Slavery,Gender and the Meanings of Freedom

Books reviewed in this article: Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation Marli Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830–1880     

Debating Womanhood,Defining Freedom: The Abolition of Slavery in 1880s Rio de Janeiro

This article demonstrates how both the agency of women of colour and a particular set of ideas about femininity and maternity played an important part in shaping the ending of slavery in the city of Rio de Janeiro. It does so through the prism of untapped municipal documentation, exploring initiatives taken by the city council both to abolish slavery by emancipating mainly women and to shape the city's first generation of fully free working families by founding schools and charitable institutions. In enacting these measures, councillors found themselves debating not only the meanings of freedom, but the meanings of ex‐slave womanhood. Their discussions reflected both the long‐term development of ‘free womb logic’ in Brazilian slavery and emancipation, and tendencies by the 1880s abolitionist movement to make emotive, ‘feminised’ appeals for elite women to sympathise with enslaved mothers. The article explores how women of colour used elite discourses about freedom, maternity and womanhood in order to achieve freedom, but also contested and reshaped them as they sought to bring their own lived meanings to freedom.     

The Archaeology of Slavery at the Van Cortlandt Plantation in the Bronx,New York

Excavations at the Van Cortlandt Mansion, the central structure of an eighteenth-century plantation located in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, New York, highlight the difficulty of using archaeological evidence to document the story of enslavement in early America. While the documents indicate the extent of the Van Cortlandts' involvement in the slave trade and in the reliance on enslaved labor to build and run their enterprise, the excavations carried out over several years have not yielded concomitant evidence.     

Loyalists and lairds: The politics and society of Upper Canada reconsidered

The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada: A Developing Colonial Ideology by Jane Errington. Kingston and Montreal: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1987. Pp.272. $30.00.

The Idea of Loyalty in Upper Canada, 1784–1850 by David Mills. Kingston and Montreal: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1988. Pp.x + 238. $27.95.

Becoming Prominent: Regional Leadership in Upper Canada, 1791–1841 by J.K. Johnson. Kingston and Montreal: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1989. Pp.ix + 277. $29.95.

Attitudes to Social Structure and Mobility in Upper Canada 1815–1840: ‘Here We Are Laird Ourselves’ by Peter A. Russell. Lewiston/ Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990. Pp.213. US$59.95.     

Motivation and Scale: a Method of Identifying Land Speculators in Upper Canada

Land speculation played a major role in the settlement of Ontario. Its impact has been discussed in great detail but there always remained the problem of identifying individual speculators. Previous studies have identified land speculators solely on the basis of the amount of land held. This paper presents an alternative method of identifying speculators by calling attention to the motivations behind speculation and manifestations of these motivations as inferred in landholding behaviour. In addition, a typology of speculators is presented. Elizabethtown Township provides the setting for an application of the proposed method and a brief analysis of the speculative patterns that emerge.
Les achats speculatifs des terrains, ayant joué un rôle majeur dans la colonisation de l'Ontario, ont souvent été examinés en détail: le probléme de l'identité des speculateurs est pourtant resté sans solution. Dans des études déjà parues, ceux-ci ont été discernés en ne tenant compte que de la superficie des terrains qu'ils detenaient. Cet essai presente une autre méthode pour identifier les spéculateurs en examinant les mobiles de la spéculation tels qu'ils sont révéles par la conduite de Tacheteur: nous avons aussi formulé une typologie des spéculateurs. Nous avons appliqué la méthode proposée à la ville d'Elizabethtown pour analyser brièvement les mouvements spéculatifs qui s'y présentent.     

Community Archaeology from Below: a Response to Tully

Abstract

The Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project, set up in 1996 as an experiment in 'democratic archaeology', was shaken by a major internal crisis between November 2007 and July 2008. An attempt by a small group of local people to establish top-down control over the project was defeated by a political mobilisation of the project's mass base of volunteer archaeologists and community activists. This article, by a leading protagonist, analyses the crisis and comes to some radical conclusions about the nature of community archaeology, democratic organisation, and the way in which political power is sometimes contested.     

