Archaeologies Of Violence And Privilege

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Gonzalez-Tennant.

At the center of Myrdal’s An American Dilemma is the understanding that cycles of violence continue to oppress African Americans. His dilemma refers to the inconsistency between this cycle and the national ethos of upward social mobility. The situation remains unchanged for many minorities today. This paper charts how this cycle of violence has transformed through time by drawing upon the author’s ongoing work in Rosewood, Florida and elsewhere. Although an archaeology of American race riots...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Koji Ozawa.

Violence can be seen in the archaeological record in many different ways, from trauma in the osteological record to depictions in iconography. This paper will focus on reactions to violence.  In World War II, all those of Japanese Ancestry living on the West Coast of the United States were forcibly incarcerated in prison camps. These people reacted to this violent act of imprisonment with many different strategies.  Recent archaeological work has examined the material manifestations of these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Ancheta.

Nineteenth century Fair Haven, New Jersey was home to an African American community that persevered through religious and structural racism. Racism that escalated to the burning of their Free-African American School house.The African American history of Fair Haven is one of gradual emancipation accompanied by gradual gentrification. This research provides an important avenue to rediscovering a long forgotten and dynamic enclave of African Americans that once existed in Fair Haven. Examination of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacey Camp.

Three dimensional virtual worlds present new possibilities and new challenges for teaching about difficult pasts or "dark heritages." This paper considers how virtual environments can be used to explore conflict through user interaction with primary and secondary data sets. It will present a virtual world prototype of Idaho’s Kooskia Internment Camp, a World War II Japanese American internment camp that imprisoned over two hundred Japanese American men. Drawing upon pedagogical strategies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Douyard.

Alix W. Stanley spent the early 20th century purchasing old family properties in the ‘Stanley Quarter’ section of New Britain, Connecticut. The properties, owned by Stanley family members from 1644 through the mid-18th century, provided his ancestors the ability to generate considerable wealth, some of which Alix’s father used to create the Stanley Tool and Die Company. In 1928, Stanley gifted the 360 acre patchwork, which included his mansion and historic Stanley family homes to the city for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Lorenc.

Expanding on conversations occurring in 19th century African American print culture studies, this paper explores the relationship of documentary archaeology to African American print materiality, black nationalism, and collective memory. Conceptualizing print material as mnemonic devices, the paper explores how print culture creates an imagined collectivity through the broad circulation of representational media. Specifically, this paper examines how these mnemonic devices, in relationship to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bradley Phillippi.

The production of history is inherently political and often involves legitimating the status quo by obscuring the historical roots of contemporary inequality. This paper investigates how residents of an affluent suburb on Long Island came to remember one of their historic places as a site representing white, colonial history and heritage exclusively when in fact it was a historically diverse household comprised of white family members and nonwhite laborers. The masking of plural space and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth M Scott.

            In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the town of Ste. Genevieve (in present-day Missouri) was supported by agriculture, salt production, and fur-trading, all of which were dependent on enslaved African American and Native American laborers.  French emigrants and New World French descendants made up the majority of Euro-American settlers and French cultural traditions structured daily life in the community.  The built environment included architectural barriers, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Orser.

Symbolic violence is usually subtle even though its physical manifestations can be imposing. Fortifications of colonialist powers express symbolic violence in contextually important ways, but when constructed as part of a colonial-capitalist nexus they have especially strong symbolic power. Focusing on the Puritan colony on Providence Island off the coast of Nicaragua (1630-41), I explore the symbolic nature of the island’s fortifications and their impact upon the indentured and enslaved...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark S. Tweedie. Allison J.M. McGovern.

Indigenous dispossession and forced relocation remain central features of historical narratives, as they are used to explain the seemingly "natural" cultural loss and subsequent disappearance of Native peoples. However, these occurrences are less frequently remembered as acts of violence that supported privilege and cultural hegemony. In this paper, documentary and archaeological evidence are used to highlight instances of indigenous removals on eastern Long Island in the post-contact era, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eve H Dewan.

In 1879, the first federally funded off-reservation boarding school for Native American children was opened at the site of a former army barracks in Pennsylvania. Several additional facilities were soon established throughout the United States. Guided by official policies of assimilation and goals of fundamentally transforming the identities of their pupils, these institutions enrolled thousands of individuals from a multitude of tribal communities, sometimes forcibly. Once at school, students...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael P Roller.

The discovery of a revolver in the privy deposits of a home in a coal company town in the anthracite region of Northeast Pennsylvania evokes a long history of Southern Italian racialization as violent and vindictive by dominating groups. These imagined characteristics mobilized the privileged to fear, and thereby act to contain or exclude Southern Italian laborers wherever they lived. At the same time a transnational context reveals complex historical continuities when considered through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn E Sampeck.

A variant of symbolic and structural violence can be termed "spatial violence".  Colonial reordering of space, expressed as civilizing, moral order, created iniquities in power that physically prevented access to resources and segregated people into controllable spaces for achieving imperial schemes. This process treated land as one thing and its residents as something separate, objectified, commodified, and thus removable. Spatial violence in the case of many Native Americans was extreme, not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Matthews.

The achievement gap, "failing" schools, re-segregation and blight, while often seen as problems and signs of people of color in the US, are better understood as the results of modern efforts to enforce white privilege. Thus, as historical research on the building and renewal of American cities proceeds, we need to pay attention to how policies and practices supporting racial advantage were put in place and made material on the landscape. The urban and suburban northeast is an especially good...