Browsing by Author "Hall, Randal L"

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    Fashioning Slavery: Slaves and Clothing in the U.S. South, 1830–1865
    (2014-04-24) Knowles, Katie; Boles, John B.; Hall, Randal L; Levander, Caroline Field; Eaton, Linda S.
    This dissertation examines such varied sources as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Eastman Johnson’s genre paintings, runaway advertisements, published narratives, plantation records, the WPA ex-slave narratives, and nearly thirty items of clothing with provenance connections to enslaved wearers. The research presented in the following pages seeks to reveal the complexities surrounding clothing and slave life in the antebellum South by examining a variety of sources in combination. Enslaved people resisted race-based slavery by individualizing their appearance when working and when playing, but they were ultimately unsuccessful in resisting their exclusion from the race-based American fashion system. In bringing together previous scholarship on slavery in the American South, material culture, and fashion studies, this project reveals the deep connections between race and fashion in the antebellum United States. Enslaved people struggled against a racist culture that attempted to exclude them as valid participants in American culture. The individuality expressed by slaves through personalizing their clothing was a tactic of resistance against racism and race-based slavery. In many instances, enslaved people chose to acquire and dress in fashionable Euro-American clothing, a method of resistance because it was an attempt by them to disrupt the racially exclusionary fashion system of the antebellum United States. Though relatively few garments survive today, the voices of enslaved people and the records of their oppressors provide a rich narrative that helps deconstruct the many ways in which slaves encountered clothing. Clothing played an integral part in the daily life of enslaved African Americans in the antebellum South and functioned in multi-faceted ways across the antebellum United States to racialize and engender difference, and to oppress a variety of people through the visual signs and cues of the fashion system. By combining written, visual, and material sources, this study demonstrates the imperative that dress be a central part of the analysis as scholars continue to explore the history of race and slavery in the United States.
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    Southern Landscapes in the City’s Shadow: Environmental Politics and Metropolitan Growth in Texas and Virginia, 1900-1990
    (2014-04-16) Baker, Andrew C.; Boles, John B.; Matusow, Allen J.; Wittenberg, Gordon; Melosi, Martin V; Hall, Randal L
    This dissertation explores the twentieth-century connections between city and countryside within the metropolitan South. Popular myths of suburbanization, reinforced by much of suburban historiography, envision a “crabgrass frontier” inexorably spreading suburbia into a static and defenseless countryside. This myth serves the ends of environmental, slow growth, and open space advocates. It does so, however, by obscuring the transformations, some imposed by the city and some endogenous to the countryside, that reshaped these rural landscapes into metropolitan hinterlands. Highways, airports, reservoirs, and early commuters bound these rural landscapes to the city before the arrival of suburban sprawl. This dissertation uses the histories of two southern metropolitan counties, one outside Houston, Texas, and the other in Northern Virginia, to examine the history of these rural counties as they simultaneously developed into metropolitan hinterlands and countryside, a reflection of urban conceptions of rural life. This project integrates rural, environmental, and agricultural history into the history of the metropolis in a way that calls urban historians to explore the city’s impact beyond suburbia and that challenges rural historians to allow these dynamic metropolitan rural areas to destabilize their larger narrative of a rural America left behind. Additionally, it examines the gentlemen farmers, historical preservationists, and nature-seeking suburbanites who abandoned the city to live in this countryside. These privileged white newcomers formed the vanguard of the anti-growth movement that defined metropolitan fringe politics across the nation. In the rural South, these activists obscured the troubling legacies of racism and rural poverty and celebrated a refashioned landscape whose historical and environmental authenticity served as an implicit critique of the alienation and ugliness of suburbia. Green pastures, historical preservation, horses, and white privilege defined this metropolitan fringe landscape. Using a source base that includes the records of preservation organizations and local, state, and federal government agencies, and oral histories, this project explores the distinct roots of the environmental politics and the shifting relationship between city and country within these southern metropolitan fringe regions.