Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp

In Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, J. Brent Morris uncovers the lives of people who self liberated and the communities they developed in the Great Dismal Swamp. Reviewer Ashely Towle writes that among the important revelations the book provides is that the maroons’ communities were more robust and persisted longer than previously understood and their very presence undermined the institution of slavery. Morris’s book “deserves high praise” as it is a “readable and engaging account of the Dismal Swamp marrons and their contributions to ending slavery.

History Department 2020 Summer Reading Suggestions

This list of readings was collected by USM History Department faculty at the University of Southern Maine. From the guide: An important part of the anti-racist work of dismantling racial inequities is self-education, doing the work of learning about the hundreds of years of oppression and injustice that provide the context to our contemporary struggles. For historians, context is key to all that we do. Faculty members in the Department of History at USM have come together to suggest a series of texts that we find both personally significant and think will be helpful in coming to a greater understanding of the events, actions, and inactions that have led us to this current moment in the United States and globally. This list reflects our diverse geographical areas of expertise and research, and is by no means exhaustive. We continue to learn from one another, and from our students. We welcome student suggestions on books and pieces you think we should read; this is a conversation. We encourage you to cast a wide net in your anti-racist reading and learning. Here is a place to start

Dying Free: African Americans, Death, and the New Birth of Freedom, 1863-1877

This dissertation explores the ways in which African Americans in the South used death to stake claims to citizenship and equality in the years following emancipation. The death and destruction the Civil War wrought did not end at Appomattox Courthouse. After the war, freedpeople in the South continued to die from disease, starvation, and exposure and former bondspeople became the targets of racial violence by white Southerners. By recasting emancipation as a struggle for power over life and death, “Dying Free” provides a new framework for examining the fraught power relations between former masters, ex-slaves, and the federal government in the postwar South. This dissertation asserts that African Americans used the murders of their loved ones and community members as opportunities to protest the injustices they faced as they tried to forge new lives in freedom. By harnessing the power of the dead in a variety of arenas, freedpeople strengthened their bonds with relatives and communities, denounced their unjust treatment at the hands of white Southerners, and demanded equality and the rights of citizenship from the federal government.https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/facbooks/1332/thumbnail.jp

Grave History: Death, Race, and Gender in Southern Cemeteries

Grave sites not only offer the contemporary viewer the physical markers of those remembered but also a wealth of information about the era in which the cemeteries were created. These markers hold keys to our historical past and allow an entry point of interrogation about who is represented, as well as how and why.Grave History is the first volume to use Southern cemeteries to interrogate and analyze Southern society and the construction of racial and gendered hierarchies from the antebellum period through the dismantling of Jim Crow. Through an analysis of cemeteries throughout the South—including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Virginia, from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries—this volume demonstrates the importance of using the cemetery as an analytical tool for examining power relations, community formation, and historical memory.Grave History draws together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, including historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and social-justice activists to investigate the history of racial segregation in southern cemeteries and what it can tell us about how ideas regarding race, class, and gender were informed and reinforced in these sacred spaces.Each chapter is followed by a learning activity that offers readers an opportunity to do the work of a historian and apply the insights gleaned from this book to their own analysis of cemeteries. These activities, designed for both the teacher and the student, as well as the seasoned and the novice cemetery enthusiast, encourage readers to examine cemeteries for their physical organization, iconography, sociodemographic landscape, and identity politics.https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/facbooks/1683/thumbnail.jp