Suchergebnisse

"Native Citizens!" Citizenship, Family, and Governance During the Haitian Revolution, 1789-1806 Given the upheaval of the Haitian Revolution, and first head-of-state Jean-Jacques Dessalines's insistence on divesting Haiti from all French influence, it is unsurprising that many historians have depicted Dessalines's rule as a dramatic rupture; the end of an old state, and the beginning of a new one. However, despite Dessalines's stated desire to divest from French influence, he continued to use the language of citizenship in legal texts, speeches, and proclamations, despite its strong association with French republicanism. By examining legislative texts and proclamations from 1793 to 1806, I argue that Dessalines used the language of citizenship as a shorthand for duty, obedience, and unity, in order to ensure the security both of the nation, and of his own authority. In doing so, he continued a trend set by pre-independence administrators, who used citizenship rhetoric in their attempts to establish order after the proclamation of emancipation in 1793. "Thrown into this Hospitable Land:" French Refugees in Virginia, 1793-1810 I explore the experiences of French refugees from the Haitian Revolution in Virginia, tracing several members of one refugee household in order to understand how refugees negotiated the opportunities and limitations that they faced upon arrival in the state. French refugees were received in the state with a combination of enthusiasm and suspicion, with the latter being particularly directed towards enslaved refugees, who were feared to carry the "contagion" of slave revolt. By piecing together the archival traces left by two members of the Burot family – planter Alexander Burot, and enslaved domestic Julia Ann Burot – and their immediate relatives, I speculate on the ways in which they addressed the obstacles they faced in Virginia, and argue that their ability to exploit personal and professional relationships, together with sheer good fortune, was instrumental to their achieving some level of socio-economic success in the state.

Attempts to account for the pattern and progress of mortality decline
in
England and Wales in the nineteenth century have produced a literature
in which something of a general accord exists over key factors involved.
Historians acknowledge the influence of two broad trends of change:
environmental improvements as a result of sanitary reform initiatives and
nutritional improvements as a consequence of a rise in the general
standard of living. Where discord has arisen is in the degree of attachment
of individual historians to one or other of these trends as primary
contributor. The study of mortality decline, which was the product of a
complex amalgam of factors, has proved a complicated task. It is one
whose outcome ultimately depends upon efforts to disaggregate and
measure the influences of different factors involved. To date, attempts
at
the systematic measurement of certain key factors associated with
mortality decline have lagged considerably behind acceptance of the
importance of their measurement. An important omission has been a
measure of the timing and dimensions of sanitary reform programmes
which, via infrastructure development and environmental controls, had
the potential to decrease the rate at which infectious diseases were
transmitted. This article examines the trends which emerge from a
quantification of local government expenditures on sanitary infrastructure
and from attention to its phasing over time. We are concerned with two
main issues: to what extent do public health expenditure data describe
the
public health effort, and how do trends in public health expenditure relate
to the decline of mortality? Our subject is local authority sanitary reform
as a factor in mortality decline and our focus is on the impact of the
timing
of public health expenditure rather than the reasons for that timing. We
do not examine inter-relationships between sanitary reform and other
factors contributing to mortality decline such as income levels and density
factors. A call for a more comprehensive study of the sanitary
undertakings of local government has been common amongst historians
of nineteenth-century mortality decline. It has been acknowledged on
both sides of the 'nutrition versus sanitation' debate that
a probable
causal relationship exists between sanitary reforms and declining mortality
levels. What has been lacking is a study of sufficient scale and detail
to
enable comprehensive evaluation.