Embedded Files
To be an anthropologist, for me, is to live in surprise and curiosity. It’s to notice what people are doing and to marvel at much of it. To be an archaeologist – the particular strain of anthropological practice in which I specialize – is to continuously wonder about relationships between the human and the material.
Of all the questions that intrigue me, the ones on which I have focused in recent years feature dynamics of death and remembrance, “lunacy,” and consumer strategies. I’ve sought to understand why people are inscribing headstones with images of zombies, emus, and even the Starship Enterprise; why some seemingly innocuous behaviors were once considered evidence of lunacy (he “beats the corn into meal himself, which he eats and cooks for himself,” c. 1880s); and why some of the most privileged people on an historic site had the least expensive ceramics and architectural materials (c. 1820s).
My work investigates ways that humanity and materiality articulate with each other, particularly in contexts of social inequality and hierarchical authority. Below are some selected examples of my scholarship. Please also see my curriculum vitae.
PUBLICATIONS: BOOK
In my book, The Vital Dead, I explore what traditional burial grounds tell us about the social and cultural dynamics of a place and time. I suggest that cemeteries participate in the grassroots cultural work of crafting social connections, even as they test the transcendental durability of the deceased person and provide a measure of a culture’s values. I apply this framework of meaning to communities throughout the Valley of Virginia, considering the cemeteries that have both claimed them and, paradoxically, sustained them.
One reviewer wrote: "In The Vital Dead, Bell has skillfully and even beautifully done what few scholars of culture manage to do: interwoven a number of intriguing and provocative scholarly threads (at home in any advanced high school or university classroom and of course graduate level seminar) with the intimate and poetic details of human life and loss. While Bell's scholarship is first rate, the lasting import of The Vital Dead will be owed to the author's courage to treat her subjects with humanity and compassion, an unambiguous tone which reveals itself in the almost literary approach to the work."
"A Virginian," Public Review (Spring 2025)
Journal of American Folklore, Review (Spring 2025)
PUBLICATIONS: ARTICLES
"All My Little Might of Money" : Signaling, Structure, and Mobility Among the Middling in
Nineteenth-Century Virginia and Kentucky. Historical Archaeology, 2019. Alison Bell, Donald Gaylord, and Kristin Sharman.
Archaeological testing of a site occupied by farm manager Edmund Bacon (ca. 1806-1822) at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in Virginia raised questions about how costly signals operated and other roles that materiality played in this social milieu. Free and White, but neither wealthy nor well educated, Bacon's positionality both limited and faciliated his economic sociomobility. He gathered his "little might of money" to become a prominent Kentucky landowner. Bacon's experiences, and those of his contemporaries, elite and enslaved, illustrate the weight of durable structural inequalities in constituting such personal qualities as wealth, knowledge, and social connection.
Published online by the Society for Historical Archaeology on June 5, 2019.
"Blood Will Tell," Eugenics Education at a Twentieth-Century Southern University. Southern Anthropologist, V38 N1, November 1, 2023. Meg Langhorne and Alison Bell.
During the 1920s and ‘30s, Washington and Lee University (W&L) biology students visited local families suspected of “degeneracy.” At the direction of their professor and with the support of social workers, physicians, and other authorities, students recorded generational histories as well as such variables as age, material conditions, educational level, employment,illnesses, and supposed proclivities toward promiscuity, alcoholism,illegitimacy, “idiocy,” and “feeblemindedness.” W&L Special Collections and Archives contains 25 of these eugenics term papers. This analysis highlights ways that eugenics education fostered understandings of “us” and “them”: he worthy and the unfit both biologically and socially, which were understood to reflect the same innate hierarchy. The conclusion suggests a through line, showing how ingroup/outgroup dynamics run through eugenic teachings to the current day as debates still rage about who should be empowered to make decisions about reproduction, for example, or who belongs in college.
Click here to read this article.
Emulation and Empowerment: Material, Social, and Economic Dynamics in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Virginia. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, V6N4,
December 2002.
