Washington, George, 1732-1799 (SC 535)

Finding aid and scan (Click on additional files below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 535. Facsimile of George Washington’s 14 April 1789 letter to John Langdon, president pro tempore of the Senate, accepting the presidential office.Includes a discussion of the events surrounding the occasion written by Paul M. Angle

Roger Williams, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln

Three prints mounted in a cream and gold mat and gold frame. Subjects include Roger Williams (1603-1684), George Washington (1732-1799), and Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865).https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/fvw-artifacts/3833/thumbnail.jp

MS-195: Early American Document Collection

The Early American Document Collection contains broadsides, manuscripts, and other material from the colonial era and early republic. The material covers a broad range of subjects, mostly pertaining to administration in colonial Philadelphia, and the American Revolution. The series listing below further specifies the subject areas within the collection. Possible research topics include: colonial-era legal, land, or government documentation, the influence of broadside announcements, the use of German in colonial American documents, and for a general investigation into the happenings of the Continental Army. The military documents are more sparse in subject area, and do not include engagement information. The dates are largely bulked from 1727-1728, and also from 1775-1787. The collection does not contain mid-century documents pertaining to topics like the French and Indian War, or specific topics on daily colonial life. The Early American Document Collection also contains a strong variety of colonial watermarks, from domestic and foreign paper. Possible research topics concerning watermarks include: sourcing of the papermaker, the inspiration behind the designs, the region of production, the trade connections between papermaker and user, and the connections between documents with the same watermarks. Further historical information on the use of watermarks in early American documents can be found in the historical notes above. Special Collections and College Archives Finding Aids are discovery tools used to describe and provide access to our holdings. Finding aids include historical and biographical information about each collection in addition to inventories of their content. More information about our collections can be found on our website http://www.gettysburg.edu/special_collections/collections/.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/findingaidsall/1173/thumbnail.jp

A History of the Early Fairfield Town Lots

In 1732 Charles Carroll of Maryland received a grant of 5000 acres of land in present Adams County, Pennsylvania, from the authorities of Maryland. Soon after, a survey of that land, known as “Carroll’s Tract” or “Carroll’s Delight,” was conducted. At that point in time there was still some dispute over the location of the boundary between the two states. A temporary line was agreed upon in 1739, and a more permanent line (very near that temporary boundary) was surveyed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon during the 1760s. And even though it was established that Carroll’s Tract was in Pennsylvania, an agreement was made that Marylanders would retain their rights to the lands previously granted to them. But it is important to note that at an early date the people settling in this area knew they were in Pennsylvania. According to Charles H. Glatfelter, the most respected of local historians, “the widely held and long persisting notion that until many years later people did not know where the boundary line was and that it shifted from time to time has no basis whatsoever in fact.” [excerpt

“Known to be Equal to the Management”: The Modernising Planter and the Enslaved Overseer

Enslaved overseers have largely been neglected in the extant historiography of plantation slavery. At best they have been pushed to the margins of in the literature, their numbers and their significance downplayed. Yet, as large plantations diversified over the latter years of the eighteenth century, and as relations between established planters and independently minded and aspirational white overseers became prone to mistrust and friction, many prominent modernising planters, including both Washington and Jefferson, began to experiment with unfree managers. They often proved to be skilled, dependable and, even under the pressure of the Revolutionary War, resilient. Yet their presence raised serious questions within plantation society too; they challenged white racial hegemony, and their ‘loyalty’ was a conditional and contingent quality. They occupy a unique place in the story of plantation management, one that challenges orthodox conceptions of race and power in the slave South

Lewis-Starling Collection (MSS 38)

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 38. Correspondence, Civil War military and personal papers, business papers, land records, scrapbooks, account books, clippings, and genealogical records of the Lewis and Starling families of Logan and Christian counties in Kentucky, and associated families

Southern Manuscript Sermons before 1800: A Bibliography

https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_newfound-ebooks/1007/thumbnail.jp

ASSEMBLING ENSLAVED LIVES: LABOR, CONSUMPTION, AND LANDSCAPES IN THE NORTHERN SHENANDOAH VALLEY

This dissertation is a study of the lives of some of the people enslaved on rural plantations and farmsteads in the northern Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia. Scholars did not widely acknowledge the presence of slavery in the Valley before the 1990s, and this is the first work to provide an in-depth view of the lives of enslaved Shenandoahans before 1860. Specifically, this project answers two questions: what was life like for enslaved people in the Shenandoah Valley, and how did they shape the region\u27s political economies. Data for this project comes from archaeological excavations at the main enslaved quartering site at Belle Grove Plantation and 19th-century written sources from Frederick and Shenandoah Counties, Virginia, and Jefferson County, West Virginia. Using these sources, this dissertation assesses 1) the impact grain agriculture had on enslaved people and the economic impact of enslaved farmers, 2) the food rations issued to enslaved Shenandoahans and the ways they grew, gathered, raised, and hunted at night and on Sundays to ensure their families had enough to eat, 3) how restrictions on enslaved people’s consumption practices limited their ability to travel to, and buy goods from, cities, towns, and country stores, 4) the ways enslaved people used imported tea and tablewares and locally-made utilitarian ceramics to make lives for themselves, and the larger economic implications of these actions, and 5) the struggles between enslaved Shenandoahans and their enslavers that took place through local landscapes. In addition to its contribution to Shenandoah Valley history, this dissertation proposes new ways of theorizing archaeological research on enslaved life that draws heavily from assemblage thinking and Black studies, focusing on ontological politics through which how enslavers defined enslaved people as a different type of human than themselves and enslaved people redefined their humanities on their own terms

The Meanings of Georgia's Eighteenth-Century Great Seals

First paragraph: Georgia experienced rapid political transformation over the course of the eighteenth century, changing in the space of a few decades from a British proprietary colony to a Crown colony, and then to an independent republic that federated into a new union. The creation of a new great seal for Georgia accompanied each step, because as the ultimate symbol of sovereignty, the seal was a vital tool that conferred legitimacy upon ruling authorities and lent authenticity to their actions. Max Cleland, as Georgia Secretary of State in 1986, described the seal as having "wide value as a symbol," noting that its power "has been impressed on our entire history." Georgia's eighteenth-century seals have indeed had a distinguished legacy. At its founding in 1839, the Georgia Historical Society modeled its seal and logo on the colonial Trustees' seal of 1733, and since 1998 this image has adorned a growing number of historical marker sites across the state. Georgia's current state seal remains true to the design of the last seal that was created in the eighteenth century (1799), with only minor alteration. Its three-pillared republican arch also features on the Georgia flag, having proved resilient in the face of almost all of the flag's past incarnations. These seals were more than just a part of the paraphernalia of eighteenth-century governance, for they were also instruments of cultural hegemony. The act of creating the colonial seals (in 1732, 1733, 1754 and 1767) lay at the heart of the European projection of dominion over the New World. In turn, the act of creating a great seal for the independent state (in 1777 and definitively in 1799) was a chance to explain revolution and to express post-colonial identity. The seals gave material credence to invocations of power, and provided unique opportunities literally to stamp symbolic ideals onto real life. They contained grandiose cultural messages, all the more concentrated because they were compressed into a circular space of just four inches or so in diameter