Publication Type: Panelist Abstract
Abstract: In 1894, the Boston newspaper Woman’s Era published a short reminiscence of an event that took place nearly half a century earlier that had become local legend. A group of women on Boston’s West End had violently confronted a slave catcher and succeeded in driving him off, thus securing the freedom of the woman who was his intended target. The leader of the vigilant group was a “colored woman of prominence” named Nancy Prince. After reading this short item I was left wondering, “Who was Nancy Prince and why did she have such a prominent reputation among Boston’s small but vibrant African American community in the 1840s?” I then embarked on a preliminary research project to answer that question and stumbled upon a small body of scholarly and primary literature that opened the door for a myriad of questions and opportunities to address the condition of African American women’s activism, radicalism, and ideology in the antebellum U.S.
Nancy Prince (nee Gardner) left behind two major primary documents central to the examination of her life: The West Indies, Being a Description of the Islands, Progress of Christianity, Education, and Liberty among the Colored Population Generally and A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince (published in 1841 and 1850 respectively) and wrote a handful of letters to The Liberator. These documents bring to light Prince’s connections to prominent white Boston families and institutions (the Sargent family and the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society among the more notable) and her deep relationship to African American organizations and individuals (e.g. Prince Hall Masons and the Reverend Thomas Paul’s African Baptist Church). Furthermore, they convey a profound connection to her family’s African past and an international consciousness that begs for a deep historical examination of Nancy Prince’s life, travels and work.
Prince lived in both Russia and Jamaica, and through her writings one can begin to identify her ideological leanings and the nature of 19th Century abolitionism, progressive activism, the Women’s Rights Movement, and the Black Baptist Church. Prince’s work has been read mainly in connection with common literary genres, but textual analysis must not overshadow the fact that Prince’s work was, by and large, a radical tract that drew upon previous African American traditions of protest, pamphleteering, and biblical interpretation to argue for the inclusion of black people in the human family, and thus the ends of slavery and white domination world-wide. Furthermore, the extensive travels of Prince and the explicit literary connection she draws between the plight of both the Russian and Jamaican peasantry complicate and problematize the notion of the “Black Atlantic” that has come to dominate so much of the scholarly discourse on African and African American history and ideology.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: “…It is our duty to sympathise with our fellow men under their troubles.”

Prince Hall, 1797

Despite the extraordinary leadership Prince Hall provided as America’s earliest community activist of African descent, academics have not devoted the requisite time and resources necessary to bring his legendary contributions from the periphery of early American History. This paper is the first of a series of initiatives necessary to offset the current deficit of original academic scholarship concerning Prince Hall. Another aim is to counter the disproportionate number of flawed historical works exalting Prince Hall to mythical proportion.

During the twentieth century several U.S. Colonial and New Republic era historical accounts reduced Hall’s existence to merely founding the first Masonic Lodge for people of African descent. Several books written by notable American historians contain erroneous information concerning Prince Hall’s existence. Typically, Masonic historians have provided the most reliable insight, but scarcely do their works contextualize the significance of Hall’s being within one of America’s most fascinating eras in history.

Using primary and secondary source material, this paper serves as the foundation for further scholarly inquiry. It relies on scarce tangible evidence to establish factual assertions about Prince Hall’s character, conduct, and unwavering commitment to his community. An attempt to contextualize the aforementioned as an Americanist historian, this paper, and subsequent research associated with it, is distinguishable from previous works that either focus solely on Prince Hall’s Masonic ties or briefly allude to his existence merely as a by-product of their main subject interest.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Abstract: This paper will explore the analogy to landscape painting drawn by Machiavelli in the opening pages of The Prince. This reference by Machiavelli closely parallels a passage in DaVinci's notebooks and the connection between these two references will be carefully considered. I am interested in exploring how Machiavelli constructs a body of knowledge about the prince while simultaneously creating the prince as an object of study, who will be evaluated against a 'supposedly objective' standard of greatness. The analogy to landscape painting, which was not fully recognized at the time as a separate art genre, will provide the opening to uncover the ways in which standards and subjects are mutually implicated in the same processes of creation. I will end with an examination of the query, Why are there no 'great' women artists? in order to consider possibilities for critical and transformative action against the standard of greatness which creates The Prince as both its object of study and its subject. How have Realists interpreted/applied Machiavelli's Prince in the study of international relations? By explicating how The Prince was constituted as a subject and object of truth effects, we can expose the way in which standards regulating the conduct of international relations emerged, or came to be regarded, as 'objective' and 'timeless'. Drawing upon Foucault's critical emphasis on the transformative possibilities that lie within the terms of the dominant discourse coupled with his stress on esthetic self-fashioning, will hopefully open up a trajectory of thought enabling us to think beyond the limits of the present. The aim is to think international relations as other than it is at present.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: A study of Machiavelli?s Prince (with brief notes on the Discourses). By using simple instruments of semiotic analysis I argue that the text construes the political as the domain of the public whereas the moral is relegated into the private sphere.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: Paper Title: "In Defense of Prince Saunders: African American Educator and Proponent of Emigration to Haiti, 1816-1839"

Abstract:
Thousands of free African Americans, mostly from cities in the north, made the decision in the first half of the nineteenth-century to leave the United States and resettle in the new republic of Haiti. For some, emigration permitted individuals and their families a chance to escape society in free states where harsh restrictions increasingly curtailed the liberties of African Americans. As a whole, emigration to Haiti in the nineteenth-century was the larger expression of African American activism in the United States. This paper looks at one of the earliest plans for African American emigration to Haiti through the efforts of Prince Saunders (1785? -1839) who demonstrates how Haiti and the revolution of 1791-1804 figured prominently in the minds of African Americans as the first nation in the western hemisphere to eradicate slavery and colonial rule. Haiti’s achievement openly posed a threat to slave societies who felt the consequences of the revolution in the spread of slave resistance and antislavery in the Americas. An analysis of Prince Saunders’ writings in the Haytian Papers, letters of correspondence with the British anti-slavery activist Thomas Clarkson, and speeches presented to audiences in the U.S., reveals Saunders' vision to help African Americans achieve a better life outside of the constraints of an oppressive society. Saunders' involvement in Haiti also challenges contemporary perceptions of him as a self-interested individual and instead, allows us to see his impact as an advocate and supporter of Haiti's independence.