The influence of emulative behavior on the material and socioeconomic trans- formations of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American world is widely debated. A study of historical archaeological sites and probate inventories in Virginia implicates emulation as one ethic operative in rural communities but also identifies a second dynamic: a tendency for many planters of divergent means to act in step with one another, responding in similar ways to new circumstances. Here termed a "cultural accord," this affinity enabled some individuals who occupied middling social positions to use emulation advantageously in ways that less privileged members of the population could not.
"Getting Through" : Anthropologies of Crisis, Resistance, and Resilience, An Introduction for a Special Edition of Southern Anthropologist, V39. 2025.
"Shelby County: Tennessee’s westernmost county, bounded on the south by the state of Mississippi and on the west by the Mississippi River. Memphis is the county seat. Standing on the city’s cobblestone waterfront, you see rice fields in Arkansas, barges sliding along the water, and tractor-trailers streaming across the bridge. Growing up there during the 1970s, I had a sense of Shelby County as a hub of the South and as a creature straddling the past and future. Interstate 40 newly roiled through, and two-lane roads still edged cotton fields. From the backyard my family watched flocks of FedEx planes descend on the Memphis airport, and at the Penal Farm we rented horses. Designed in the 1920s to rehabilitate “prisoners through the work they are best suited to perform” – farming, road maintenance, laundering – the Penal Farm felt like a survival of the chain-gang era and doubled as a recreational public park for, among others, rollicking Gen X-ers."
Click here to read the article.
Moment and Metaphor: Reflections on Ivor Noël Hume’s Address at the 2007 Society for Historical Archaeology Meetings. San Diego State University Occassional Archaeology Papers, V2, 2008.
"When considering the words and work of Ivor Noël Hume, analogies seem indispensable. Metaphors surface in part because they infuse Noël Hume’s own writings so frequently and so colorfully, and in part because his influence in historical archaeology looms so large that simple, declarative sentences appear inadequate to the task of describing it. Many others must agree, as they too have reached for analogies to characterize Noël Hume’s legacy. He is the “Babe Ruth” of historical archaeology (Scham 2005), its “dean” (Kolb 2003:119), and its “godfather” (Kelso 1992:2). Undergraduates in field schools learn quickly that Noël Hume’s Guide to Artifacts of Colonial America is the “artifact bible” (De Cunzo 2005)." Photo at left is my well-worn, dog-eared and treasured copy.
Click here to read the article.
Tribute to Professor Doug Rendleman. Washington and Lee Law Review, V78 Issue 1, 2021.
"In December of 2018, I thought I’d be early to the inaugural meeting of the Faculty Affairs Committee (FAC), but turning the corner into Chavis Boardroom I saw that I was not the first to arrive. Trim, bespectacled, seemingly at ease in red cardigan and khakis, a figure sat with hands folded and one leg crossed over the other. We introduced ourselves as I took a seat next to him—a spot that I would habitually come to occupy, in countless subsequent meetings, at the right hand of Doug Rendleman."
Click here to read the article.
"White Ethnogenesis and Gradual Capitalism: Perspectives from Colonial Archaeological Sites in the Chesapeake." American Anthropologist, V107 Issue 3, 2005.
"The piecemeal development of capitalist socioeconomic systems in the colonial Chesapeake was deeply intertwined with projects of white ethnogenesis. Crafting a sense of "groupness" along lines perceived as racial required free "whites" to remain economically and socially interdependent. A variety of strategies and material forms—including reciprocal exchanges, hall-parlor house plans, and earthfast construction-facilitated this cohesion. Such integrative tactics coexisted in colonists' behavioral repertoires with more "capitalistic" strategies that prioritized private profit over social obligation. Colonists' deployment of diverse social strategies reflects a complex calculus assessing the benefits of economic autonomy against the benefits of ethnic ("white") solidarity. These dynamics can be illustrated through an 18th-century archaeological site at Flowerdew Hundred in the Chesapeake."
CONFERENCE PAPERS & PRESENTATIONS
“Don’t Forget about Daddy and Me”: Asserting Community through Recent Cemetery Practice in the Valley of Virginia. Presented at The Virginia Forum, March 2018.
"In the mountains of Cumberland, Maryland, a gravestone erected to a man who died in 2000 features a grinning winged skull and the words, “Remember me as you pass by. As you are now, so once was I. As I am now, soon you shall be. Prepare for death and follow me.” This inscription derives from the medieval European tradition of memento mori: a reminder that death is inevitable and an encouragement to make life choices accordingly. A fourteenth-century European version read, “Good people who pass this way, To God unceasingly please pray For the soul of the body that lies below.” The formulation implies a worldview in which living and dead are responsible to each other, part of a community that transcends the grave. A “two-way communication was being established, a message to the deceased for the repose of his soul, and from the deceased for the edification of the living.” Memento mori represents a classic gift exchange– remembrance or prayers flow in one direction, advice in the other. These transactions both express and maintain social connections among members of a community that includes the quick and the dead."
Click here to view the PowerPoint Presentation.
Click here to read the paper.
The “Colored Dead”: African American Burying Grounds in a Confederate Stronghold. Presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Meetings, 2018.
What few sightseers encounter when visiting Lexington, Virginia today is what’s off-radar for even most students: Evergreen Cemetery, the resting place of local African Americans since the 1880s. Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery is on Main Street and features prominently in Lexington’s tourism circuit. Evergreen is on a dead-road, tucked behind a gas station, payday lender, and fast-food store. Before Evergreen’s establishment in 1881, African Americans were buried in a segregated Lexington City cemetery, near current-day Marble Lane. Among those interred in this “colored cemetery” was James Lewis, a free, “large and handsome mulatto” — who had acted as Jackson’s cook during the war and cared for Jackson when mortally wounded. While Jackson’s monument towers over the cemetery named in his honor, Lewis’s grave, across town, is unmarked and its location uncertain: in 1880 Lexington Town Council exchanged half of the cemetery for three acres outside of town, banning burial in the original cemetery. In 1946 the Town of Lexington sold the balance of the old cemetery for development, noting that any human remains encountered would be moved to Evergreen. Controversy persists over how many, if any, remains of the “colored dead” were actually relocated or what happened to them when houses were built and roads.
The Dead’s Vitality: Maintaining Souls in Virginia Communities. Presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Meetings, 2016. With research by W&L students Jeremy Ledbetter, Alex Meilech, and Kristin Sharman.
Solar-powered bulbs and flapping-winged ladybugs, wind chimes, whirligigs, jack-o-lanterns, valentines to the deceased, and much else adorn gravesites in the Valley of Virginia. A 2003 bowling trophy sits on the headstone of a person who died in 2001. A stuffed rabbit faces another stone and holds recent photos of children, as if showing them to the buried teen. These objects relate not only to the deceased’s personal histories and interests but also represent gestures, through exchange and otherwise, to retain them in webs of social connection. Employing light, movement, sound, written and visual communication in cemetery landscapes, the living work to keep invisible souls present and participatory in daily life. This paper draws on anthropological understandings of personhood to contend that many Virginians understand themselves as “people with a strong sense of community, and being dead is no impediment to belonging to it.”
“A Good Life: Material Strategies of Virginia Tenant Farmers, 1775-1825.” Presented at the Upland Archaeology in the East: Archaeology and History of the Blue Ridge and Beyond Symposium XI, Roanoke, 2012. With Laura Voisin George.
Archaeological and archival research recently conducted at two large plantations in Albemarle County, Virginia explores ways in which early nineteenth-century socio-economically middling people defined and worked toward "a good life." This multidisciplinary, inter-institutional project focuses on such members of the rural population as tenant farmers and overseers, whose opportunities and constraints often differed from those of their enslaved neighbors on the one hand and elite contemporaries on the other. We find that financial strategies informed by the diversification of resources were central to otherwise varied decisions about land use and mobility.
