Browsing by Author "McDaniel, Caleb"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Freedom’s Archive: Slavery, Emancipation, & Reconstruction in Fort Bend County
    (Rice University, 2022-05) Schachter, Ben; McDaniel, Caleb
    This thesis tells the story of the Wheat family from their enslavement in Fort Bend County by Frederick Allen Rice through their experiences during emancipation, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. It studies questions of change and continuity and grapples with the inadequacies of traditional sources to try and tell a rich, colorful story of one Black family's life. The thesis finds that while there was certainly some progress from slavery, one family member's gains might be weighed down by setbacks for another. It also argues that freedom's archive is not well-suited to answering the sort of broad, overarching questions historians of this time period often ask when searching for a definitive answer to how revolutionary Reconstruction was. This thesis also asserts the importance of attempting to reconstruct just a few people's lives and their genealogies, emphasizing enslaved people's claims on the present.
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    Reconstructing Race, Place, and Population: Postemancipation Migrations and the Making of the Black South, 1865–1915
    (2019-04-16) McCall, Keith D.; McDaniel, Caleb
    This dissertation explores the African American search for belonging in the Reconstruction era from demographic and geographical perspectives, making three overlapping arguments. First, that migration within the South, rather than only from the South, was critical to the construction of a shared political identity among freedpeople. Second, that broader debates over where freedpeople belonged were central to late-nineteenth-century understandings of region, place, and citizenship in the United States; and third, that migration and its debates shaped intellectual frameworks of integration and pluralism by linking demographics and geography to the functioning of democracy. The dissertation bridges the histories of enslavement and Reconstruction, looking back to the antebellum period rather than forward to the Great Migration to interpret freedpeople’s migrations in the Reconstruction era. Exploring on-the-ground migration, this work builds on recent literature of the internal slave trade to show how movement restructured freedpeople’s kinship and information networks, creating networks that spanned hundreds of miles. As freedpeople told each other of distant places, they forged broader political consciousnesses and created geographical frameworks explaining how space shaped the potentialities of freedom. Those geographical ideas and information networks sustained a significant internal population movement among freedpeople, as they left the eastern and upper South for the Gulf South and Mississippi Delta. That population shift, which increased the demographic concentration of the black population in the U.S. South, eventually spawned discussions of a “population distribution” that would resettle the African American population throughout the nation as a method of socially engineering integration and, presumably, better race relations. But Booker T. Washington and others rejected the idea that becoming more fully American meant leaving the South and severing a regional identity. Ultimately, the success of freedpeople’s intra-South migrations and the related discussions of out-of-the-South migration shaped a cultural and political emphasis on black southerness by about 1900. By blending such stories, “Reconstructing Race, Place, and Population” demonstrates that ideas about spatial belonging and social belonging formed and shaped each other during the era of Reconstruction.
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    Reflections on Juneteenth: Session Two
    (Rice University, 2020-06-19) Torres, Michelle; McDaniel, Caleb; Sidbury, James
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    Silences on the Strand: Contesting Public Memories of Slavery and Freedom in Galveston’s Civic Historical Landscape (1871-2021)
    (Rice University, 2022-05) Landry, Katelyn; McDaniel, Caleb
    On June 19, 2021, a mural was unveiled in Galveston, TX titled Absolute Equality. It depicts several scenes representative of enslavement and freedom and it is located at the former site of the Union Army Headquarters and where U.S. Gen. Granger read the orders that abolished America’s last vestige of slavery. The mural was unveiled with effervescent local pride in the wake of federal recognition of Juneteenth as a national holiday just two days before. U.S. politicians gave impassioned speeches to a huge crowd and media outlets about the historical and political relevance of celebrating Juneteenth and Galveston’s role in the story of freedom. Six blocks away, in front of the Galveston County Courthouse, the 22 ft. tall Dignified Resignation monument depicts a Confederate soldier. Unveiled in 1911 by the city’s local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), the statue’s plaque reads: “There has never been an armed force which in purity of motives intensity of courage and heroism has equaled the Army and Navy of the Confederate States of America.” About ten months before Absolute Equality was unveiled, a motion to remove the Dignified Resignation monument was presented by one county commissioner but it quickly died after no other commissioner seconded the motion, and the issue has yet to be publicly debated again. The coexistence of these two sites is emblematic of the polarized narratives regarding Galveston’s history of slavery and freedom that have jockeyed for influence in the city’s civic historical landscape since the end of the Civil War. For people who are just learning about Juneteenth and registering Galveston as a place that is significant in the national story of slavery, it is easy to get the impression that Juneteenth has always been a well celebrated occasion by the city writ large. This is only partially true -- African Americans in Galveston and beyond have celebrated emancipation on June 19 since 1866, however their collective and cultural memories of emancipation and the preceding centuries of enslavement have only very recently become incorporated into Galveston’s civic historical landscape and made more widely known to the public. Rather than seeing this as a simple story of progress or diversification, this observation led me to ask: Why has it taken so long for this significant piece of Galveston’s history to come to light, and why now? Through my primary source research I have found that Local practices of memorialization and historic preservation have been constructed and enforced in ways that granted white collective memories more visibility and perceived authority in Galveston, and thus marginalized or silenced narratives that would trouble those memories such as a more honest history of slavery on the island.
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    The Racialized Politics of Home in Slavery and Freedom
    (2017-04-18) Stewart, Whitney Nell; Sidbury, James; McDaniel, Caleb
    While most historians interpret the motivations of the black freedom struggle—including the acquisition of legal freedom and citizenship—as public and traditionally political issues, this project places black homes at the center of the narrative. Scholars often overlook how the rights of home—including privacy, freedom of movement, and the security of self and family in one’s dwelling—suffused the private and public politics of nineteenth-century Americans. Black women and men sought solutions to violent social injustices by drawing on a long tradition of resistance and activism that began before the opening of ballot boxes, government offices, and citizenship. They sought freedom and rights through the home. This dissertation uses a wide range of material, visual, and textual sources to demonstrate how enslaved and free black Americans gave meaning to their lives, shaped their hopes, and sought individual and social change through their dwelling space, structure, and objects. Home was a concept, space, and structure that shaped the meaning and experience of slavery and liberty. Throughout the long nineteenth century, the black home functioned simultaneously as a symbol that could destroy or invigorate the racist social structure that undergirded slavery. In physical dwellings throughout the American South, black men and women fought to build privacy and security into their dwellings and lives, even as white southerners racialized these rights for white families only. Looking across the chasm of war and emancipation uncovers the crucial role of home to evolving notions of freedom in the tumultuous long nineteenth century. Revealing the connections between race, home, and liberty, this project reorients the narrative of the black freedom struggle towards the domestic spaces and objects that shaped the politics of nineteenth-century Americans.