Browsing by Author "Katherine Mellen Charron, Committee Member"

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    Absent Voices: Searching for Women and African Americans at Historic Stagville and Somerset Place Historic Sites
    (2010-04-30) Taft, Kimberly E.; Craig Thompson Friend, Committee Chair; David Zonderman, Committee Member; Katherine Mellen Charron, Committee Member; Susanna Lee, Committee Member
    This thesis examines the interpretation at Somerset Place and Historic Stagville, two North Carolina Historic Sites. While the interpretation of slavery at plantation museums has received increased attention, much remains to be explored regarding the interpretation of women. In addition to examining the interpretation, this thesis explores the history of both Somerset Place and Stagville as active plantations and later historic sites. This thesis proposes that interpretations of race and gender are interconnected but not always concurrent at plantation museums. While the first chapter explores the history of Somerset Place, the second examines Stagville. The final chapter focuses on the current interpretation found at both sites.
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    Detached Kitchens, Detached Memories? The Plantation Landscape and the Challenge of Inclusive Museum Narration.
    (2010-04-27) Adams, Robyn Elizabeth; David Zonderman, Committee Chair; Craig Thompson Friend, Committee Member; Katherine Mellen Charron, Committee Member
    Visitors to historic plantation house museums may come for tours of grand manor houses, stories of elite white history, and expensive decorative arts, but once they step outside the main house they are confronted with numerous outbuildings which were once the work and living spaces of enslaved men and women. Perhaps the most popular outbuilding with visitors today, the detached kitchen is the focal point of my study into the interpretations of space at historic house museums. More commonly found at historic sites than smokehouses, privies, and dairies, the detached kitchen has become the primary venue for the incorporation of slavery into the master site narratives. As scholars of plantation landscapes have shown, the detachment of the kitchen was a purposeful choice made by white elites in an effort to control the access enslaved workers had to areas of the white family. This racial segregation meant a plantation household was really a series of households, and my paper argues that the architectural legacy of the kitchen’s detachment from the house complicates the very ability of a site to incorporate and interpret the social structures of the plantation into one inclusive narrative. This paper focuses on Gunston Hall Plantation in Mason’s Neck, Virginia, Tryon Palace in New Bern, NC, and Mordecai Historic Site in Raleigh, NC to highlight the ways the kitchen is interpreted through both the regular tours and special programming.
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    Fear of a Hip-Hop Planet: Rap Nationalism, The Gangsta, and the Making of the Dirty South.
    (2009-12-08) Cavazo, Rodney Bo; Katherine Mellen Charron, Committee Member; Craig Thompson Friend, Committee Member; Blair LM Kelley, Committee Chair
    ABSTRACT CAVAZO, RODNEY BO. Fear of a Hip-Hop Planet: Rap Nationalism, The Gangsta, and the Making of the Dirty South. (Under the direction of Blair LM Kelley) From the streets of New York, to the inner cities of Los Angeles, to the Gaza Strip, hip-hop music has touched a diverse range of people from all over the world. Hip-hop music and culture has grown in popularity all over the U.S. and the globe, crossing race, class, and gender lines like few other art forms have before. Hip-hop music exists on a continuum of historically black musical traditions and draws from various moments in the history of black resistance. My project will focus on an examination of the several important mainstream hip-hop groups and also positioning hip-hop music within a long history of black cultural traditions. Additionally I seek to gain a better understanding of how these particular artists presented their version of black masculinity, and how they opposed what they perceived as oppressive power structures and white masculine constructions. Through three case studies that explore distinct moments in hip-hop history, the thesis will trace the shifts in hip-hop identity over time. The project begins with an exploration of the politically conscious rap of Public Enemy that examines the ways that the group drew both from historic forms of black cultural nationalism from the black arts movement and a savvy, self-crafted business model. The project then explores the roots of the gangsta chic that seems dominant in current mainstream hip-hop through an analysis of the group N.W.A. The project concludes with an exploration of the shifting of hip-hop culture southward, through a discussion of the Atlanta-based group OutKast that examines the diverse representations of black masculinity presented by the group. This project frames hip-hop as a form of performance; that is, artists not as