Material Culture and Social Liminality: Variation in Ceramic Consumption among Monticello Residents. Poster presented at the Society for American Archaeology Meetings in a poster session organized by Alison Bell and Sara Bon-Harper, Site Structure and Consumption: Exploring Social Dimensions of Artifact Variation at Monticello Plantation, 2010. With Alexandra Massey, and Karen Y. Smith.
What social & economic tactics often informed non-elite Euro Americans’ use of material culture in the 18th- and 19th-century mid-Atlantic? Because archaeologists have conducted little research on non-elite Euro Americans in the colonial and early Federal periods, their strategies are poorly understood. To investigate this issue, in the spring of 2009 Monticello’s Archaeology Department and Washington and Lee University Archaeology began testing a domestic site occupied by Edmund Bacon, Thomas Jefferson’s farm manager/overseer.
Click here to view the conference poster.
Quantifying Use Wear on Early 19th-Century Refined Earthenwares: Implications for Interpreting Mean Ceramic Dates and Variability in Consumer Behavior. Presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Meetings, 2012. With Donald Gaylor and Erika Vaughn.
Recent analysis of several early 19th-century domestic sites occupied by non-elite European Americans in central Virginia has suggested discrepancies between mean ceramic dates (MCD) and site occupation periods as documented in historic sources. In this paper we’ll consider divergent MCDs and documentary dates at a site occupied by Thomas Jefferson’s farm manager, Edmund Bacon, and his family at Monticello. Here the MCD precedes the documentary date by sixteen years: occupation established in written sources is 1806-1822, and the MCD is 1798. By contrast, MCD and documentary dates diverge by only three years at a second site at Monticello we examine here, occupied by enslaved woman Elizabeth Hemings. Image at left is Edmund Bacon.
Reading Ceramic Use Wear: A Twist in the Plot. Presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Meetings, 2014. Donald Gaylord and Alison Bell.
The narratives of archaeological analysis summarized in this paper began with a seemingly simple question about the correspondence, or lack thereof, between mean-ceramic dates (MCDs) and site occupation spans known from documentary sources. Analysis focused initially on a pair of sites occupied around the turn of the 19th century at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia. Inquiring into these site dating methods produced surprising disparities that subsequently encouraged us to investigate questions about influences on and interrelationships among a wide array of issues; these included microscopic use wear, variation in foodways, intensity of site occupation, vessel equivalencies, landscape use, and (not least) alcohol consumption. Today we’ll share what we’ve uncovered, but have yet to fully untangle, about variation in behavior of free and enslaved members of the Monticello Plantation community and its impact on ceramic assemblages excavated at four domestic sites.
Site Dating and Ceramic Use Wear: Factors Contributing to Variation. Poster presented at the Society for American Archaeology Meetings, 2014. Donald Gaylord, Alison Bell, and Erika Vaughn.
In his classic study elaborating the MCD, South (1977) found that, in his sample of sites, the MCD preceded the MHD by an average of four years. Though he urged further research into the method, South saw their correlation as support for the utility of the MCD as one of several site dating methods. For many Monticello sites, Jefferson’s copious records permit calculation of the MHD with a reasonable degree of confidence. Analysis of ceramics from two of these sites generated disparate results, as the MCD and MHD correlated closely on one site but diverged appreciably on the other.
Painted, Molded, Printed, Sponged: Ceramics from Two Communities at One Site. Presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Meetings, 2020. Alison Bell and Donald Gaylord.
On the back campus of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia stand the iconic walls of its predecessor, Liberty Hall Academy. “The Ruins,” as they’re called, loom large in constructions of institutional history and identity; they persist as an 18th-century island in the ever-spreading sea of parking lots and playing fields. Isolated and ancient, The Ruins appear to many at W&L – students, employees, visitors – as elegiac testimony to a determined commitment to education with roots as deep at those of the nation itself. W&L identifies its founding as 1749– making it the ninth oldest institution of higher learning in the United States– although doing so requires accepting a series of tenuous links to a tutor hired in a private home some seven miles north of Lexington.
