This dissertation explores lasting familial relationships and friendships among southern African Americans from the antebellum years to the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on southern Maryland, the dissertation shows how free and enslaved African Americans cultivated familial and non-familial relationships in towns and rural neighborhoods. Over the course of five chapters, the dissertation traces community members as they lived through the displacements of civil war and its aftermath, paying special attention to their struggles to sustain relationships of family and friendship. In antebellum southern Maryland, living within close distances allowed free and enslaved people opportunities to meet, socialize, talk, visit, labor, and share in rituals together. Amid the violence and uncertainty of the Civil War, many Black southern Marylanders managed to relocate with their family, friends, and neighbors to other places, including southeastern Virginia and other parts of Maryland. With their family, friends, and neighbors, Black southern Marylanders resisted dispossession after the war to hold on to their homes on government farms. When government farms were dismantled after the war, many Black southern Marylanders again moved together in small clusters and reestablished new homes and neighborhoods near each other. As they navigated life in the postwar south, Black southern Marylanders who lived near one another could call on each other in times of needs and through the first several decades after the war provided a steady source of support.

Creator

• Rosado, Ana

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-kqfx-d676

Subject

• History
• American history
• Black history

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15697
• etdadmin_upload_841483

Keyword

• Black Studies
• African American Studies

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright