Slavery, Freedom, and Dependence in Pre-Revolutionary Boston, 1700-1775

Thesis advisor: Cynthia L. LyerlyThis dissertation uses an early-modern, transnational lens to examine slavery in eighteenth-century Boston. It serves as a test case for reexamining and reconceptualizing slavery in British North America and the Atlantic World. Rather than the traditional dichotomous conception of slavery and freedom, colonial-era slavery must be understood as part of a continuum of unfreedom. In Boston, African slavery existed alongside many other forms of dependence, including indentured servitude, apprenticeship, pauper apprenticeship, and Indian slavery. Drawing heavily on legal records such as wills and trial transcripts, we can see how African slavery functioned within this complex world of dependency. In this hierarchical, inherently unfree world, enslaved Bostonians were more concerned with their everyday treatment than emancipation. Eschewing modern notions of freedom and liberty and understanding slavery as part of a larger Atlantic World characterized by a culture of unfreedom, this study demonstrates not only how African slaves were able to decode their new homeland and shape the terms of enslavement, but also how marginalized people engrained themselves in the very fabric of colonial American society.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: History

Evidences for a quasi 60-year North Atlantic Oscillation since 1700 and its meaning for global climate change

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) obtained using instrumental and documentary proxy predictors from Eurasia is found to be characterized by a quasi 60-year dominant oscillation since 1650. This pattern emerges clearly once the NAO record is time integrated to stress its comparison with the temperature record. The integrated NAO (INAO) is found to well correlate with the length of the day (since 1650) and the global surface sea temperature record HadSST2 and HadSST3 (since 1850). These findings suggest that INAO can be used as a good proxy for global climate change, and that a 60-year cycle exists in the global climate since at least 1700. Finally, the INAO ~60-year oscillation well correlates with the ~60- year oscillations found in the historical European aurora record since 1700, which suggests that this 60-year dominant climatic cycle has a solar-astronomical origin

Excavations at the State House Inn Site, 18AP42, 15 State Circle, Annapolis, Maryland

During the spring of 1985, archaeological excavations were conducted at the State House Inn, 18AP42, 15 State Circle, Annapolis, Maryland. Work was conducted by "Archaeology in Annapolis," a cooperative project between Historic Annapolis, Inc. and the University of Maryland, College Park. This site is located within zone seven of the Maryland Archaeological Research Units (Figures 1, 2 & 3). A two-week program of testing in March, 1985 was carried out in the yard on State Circle. On the basis of positive results from this testing, six more weeks of excavations were carried out. This report summarizes the results of both phases of the excavations. Excavations were directed by Joseph W. Hopkins III, with the assistance of Donald Creveling and Paul Shackel. These excavations were part of a larger investigation of the Baroque town plan of Annapolis, laid out by Governor Francis Nicholson in 1695. This plan served as a framework around which the town grew over the next three centuries. Available historic records do not adequately document the development of the plan to its present form. The excavation program was a first step in a program to recover information about the gradual change of the city plan

Material Culture and Textiles: An Overview

The majority of literature dealing with textile-related artifactual evidence has consisted of descriptive catalogues concerned primarily with identification of material but only minimally placing it into a broad historical context. Some recent studies have moved away from this approach, to look at the impact of cloth production and consumption on local social, economic and political realities. Scholars have examined such things as the use of fabrics to indicate wealth and status; the influence of British imperial policies on North American textile production; the differences between urban and rural production and use, and the impact of the migration of cultural traditions on the structure and output of textile-making. Despite the newer research, there remains a distinct polarity between the descriptive works on the one hand, focusing on objects, and those on the other that look at broader issues of textile use and production through an analysis of documentary evidence. This paper examines how we can begin to integrate the study of objects with more traditional historical research. Résumé Les textes consacrés aux documents archéo-logiques ayant rapport aux textiles sont, pour la plupart, des catalogues descriptifs où l'on s'attache principalement à décrire des arte-facts, sans s'attarder à les situer dans un contexte historique général. Certaines études publiées récemment s'écartent de ce modèle et tentent d'évaluer l'effet de la production et de la consommation de textiles sur les réalités sociales, économiques et politiques de cer-taines collectivités. Les chercheurs se sont ainsi penchés sur l'usage de certains tissus comme signes de richesse ou de rang social, l'influence des politiques impériales bri-tanniques sur la production textile en milieux urbain et rural, ainsi que les répercussions de la migration des traditions culturelles sur la structure et la productivité de l'activité textile. Malgré ces nouvelles recherches, on remarque encore une nette polarisation autour des travaux descriptifs centrés sur les objets eux-mêmes et de ceux où l'on analyse ces documents archéologiques dans une perspective plus vaste comme celle de l'utilisation et la production des textiles. Cet exposé examine la façon dont nous pourrions maintenant intégrer l'étude des objets à une démarche plus classique de recherche historique

Where the Weather Comes From

When Andreas Malm observed that “not even the weather belongs fully to the moment,” he was looking forward from 2016, considering the cumulative impact of present emissions on “generations not yet born.” The reverse is also true: present storms have their origins in past consumption. Up to this point, though, analysis of how human activity will intensify future weather has focused on change in a limited set of quantifiable conditions, like precipitation and temperature – and in this respect, too, the weather of the present is the weather of the past. Both this set of variables and its status as the central object of meteorological study have their origins in the eighteenth century – and so, as this essay will demonstrate, many current complaints about the narrowness of this sense of the weather have also been anticipated by the widespread debate about the objectives of empirical inquiry in which it took shape. By looking back at the concerns that this empirical model of the weather inspired when it was new, however, and taking seriously the eighteenth-century fears about what might be lost to the rise of this new science, we also catch a glimpse of the alternative (and often more expansive) models of perceiving the causes and consequences of encounters with extreme weather that were circulating at the same time. For contemporary scholars interested, after Christina Sharpe, in how to reconceive the weather as “the totality of the environments in which we struggle,” these eighteenth-century responses to the weather thus offer a timely reminder: to aim, in this effort, to acknowledge more of the social and political injustice to which we are so unevenly exposed, but also to cast light on the power we can claim to change the weather–if only we acknowledge all the ways we already make the weather for one another