The Ruins represent one architectural iteration of the institution: a building used as classrooms and a dormitory beginning in 1793. Contrary to common assumption, it was only used for a decade before being consumed by fire in 1803. Just as surprising to many, the academy building was not alone on the academic landscape. W&L anthropology professor emeritus John McDaniel led historic and archaeological investigations of the Liberty Hall campus in the 1970s, much of it focused on locating remains of structures mentioned in records of the board of trustees. McDaniel identified features believed to be the stable, spring house, brick kiln, steward’s house, and rector’s house known from trustees’ minutes. W&L’s website and other community-facing materials convey limited information about the diversity of structures that coexisted with the academy building.
The Willing Suspension of Documentary Evidence: Centering the Artifact and Considering Tacit Knowledge. Presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Meetings, 2023.
Toni Morrison wanted to see books “where the gender of the narrator is unspecified. Gender, like race, carries with it a panoply of certainties.” What panoply of certainties do readers mobilize when thinking a character is female? What tacit knowledge do archaeologists bring to a site when thinking its occupants were Black? This paper reports on an experiment the presenter conducted with archaeologists, suspending documentary information and sharing only archaeological data from a 19th-century Virginia site. Documents had inclined previous archaeologists to see the stone foundation as remnants of a stable. The density of ceramics, buttons, and glass encouraged others to see it as a domestic site, but how did participants view it differently when supplied with different hypothetical information – site occupants being Black, White, free, enslaved, tenants, land owners, women, or men? How does re-centering the artifact enable archaeologists to perceive, and question, tacit knowledge informing our interpretations?
Grounding in the Sensorium: Experience, Empiricism, Empathy. Poster presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Meetings, 2026.
Between 1991 & 2004, W&L field schools tested scores of domestic and, to a lesser extent, industrial sites in areas owned by Longdale Iron Company and its predecessors, the Lucy Selina and Australia Furnaces, collectively ca. 1826-1911. Archaeology and allied sources indicate that people continued residing in (former) company housing into the 1930s or later, with hunting, berrying, spring-water collecting etc. continuing today in this part of the Washington Jefferson National Forest. Dozens of stone foundations are still visible along & above the floodplain of Simpson’s Creek. Census returns calibrated to modern topography and locations of archaeological features suggest that housing in the eastern and central part of this span were mostly White families; a small Black community existed to the west, closer to the village of Longdale Furnace.
Reporting from the Lab: Research with Longdale Iron-Making Community Artifacts and Records at Washington & Lee University. Poster presented at the Archaeological Society of Virginia, 2025. With W&L students Liliane Mafon, Kevin Rice, and Mendrel Tshering.
Between 1991 and 2004, W&L field schools tested dozens of domestic and, to a lesser extent, industrial sites at Longdale Iron Company and its predecessors, the Lucy Selina and Australia Furnaces -- collectively ca. 1826-1911, though archaeological evidence indicates that some domestic sites remained occupied into the 1930s, with hunting or other activities following well into the twentieth century. In the 13 years of field work, at least seven archaeologists served as principal and/or co-principal investigators. A greater number of work-study students, staff, and volunteers processed the collections; hundreds of students participated in field work and artifact analysis. For two decades, progress with Longdale collections stalled due to inadequate laboratory space. From 2023 to the present with marginally improved infrastructure, W&L Archaeology jumpstarted analysis of Longdale assemblages. Given the circumstances, field records and artifact inventories are uneven, but the artifact collections are intact, extensive, and revealing, particularly in the holistic context of archival, oral history, and other data that historical archaeology affords.
Measuring Diversity to Identify Residential Group Types: Buttons from the Longdale Mining Community. Poster presented at the Virginia Social Science Association Meetings, 2013. Chelsea Dudley, Karen Lyle, Donald Gaylord, and Alison Bell.
Washington and Lee University conducted archaeological field methods classes during six-week spring terms 1991-2003 at the Longdale Mining Community in George Washington National Forest. W&L Archaeology recorded industrial as well as domestic struc tures, though excavation focused on the latter. While the wooden structures, whether frame or log, are long gone, stone foundations, hearth bases, and chimney falls (sometimes including brick) are often visible at the surface. Archaeologists tested 17 sites in a preliminary fashion and conducted more extensive excavation on 21 domestic sites (Stroh and McDaniel 1999:4).These sites are dispersed among four “communities” to which archaeologists assigned numbers.
