Black Women and Post-Emancipation Diaspora: A Community of Army Laundresses at Fort Davis, Texas

Author(s): Katrina C. L. Eichner

Year: 2018

Summary

This paper investigates the role black women at U.S. military forts took in post emancipation diasporic events and movement. Using materials related daily life at a late 19th century, multi-ethnoracial, Indian Wars military fort in Fort Davis, Texas, I show how army laundresses acted as cultural brokers, navigating often contentious social and physical landscapes. With their identity as citizens, women, care-takers, employees, and racialized individuals constantly in flux, these women balanced their relationship with one another, their families, the civilian community, and their military colleagues as a way of redefining and creating new personhoods and identities that were defined by their living on the geographic and cultural boundary of the American western frontier.

Cite this Record

Black Women and Post-Emancipation Diaspora: A Community of Army Laundresses at Fort Davis, Texas. Katrina C. L. Eichner. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, New Orleans, Louisiana. 2018 ( tDAR id: 441128)

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

Spatial Coverage

min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 989