibilities
    • Reappraising the primitive
    • Refiguring the federation
    • Humanitarians and activists
    • A new deal
  • Chapter 3: Aboriginal Activists Demand Acceptance
    • Conditional citizenship
    • Virile, capable and black
    • Representation and rights
    • Citizen soldiers
  • Chapter 4: Restricted Reconstruction
    • Postwar world order
    • Challenging white Australia
    • An anthropologist discovers citizenship
    • Appreciating the Aboriginal
  • Chapter 5: To Live as We Do
    • Stranded individuals
    • Avoiding ‘Aborigines’
    • Mobilising civil society
    • Attenuated identities
  • Chapter 6: Assimilation and Integration
    • Assimilation through tradition
    • An expedient slogan
    • Definitions and redefinitions
  • Chapter 7: Enriching the Nation
    • Respect and redemption
    • Sporting heroes
    • Indigenous wisdom
    • Appreciation and appropriation
  • Chapter 8: Fellow Australians
    • Voting rights
    • Drinking rites
    • Right wrongs, write yes
    • Special assistance or minority rights?
  • Chapter 9: After the Referendum
    • Dream time in Canberra
    • Land rights
    • An Aboriginal nation
  • Epilogue: Unfinished Business
  • Notes
  • Select Bibliography
  • Index

Chapter 1: Preserving the National Complexion

After the First World War, Australians began to notice a new trend among the Aboriginal population. Within their own enclaves, people of mixed descent were reproducing faster than white Australians. Remarking on this trend, demographer Jens Lyng observed in 1927 that ‘the idea of the White Australia ideal eventually being shattered from within cannot be dismissed as altogether absurd’.1 Lyng’s wording was guarded, and there is no evidence to suggest that the Australian public was alarmed by half-caste reproduction rates or fearful that it posed a threat to the national ideal. Some administrators of Aboriginal affairs were alarmed and fearful, however — or at least their statements on the issue were alarmist and fear-provoking. Two administrators in particular — Western Australia’s Chief Protector of Aborigines (later Commissioner of Native Affairs), AO Neville, and the Northern Territory’s Chief Protector of Aborigines, Cecil Cook — elevated the ‘half-caste menace’ to their highest priority.

Neville’s and Cook’s solution to the half-caste problem was biological absorption, colloquially called ‘breeding out the colour’. This entailed directing persons of mixed descent into marital unions with white people, so that after several generations of interbreeding all outward signs of Aboriginal ancestry would disappear. It held an incongruent array of aims and means. Absorption promised to resolve the supposed problems resulting from racial intermixture by encouraging still more intermixing. It aimed to uphold the ideal of white Australia but flew in the face of popular notions of white Australia as a doctrine of racial purity. While racist in many ways, absorption simultaneously defied prevalent racist assumptions of hybrid inferiority. It parallelled eugenicism in certain respects, but also clashed with eugenic principles. It was inspired partly by humanitarian welfarism, but evinced profound disdain for the subjects of its welfare interventions.

Despite these myriad inspirations and aspirations, absorption’s primary objective was accurately stated in its colloquial designation. It aimed to ‘breed out the colour’ — to physically transform persons of Aboriginal ancestry into white Australians and thereby bleach out the as yet small coloured stain in the national fabric. Half-castes must become white since whiteness was the essential qualification for national membership. Breeding the colour out of persons of Aboriginal descent was equally a program of breeding them into the community of the nation. This chapter argues that biological absorption in the interwar years should be understood in the context of a strongly ethnic conception of Australian nationhood, whereby myths of blood kinship provided the core of national cohesion. It also argues that while absorption was a variant of assimilation, it was in crucial respects different to the social assimilation which some critics were beginning to advocate in the 1930s, and which came to the fore after the Second World War

Read the entire chapter here.

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Banneker’s family tree still bears rich fruit

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, United States on 2012-09-01 01:15Z by Steven

Banneker’s family tree still bears rich fruit

The Baltimore Sun
2006-06-12

Gregory Kane

And so Molly Welsh, an Englishwoman sentenced to indentured servitude in 17th-century Maryland, wed an African slave named Bannaka. And they begat four daughters, one of whom was named Mary.

And Mary wed a slave named Robert, who took her last name, which, by the time of their nuptials, had become Bannaky. Mary and Robert begat one son and three daughters. One of the daughters, Jemima, wed Samuel D. Lett. From that union came eight children, including a son named Aquilla.

“Aquilla Lett eventually moved to Ohio,” Gwen Marable said Saturday afternoon. A number of generations later, “that’s how I came to be born in Ohio,” she said. Marable eventually found her way to Maryland. She may be in these parts for good.

“The project has really kept me here,” Marable said.

That project would be the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum in Baltimore County. That son Mary and Robert Bannaky had was none other than Benjamin Banneker—the farmer, astronomer, mathematician, surveyor and publisher—whose farm once sat on the site where the park is now located. Marable described herself as a collateral descendant of Banneker, not a direct descendant…

…”It’s been said that she married Bannaka to keep him from running off,” said Cole Wiggins, a board member of the Friends of the Banneker Historical Park and Museum. “But don’t quote me on that. It’s never been proved.”

