WHAT MAKES A DATABASE RELATIONAL: INFORMATION IS RELATED TO EACH OTHER, BUT YOU CAN CHANGE HOW YOU VIEW THAT INFORMATION BY CREATING DIFFERENT LAYOUTS AND REORGANIZING THAT INFORMATION BY ID

• I revive and update histories on Black culture from the 1970s and 80s (Sterling Stuckey, Robert Farris Thompson, Leon Litwack, and Lawrence Levine) and put them into conversation with recent work situating African diasporic folk culture as the intellectual history of the Atlantic World (Jason Young, Aisha Finch, James Sweet, Grey Gundaker).[1]  

• I integrate new archaeologies and anthropologies of culture to show how African Americans developed social controls and collectivities among each other outside of their legal integration into the body politic.[2] 

• The most persuasive and enduring paradigm for American self-emancipation remains Black military service and W.E.B. DuBois’ assertion that enslaved people conducted a “general strike” in leaving plantations for Union camps.[3]

• I speak to an audience in African American and diasporic studies concerned with the unfinished work of Atlantic World emancipation as well as to American history audiences concerned with Civil War and Reconstruction in national reckonings. 

[1] Stuckey, Slave Culture; Thompson, Flash of the Spirit; Levine, Black Culture Black Consciousness; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long; James Sweet, Domingo Alvares; Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror; Pablo Gomez, Experiential Caribbean; Jason Young, Rituals of Resistance, Kiatezua Lubanzadio Luyaluka, "The Spiral as the Basic Semiotic of the Kongo Religion, the Bukongo: Journal of Black Studies 2017 Vol. 48(1) 91-112.

[2] In anthropology, I use the work of Grey Gundaker, Jean and John Comaroff, and David Chidester.. In archaeology, I use digs performed in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, New Orleans, Texas, and Kentucky.

[3] W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860– 1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1935), Chapter 4.

"LORD, UNTIL I REACH MY HOME": INSIDE THE REFUGEE CAMPS OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR     by Abigail Cooper

This study explores the inner life of the refugee camps of the Civil War.  Called “contraband” camps because the refugees were considered the confiscated slave property of Confederates, the camps were the first great cultural meeting grounds the war produced.  This work gives close study to the refugee camps over the course of the Civil War period, comparing the experiences across the South with a special focus on the religious transformations that occurred there.  It analyzes sources through a process of triangulation—examining slave interviews and narratives, missionary texts, government military records, and fragmentary evidence collected from various regional archives—in order to uncover the practices and artifacts outside of institutionally understood religious rubrics in the study of history.  First, this study elucidates the cross-cultural encounter that took place in the camps not only as an interracial experiment between white and black but also as an exchange between black slaves of different cultural backgrounds.  Second, this dissertation shows that the camps were breeding grounds for religious revival.  Here was a meeting not of slave religion but of slave religions, and the syncretic forms and clashes that resulted are not yet described nor understood.  Finally, this study promises to challenge histories of emancipation that celebrate black military service as the sole source of contraband freedom and citizenship.  Rather than creating a solution for the contrabands, the advent of Union black military recruiting was a trauma, upsetting family reunions and making claims to land and subsistence more tenuous.  This study evaluates the cost of military service and the alternative scenarios refugees themselves proposed.