The African American Cemeteries of Petersburg, Virginia PDF Download

Author: Michael Trinkley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Author:
Publisher: Blair
ISBN: 9780895871190
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Slavery is as basic a part of Virginia history as George Washington, who was accompanied at Valley Forge and Yorktown by his slave William Lee, and Thomas Jefferson, who directed his slaves to cut 30 feet off a mountaintop for the site of Monticello. Slavery in the Old Dominion began in 1619, when a Spanish frigate was captured and its cargo of Negroes brought to Jamestown. Virginia Negroes experienced slavery as field laborers, as skilled craftsmen, as house servants. In 1935, the Virginia Writers' Project began collecting data for a history of Negroes in the Old Dominion through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Depression. Published in 1940 as "The Negro in Virginia", it was regarded as a "classic of its kind." Modern readers will be surprised at how relevant it remains today. -- From publisher's description.

Author: Emily Williams
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1648890555
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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In 1866, Alexander Dunlop, a free black living in Williamsburg Virginia, did three unusual things. He had an audience with the President of the United States, testified in front of the Joint Congressional Committee on Reconstruction, and he purchased a tombstone for his wife, Lucy Ann Dunlop. Purchases of this sort were rarities among Virginia’s free black community—and this particular gravestone is made more significant by Dunlop’s choice of words, his political advocacy, and the racialized rhetoric of the period. Carved by a pair of Richmond-based carvers, who like many other Southern monument makers, contributed to celebrating and mythologizing the “Lost Cause” in the wake of the Civil War, Lucy Ann’s tombstone is a powerful statement of Dunlop’s belief in the worth of all men and his hopes for the future. Buried in 1925 by the white members of a church congregation, and again in the 1960s by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the tombstone was excavated in 2003. Analysis, conservation, and long-term interpretation were undertaken by the Foundation in partnership with the community of the First Baptist Church, a historically black church within which Alexander Dunlop was a leader. “Stories in Stone: Memorialization, the Creation of History and the Role of Preservation” examines the story of the tombstone through a blend of object biography and micro-historical approaches and contrasts it with other memory projects, like the remembrance of the Civil War dead. Data from a regional survey of nineteenth-century cemeteries, historical accounts, literary sources, and the visual arts are woven together to explore the agentive relationships between monuments, their commissioners, their creators and their viewers and the ways in which memory is created and contested and how this impacts the history we learn and preserve.

Author: Lynn Rainville
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813935350
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In Hidden History, Lynn Rainville travels through the forgotten African American cemeteries of central Virginia to recover information crucial to the stories of the black families who lived and worked there for over two hundred years. The subjects of Rainville’s research are not statesmen or plantation elites; they are hidden residents, people who are typically underrepresented in historical research but whose stories are essential for a complete understanding of our national past. Rainville studied above-ground funerary remains in over 150 historic African American cemeteries to provide an overview of mortuary and funerary practices from the late eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth. Combining historical, anthropological, and archaeological perspectives, she analyzes documents—such as wills, obituaries, and letters—as well as gravestones and graveside offerings. Rainville’s findings shed light on family genealogies, the rise and fall of segregation, and attitudes toward religion and death. As many of these cemeteries are either endangered or already destroyed, the book includes a discussion on the challenges of preservation and how the reader may visit, and help preserve, these valuable cultural assets.

Author: Ryan K. Smith
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421439271
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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A brilliant example of public history, Death and Rebirth in a Southern City reveals how cemeteries can frame changes in politics and society across time.

Author: Kami Fletcher
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820365815
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
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.

Author: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 730

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Author: Anna Elizabeth Dickinson
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813134242
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Anna Dickinson’s career as an orator began in her teenage years, when she gave her first impassioned speech on women’s rights. By the age of twenty-one, she was spending at least six months per year on the road, delivering lectures on abolitionism, politics, and public affairs, and establishing herself as one of the nation’s first celebrities. In March 1875, Dickinson departed from Washington, D.C., for an extended tour of the South, curious to see how far the region had progressed in the decade after Appomattox. In A Tour of Reconstruction, editor J. Matthew Gallman compiles Dickinson’s commentary and observations to provide an honest depiction of the postwar South from the perspective of an outspoken radical abolitionist. She documents the continuing effects of the Civil War on the places she visited, and true to her inquisitive spirit, questions the societal developments she witnessed, seeking out black and white southerners to discuss issues of the day. Like many northern observers, she focuses on documenting race relations and the state of the southern economy, but she also details the public’s reactions to her appearances, providing some of her most telling commentary. A Tour of Reconstruction, punctuated with a wealth of historical observations and entertaining anecdotes, is the story of one woman’s experiences in the postbellum South.

Author: Sharon Pajka
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1467150665
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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America has an array of women writers who have made history--and many of them lived, died and were buried in Virginia.(/b> Gothic novelists, writers of Westerns and African American poets, these writers include a Pulitzer Prize winner, the first woman writer to be named Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the first woman to top the best-seller lists in the twentieth century. Mary Roberts Rinehart was a bestselling mystery author often called "the American Agatha Christie." Anne Spencer was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance. V. C. Andrews was so popular that when she died a court ruled that her name was taxable, and the poetry of Susan Archer Talley Weiss received praise from Edgar Allan Poe. Professor and cemetery history enthusiast Sharon Pajka has written a guide to their accomplishments in life and to their final resting places.

Author: Mechal Sobel
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Mechal Sobel's fascinating study of the religious history of slaves and free blacks in antebellum America is presented here in a compact volume without the appendixes. Sobel's central thesis is that Africans brought their world views into North America where, eventually, under the tremendous pressures and hardships of chattel slavery, they created a coherent faith that preserved and revitalized crucial African understandings and usages regarding spirit and soul-travels, while melding them with Christian understandings of Jesus and individual salvation.