Actually, wisecracking husbands might say that Welsh’s marrying Bannaka might have been the sure way to make him run off. What may be closer to the truth is that marriages between white, female indentured servants and black men—whether slave or “free men of color”—could have been quite common at the time…

Read the entire article here.

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Q&A: Professor examines those ‘outside the color lines’ in new book

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, History, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2012-08-31 23:56Z by Steven

Q&A: Professor examines those ‘outside the color lines’ in new book

University of Wisconsin-Madison
News
2012-10-20

Jenney Price

The history of segregation in the United States is often seen in black and white. Leslie Bow, professor of English and Asian American studies, is interested in the experiences of communities that fell outside those color lines. In her new book, Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South, Bow examines what segregation demanded of people who did not fall into the category of black or white — including Asians, American Indians and people of mixed race.

Wisconsin Week: What did segregation mean for people who — as you described it — stood outside the color lines? You posed the question, “Where did the Asian sit on the segregated bus?’

Leslie Bow: I think what’s most interesting to me about a project like this is that we often conflate race with African-Americans or see race as a black-white issue. When we say “multiculturalism” … we don’t think conceptually or theoretically about the challenge that poses to the way we think about racial history in the United States…

…WW: You mentioned your parents, who are Chinese-American. They attended white schools in Arkansas but didn’t socialize with and weren’t invited to the homes of their white classmates and I wondered how much their experience impacted your research interests?

LB: Definitely, because it was something that they themselves did not talk about. What I found was that they mediated that experience by creating a third level of segregation where there was limited social engagement with either whites or blacks. Their social context was wholly Chinese-American at the time. So, to me that was just the jumping off point for really an exploration of ambiguity, which is very much the bread and butter of literary studies: How you come to this process of interpreting multiple meanings within any given text…

Read the entire article here.

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The Species Problem: Nineteenth-Century Concepts of Racial Inferiority in the Origin of Man Controversy

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, History, Media Archive on 2012-08-30 03:10Z by Steven

The Species Problem: Nineteenth-Century Concepts of Racial Inferiority in the Origin of Man Controversy

American Anthropologist
Volume 72, Issue 6 (December 1970)
pages 1319–1329
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1970.72.6.02a00060

John S. Haller, Jr., Emeritus Professor of History
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

The species problem and its implications in the origin of man controversy had grown in importance in prewar America owing largely to the question of slavery. Implicit in the problem was the position of the so-called inferior races in society. The monogenists, despite their emphasis on environmentalism, were no more favorable to the Negro, except in their remote theoretical stance. The Civil War—not Darwin—brought the controversy to an end in America, but it continued to rage in Europe. The apparent synthesis of the schools during the 1870s did not disturb the stereotyped ideas of racial inferiority. The “inferior races” remained the basis of evolutionary discussion, leaving them as remote outcasts of the evolutionary struggle.

Though most nineteenth-century anthropologists were busily engaged in the technical aspects of somatometry, a good number of them were also concerned with the more problematic question of man’s origin. Like somatometry, the speculation into origin grew out of the awareness of differences in the broad spectrum of genus Homo. The taxonomic system of Linnaeus not only precipitated an intensive study of comparative structures, but led also to the question of whether the various “races” of man originated in one primitive stock. Were the Negroes, Hottentots, Eskimos, and Australians really men in the full sense of the term, sharing in the intellectual endowments of the European, or were they half-brutes, not belonging to what the French scientist Bory de Saint-Vincent called the “race adamique”? Defined in other terms, the problem concerned whether humanity descended from a monogenetic type, or whether humanity had distinct polygenetic ancestors. If it were true that these peoples were really subspecies, or subraces, then, some argued, they should become subject to the superior races. The subsequent controversy between the monogenists and polygenists became the longest of the internecine battles among the physical scientists of man. Though ostensibly concerned only with origin, the controversy highlighted a major confrontation between science and religion. It also illuminated the peculiar role played by the “inferior races” to the higher categories of man, a role that was fundamentally the same in both schools and remained unchanged during the decades before and after Darwin. The apparent synthesis of the two opposing schools during the 1870s seemed not to disturb the continuity of race stereotypes and the ideas of racial inferiority…

…The early polygenists favored the term “species” in their belief in the diversity of man. In the context of their definition, species were “fixed” and did not naturally cross with other species, except under artificial conditions. Although there was occasional fertility between the separate species, the product of the union was sterile or tending toward sterility, proving the “unnaturalness” of the original union. The concept of species was important to those nineteenth-century scientists who drew their schematization of the universe from the logical and spatial arrangement of the chain of being. For if one hybrid were capable of increase, the divine arrangement of the creator would have been distorted and a destructive imbalance set into the order of the world. All living things formed one chain of universal being from the lowest to the highest. None of the species originally formed were extinct. Nature proceeded according to divine plan and admitted of no improvement. The continuation of this belief into the nineteenth century precipitated an enormous amount of speculation as to whether the mulatto was more or less fertile than either of the two original stocks. The general consensus was that the mulatto was less fertile, and hence, an artificial hybrid tending toward extinction.As the nineteenth-century polygenists turned to the term “race” rather than “species” to define human types, so they borrowed the word “mongrel” in exchange for “hybrid” to identify the offspring of mixing (Vogt 1864: 441; Huxley 1876:412). In doing so, however, they created a confusion in terminology because the monogenist’s criteria for “species,” “race,” “mongrel,” and “hybrid” remained unchanged…

Read the entire article here or here.