“Hammers from Indian Graves”: Working toward Repatriation of Native American Artifacts at Washington and Lee University. Presented at the Archaeology Society of Virginia Meetings, 2024.
I offer this paper in the spirit of reckoning that Victoria Ferguson and Carole Nash have called on archaeologists to embrace. In discussing artifact collections held by my employer, Washington and Lee University, my intent is to acknowledge— as transparently, factually, and clearly as possible— what we’ve recently learned. This simple frankness is, I believe, both ethically necessary and concordant with the spirit of openness required by federal repatriation law.
For an indeterminate amount of time, boxes and bags of unprovenienced precolonial artifacts labeled as having been “donated to W&L” were stored and largely forgotten in a shed, basement, and a farmhouse darkroom designated as the archeology lab at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. With attention to newly updated NAGPRA regulations effective January 2024, we set out this summer to locate and gather these artifacts, aiming to identify and categorize them by provenience and potential Tribal affiliation.
WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY
Research on People of Color Associated with the Area near the Intersection of Henry and Jefferson Streets in Lexington, Virginia, Including parts of the Corral / Hillel Parking Lot at Washington and Lee University. September, 2025
Archaeology at W&L's Robinson Hall
In June of 2013 renovation activity behind Robinson Hall uncovered shallow archaeological deposits related to historic Graham Hall (1804-1835). W&L archaeologists excavated part of the site, and Facilities Management preserved the balance for future archaeological field methods courses with students.
The Stewards House
At Liberty Hall – a predecessor of Washington and Lee – students resided and had classes in the Academy House (ca. 1793 – 1803), now widely known as “The Ruins” on W&L’s back campus. The contemporary, nearby Stewards House – the “dining hall” of its day – is less visible but was just as important to student life. Professor John McDaniel led archaeological investigations of the Liberty Hall campus in the 1970s, uncovering architectural remains of multiple structures including the Stewards House.
When fire gutted the Liberty Hall Academy House (1803), the institution moved one ridge to the southeast, was renamed Washington College, and became the core of what is now Washington and Lee University. The former campus became part of a plantation. Unlike the Academy House that was occupied for just a decade, tens of thousands of artifacts indicate that the Stewards House structure was used from the late eighteenth century into the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Particularly but not only during the site's plantation era (1803 - 1860s), enslaved people worked and lived in the building. W&L research archaeologist Don Gaylord has led recent efforts to read available evidence in light of the site’s multicomponent history.
Please see links below for stories about my advocacy for restoring the Stewards House to the condition in which archaeologists documented it during the 70s and for bringing respectful consideration of the site’s whole history to campus and community attention.
Click here for photos of the site restoration progress.
Click here for "Before and After" images.
Click here for news coverage of findings.
Click here for news coverage of the restoration.
ORAL HISTORY
“Come Through a Revolution”: Experiences with School Desegregation in Western Virginia, Essays in Honor of Professor Theodore C. DeLaney, Jr. (1943-2020).
When Washington and Lee History Professor Emeritus Ted DeLaney died in 2020, the New York Times memorialized him as the “conscience of a roiled university.” He had worked at W&L in various capacities for over half a century, beginning in 1963 as a custodian and retiring as a full professor and chair of the History Department. DeLaney had noted that the uniqueness of his story was less about working early on in a low-paying position – as countless people do so – and more about his movement through long-entrenched institutional and structural inequalities. Born and raised in Lexington, Virginia, DeLaney lived in one of the town’s predominantly Black neighborhoods where others had worked, for generations, as cooks, waiters, butlers, and groundskeepers at W&L and adjacent Virginia Military Institute. Initially following suit, DeLaney soon moved into a biology lab technician position at W&L, took classes, graduated, earned a doctoral degree in History from William and Mary, accepted a faculty position at W&L, chaired countless committees, started the Africana Studies program, chaired the History Department, and became a full professor.