everyday people, but as hyperbolic representations of black life. Hip-hop music has reflected some people’s lives, but as an art form it primarily serves as cultural script that can never fully reflect the totality of lived experience. From this framework, the thesis will address a few key questions. What are the historical and social conditions that inspired young black artists to speak out? What are the progressive and regressive elements of masculinity constructed by mainstream hip-hop artists? How does hip-hop represent a unique cultural expression where black art becomes both a form of protest and a product? I contend that hip-hop music emerged at a unique historical moment that allowed it to constitute a multi-faceted cultural form. Hip-hop was born as both protest and product, in an often conflicted conversation with the larger society. Hip-hop gave young black men the space to forge, present, and perform complex masculinities. It was a vehicle for the voiceless; through the power of art, these artists helped to craft their own history. But while hip hop resisted and recast negative stereotypes of black men, it often re-inscribed the oppression of black women and men who did not match up to hyper-masculine ideals. While hip-hop music has served as a form of subversion that gave voice to a subset of the African American underclass, it often has done so at the expense of others. The core of this study, besides all the complexities, seeks to understand historically how hip-hop has helped giving agency to young men who desired to represent themselves however they chose.
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    The Young, the Aged, and the Poor: The King's Daughters and the Growth of Social Benevolence in Durham, North Carolina, 1881-1915
    (2008-11-24) Sherman, Rebecca Thaler; Katherine Mellen Charron, Committee Member; David R. Ambaras, Committee Member; Blair LM Kelley, Committee Chair
    This thesis explores the role of gender and race in the creation of the public and private social welfare systems in Durham, North Carolina, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Local officials chose to make the poorhouse the centerpiece of the newly-founded county’s public welfare system in the early 1880s. However, as Durham expanded in the following decades from a small town to a booming industrial city, the number of economically vulnerable residents—African Americans, as well as white women and children—correspondingly grew. Patterns of both poverty and relief in Durham were gendered in nature and impacted by the system of white supremacy. By the turn of the century, many middle- and upper-class Durhamites came to view the poorhouse model as flawed and inadequate. They responded by attempting to reform the public system, often influenced by national movements, and by offering alternative private services to those groups they deemed worthy of assistance. In 1903 a group of middle- and upper-class white women formed the Sheltering Home Circle of the King’s Daughters, a local chapter of an international women’s voluntary association. The group undertook various types of charitable projects directed towards Durham’s needy residents, ranging from giving monetary donations to providing social services; the Sheltering Home Circle’s largest endeavor was the building and maintenance of a home for “worthy†old ladies. This study focuses on the public and private provisions made for needy women and children in Durham. During the nineteenth century, dependent children in Durham and other southern counties typically had been boarded in the poorhouse or apprenticed to local masters. The King’s Daughters, responding to a national child-saving movement and to the inadequacies of the local child welfare system in Durham, performed rescue work among the city’s orphaned and neglected white children. They utilized the legal system and their connections to the North Carolina Children’s Home Society to remove these children from the county and place them in new homes across the state. The organization also worked to rescue unmarried mothers by sending them to privately-run, evangelical maternity homes. The intervention of benevolent societies helped to revolutionize some aspects of Durham’s welfare system. The King’s Daughters criticized the poorhouse model and, despite the county government’s resistance to change, the women successfully provided alternative services for subsets of the city’s needy population. In all of their projects the King’s Daughters aimed to assist those people with whom they most easily identified and empathized, white women and children. However, the women’s biases blinded them to the plight of other groups—blacks, those deemed unworthy of charity, and other “undesirables†—who consequently remained dependent on the poorhouse and the limited social services provided by the county. Despite reform movements and the rise of local charitable organizations advocating “modern†methods of social work, the transformation of Durham County’s welfare system remained incomplete until the late 1910s, when the state implemented new legislation.