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Reconstructing Molly Welsh: Race, Memory and the Story of Benjamin Banneker’s Grandmother

Posted in Dissertations, History, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2012-08-30 01:38Z by Steven

Reconstructing Molly Welsh: Race, Memory and the Story of Benjamin Banneker’s Grandmother

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
September 2008
194 pages

Sandra W. Perot

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department of History

Molly Welsh, oral tradition captured in the nineteenth century tells us, was a white Englishwoman who worked as an indentured servant. The same tradition has it that she owned slaves, although she is said to have married (or formed a union with) one of them. I aim not only to recover the life of Molly Welsh Banneker, but also to consider its various tellings—probing in particular at Molly’s shifting racial status. By examining a multiplicity of social and cultural aspects of life for seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Maryland women, I test whether these various narratives are even possible or plausible reconstructions of the Molly Welsh story. My project thus sheds light on the woman Molly Welsh was, how her story was constructed, what factors contributed to the retelling of her story, and why and at what point various narratives deviate from each other. By comparing the various Molly Welsh/Benjamin Banneker narratives it is possible to uncover or at least posit the most reliable narrative, while at the same time coming to a greater understanding of how such historically undocumented stories are constructed and what part memory plays in their reconstruction. An extensive bias informs many of these narratives, shaped by the various “memories” generated by family loyalty, by the growing tensions between the North and the South over slavery, by Reconstruction, and by new standards in historical accuracy that appeared with the founding of the American Historical Association in 1884.
 
While Molly Welsh may appear to be a near-silent character in her grandson Benjamin Banneker’s story, it is possible that new discoveries will be made that further verify (or refute) the long-standing tradition that Molly Welsh was a white English dairymaid transported to Maryland and that she married one of her own slaves by whom she had four daughters. Recent interest in new ways of approaching history, a greater acceptance of oral traditions as an important historical source, and a renewed appreciation for exploring stories of the untold masses, including women and minorities, may someday locate Molly’s voice and allow her to speak for herself. The chances of uncovering Molly Welsh’s story through documentary sources has improved with the recent emergence of powerful databases and electronic search tools have made many things possible that once were not (ancestry.com, the Old Bailey records for example). And then, perhaps Molly might come to represent other seventeenth-century women who married or had children with African men, like Eleanor Atkins who had a “Molattoe” child and who subsequently received twenty-four lashes for her crime, Elizabeth Day who admitted before the court that she had an illegitimate “Malatto” child by a “Negro man named Quasey belonging to her master,” or Eleanor Price who pleaded guilty to “Fornication with a Negro Man named Peter Belonging to Mr. John Walker,” received twenty-one lashes, and whose child, Jeremiah, was bound out until the age of twenty-one. Through their stories we might come to accept that one of the few choices these women had may have been with whom they had a child, though even this is subject to question. Regardless, Molly Welsh’s story is one that does not appear to stand alone. Through her we might see how women survived their indentures and prospered, or managed at the very least to endure life in Maryland, women whose lives until now never managed to become a footnote in anyone’s biography.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  • ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  • INTRODUCTION: LOCATING MOLLY WELSH: MEMORY AND MYTH IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MARYLAND
  • I THE DAIRYMAID AND THE PRINCE
  • II “OF THE DEEPEST DYE”: EARLY NARRATIVES
  • III “A REMARKABLY FAIR COMPLEXION”: THE EMERGENCE OF MOLLY WELSH
  • IV “ACT WELL YOUR PART, THERE ALL THE HONOR LIES”: THE RECONSTRUCTION OF MOLLY WELSH’S CHARACTER
  • V “THE TALE AS IT WAS TOLD FOR A HUNDRED YEARS ON THE RIDGE”: EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY AFRICAN-AMERICAN SCHOLARS REVITALIZE MOLLY’S STORY
  • VI “TRUE NOBILITY’S CONFINED TO NONE”: MOLLY IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
  • VII “BUT WHAT ARE COLOURS? DO COMPLEXIONS CHANGE?” TWENTYFIRST CENTURY PERSPECTIVES ON MOLLY WELSH.114
  • VIII EPILOGUE
  • APPENDICES
    • I CHRONOLOGY OF PRINT CONCERNING ANCESTRY OF BENJAMIN BANNEKER
    • II BANNEKER FAMILY TREE
    • III INTERNET RESPONSES TO MOLLY WELSH
    • IV MARYLAND LAWS DIRECTLY PERTAINING TO SLAVERY, RACE, INDENTURED SERVITUDE, WOMEN, AND MARRIAGE IN SEVENTEENTH- AND EARLY-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MARYLAND
    • V 1685 INDENTURE
    • VI A BRIEF EXAMINATION OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY TRANSPORTATION RECORDS
    • BIBLIOGRAPHY

Read the entire thesis here.

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