The Cap of Liberty: Roman Slavery,Cultural Memory,and Magic Mushrooms

The commonest psychedelic mushroom growing naturally in Britain, Psilocybe semilanceata, is known in English as the Liberty Cap. This name, which references an ancient Roman social practice, has caused considerable speculation in modern literature. This article provides a conclusive etymology for how a magic mushroom acquired this obscure name.     

A Taste for Mustard: An Archaeological Examination of a Condiment and Its Bottles from a Loyalist Homestead in Upper Canada

During the excavation of the Loyalist-period Butler Homestead site in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario a small cache of glass condiment bottles was discovered in a space identified as a larder or pantry. The form of the bottles suggests that they once contained dry mustard powder, the bottles of which are usually recovered from military sites when found in Canada. This paper examines the cultural history of mustard as a food and medicine, its role in eighteenth-century British cookery and agriculture, and demonstrates how this specific form of glass container tied a Loyalist household to local and international trade networks in British North America and England.     

The phylogenetic relevance of the sacrum among macronarian sauropods: insights from a pelvis from the Upper Cretaceous of Patagonia,Argentina

Filippini, F.S., Otero, A. & Gasparini, Z., June 2016. The phylogenetic relevance of the sacrum among macronarian sauropods: insights from a pelvis from the Upper Cretaceous of Patagonia, Argentina. Alcheringa 41, xxx–xxx. ISSN 0311-5518.

Anatomical variation in the sacrum is useful for differentiating sauropod lineages. Morphological variation in the sacrum has been underestimated mainly because of its anatomical complexity and uncertain homologies with presacral and postsacral elements. We describe a titanosaurian sauropod pelvis (MLP 46-VIII-21-2) from Plottier (Neuquén Province, Argentina) collected in the 1940s from Coniacian–Santonian (Upper Cretaceous) strata. The degree of bone fusion in the specimen (fused vertebral centra forming a single rod, with neural arches fused to the corresponding centrum and to adjacent neural arches) indicates a late ontogenetic age. The presence of a space between the first vertebra and the anterior margin of the illium, together with a scar located on the anterior part of the preactabular process, suggest the possible presence of a sixth sacral vertebra (putative dorsosacral additional characters present in the ilium point towards affinities with Titanosauria. The completeness and good preservation of the specimen allowed us to track features along the sacral series and to compare characters with other sauropods. Within a phylogenetic context, and based on the pattern present in basal sauropodomorphs, the presence of three sacral elements attached to the rim of the acetabulum in eusauropods opens the possibility for considering such elements as primordial sacrals.

Florencia S. Filippini [florencia304@live.com.ar], División Paleontología de Vertebrados, Museo de La Plata, Paseo del Bosque s/n, La Plata, 1900, Bs. As., Argentina; Alejandro Otero [alexandros.otero@gmail.com]; Zulma Gasparini [zgaspari@fcnym.unlp.edu.ar] CONICET—División Paleontología de Vertebrados, Museo de La Plata, Paseo del Bosque s/n, La Plata, 1900, Bs. As., Argentina.     

Variation in Venues of Slavery and Freedom: Interpreting the Late Eighteenth-Century Cultural Landscape of St. John, Danish West Indies Using an Archaeological GIS

An archaeological GIS is used to examine the late eighteenth-century cultural landscape of St. John, US Virgin Islands. Land use patterns are reconstructed using a combination of historic maps, tax records, and survey reconnaissance. The study demonstrates significant, heretofore undocumented, transitions taking place that reflect dynamic cultural and economic change within Danish West Indian plantation society that includes a significant trend towards land ownership by free-colored St. Johnians more than a half a century before emancipation. These venues of freedom are discussed in relation to broader patterns of estate consolidation and economic shifts.