Fields, Whitney Nicole. Captive in promised land: Black lives, confinement, and incarceration in nineteenth-century urban America. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-1v4a-bs90
DescriptionThis dissertation is a history of the incarceration and labor of African Americans in the early nineteenth-century urban North. This study foregrounds African Americans as subjects within the nation’s first prisons and penitentiaries as an emerging carceral landscape developed in the urban North in the wake of the American Revolution. From the early republic to the antebellum and post-Emancipation periods, this dissertation reanimates the nation's early history and crafts a narrative of African Americans’ experiences of incarceration and captivity. As the urban carceral landscape expanded, so too did the Black populations within the walls of Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Prison, Eastern State Penitentiary, and the House of Refuge for Colored Children. Though slavery was gradually abolished in the North, state and city officials reorganized the legal and penal system to recapture the labor of the formerly enslaved to prolong their servitude. This dissertation argues that early nineteenth-century carceral institutions set a precedent model for the incarceration of African Americans after the Civil War and across the nation. This work chronicles how confinement and incarceration remained central methods to contain the possibilities of Black freedom and attends to the battles African Americans waged when they contested the demands of legislators, reformers, and prison administrators throughout the nineteenth century.
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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