DeLaney’s professional interests and personal experience combined in a major project he began in 2004, conducting oral history research on experiences of school desegregation in western Virginia. He invited me to work with him in designing the interview protocols, questions, and consent forms, and in training student researchers. DeLaney’s corpus of interviews ultimately included some 150 interviews of teachers, students, parents, coaches, staff members – Black and White – from Roanoke city and county, Botetourt County, Rockbridge County, Lexington, Buena Vista, Augusta County, Waynesboro, and Staunton. As his health declined in 2019 and 2020, he suggested that I complete the work and publish the results.
Professor DeLaney had chosen to research school desegregation in western Virginia partly because of his own experience. Despite the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision in 1954 –declaring separate schools inherently unequal – schools in Lexington remained segregated throughout his high school career; he graduated in 1961 from Lylburn Downing School. In a 2018 interview about his experiences growing up in Jim Crow Lexington, an interviewer remarked, “I’ve been told that in Lexington in the ‘40s and ‘50s, race relations were relatively civil.” DeLaney replied, “Well, I wouldn’t say that. I would not say that at all. When you have total segregation in a community and when you have people who are not easily able to register to vote in a community, those are not civil relationships. I have a real, real hard time with viewing relationships as civil when they are as divided as Lexington was when I was growing up.”
DeLaney’s oral history program was designed, in part, to explore dynamics of segregation and desegregation that were neither civil nor as overly violent and virulent as elsewhere in the commonwealth and south. Public schools did not close (as in Prince Edward County, Virginia); the National Guard wasn’t deployed (as in Little Rock, Arkansas); high schools weren’t encircled by law enforcement to block Black students’ admission (as in Tuskegee, Alabama).
I explore DeLaney’s oral history corpus to understand how in western Virginia segregation and desegregation could be neither overtly violent nor civil. Another tension considered is how people had self-described close, trusting, respectful relationships across the color line, in a caste system (cf. Isabel Wilkerson), and how racialized segregation was harmful not only to Black Virginians but to the community at large (cf. James Baldwin; "Mourning the Creation of Racial Categories").
In addition to these threads, the study considers dialectics of common ground and divergent experiences. Conversations about school desegregation differed appreciably, for example, in rural Botetourt County and industrialized Waynesboro (the latter with dozens of PhD scientists from the Midwest and northeast working for GE and DuPont, and opposed to closing schools as a means of stalling desegregation). I also highlight the frequent, profound differences in perceptions of events by Black and White students.
The study is entitled “Come Through a Revolution”: Experiences with School Desegregation in Western Virginia, Essays in Honor of Professor Theodore C. DeLaney, Jr.. The titular quotation comes from an interview of long-time African American educators, George and Christine Warren who felt that – given their experiences in segregated schools and in processes of desegregation in several communities – they had “come through a revolution.”
DOCTORAL DISSERTATION
My doctoral disseration was titled "Conspicuous Production: Agricultural and Domestic Material Culture in Virginia, 1700-1900." (May 2000). I investigaed questions of ambition, priority, hierarchy, and social relations in historic Virginia by studying agricultural and domestic material culture. The project concentrated on 405 probate inventories recorded between 1700 and 1900 in Louisa and Essex Counties, and on four archaeological sites in Louisa County: the Dabney, Moore, Martin, and Dickenson Sites.
At the core of my surprising findings, I identified a dynamic of conspicuous production that was more central to the creation, maintenance, and alteration of social identity in rural Virginia than the conspicuous consumption of luxury goods. Domestic amenities played supporting roles in day-to-day social relations, but at center stage were items related to agricultural production. The abilities and accomplishments of most eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Virginia estate holders were visible not through their leisure but through their labor— either through their own work or through their management of an enslaved labor force.
My dissertation committee: Jim Deetz (chair), Henry Glassie, Jeff Hantman, Dell Hymes, Chuck Perdue, and Camille Wells.
Click here to read a copy of my disseration.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse