This book examines early European American and African American gardening practices, social order, and material culture at the Wye House plantation. Located on the eastern shore of Maryland, this plantation housed the Welsh Lloyd family and hundreds of enslaved Africans and African Americans, including Frederick Douglass. Pruitt examines the different possible interactions and understandings of nature at the Wye House and their impact on the dynamic, culturally-based, and entangled landscape of imposed and hidden meanings, colonization and resistance, and science and magic. This book is recommended for scholars interested in historic and public archeology, applied anthropology, American and African American history, and race studies.

A multi-generational family history told in the voices of the author's ancestors, spanning enslavement alongside Frederick Douglass at Maryland's Wye House plantation, service in the U.S. Colored Troops, and the founding of all-Black Reconstruction-era communities.

The Diary of a Lady -- The Forman World -- House and Farm -- The Enslaved Community -- On Sassafras Neck -- Home and Exile -- World's End.

Critical approaches to public archaeology have been in use since the 1980s, however only recently have archaeologists begun using critical theory in conjunction with public archaeology to challenge dominant narratives of the past. This volume brings together current work on the theory and practice of critical public archaeology from Europe and the United States to illustrate the ways that implementing critical approaches can introduce new understandings of the past and reveal new insights on the present. Contributors to this volume explore public perceptions of museum interpretations as well as public archaeology projects related to changing perceptions of immigration, the working classes, and race.

"The Garden Politic shows how Americans in the nineteenth century used plants to understand their nation, mobilizing them for many different political ends, from abolition to private property. It also shows the importance of everyday gardening practices to broader environmental understandings, and suggests the lessons that this earlier period might offer our contemporary environmental imaginations"--

Violence is rampant in today's society. From state-sanctioned violence and the brutality of war and genocide to interpersonal fighting and the ways in which social lives are structured and symbolized by and through violence, people enact terrible things on other human beings almost every day. In Archaeologies of Violence and Privilege, archaeologists Christopher N. Matthews and Bradley D. Phillippi bring together a collection of authors who document the ways in which past social formations rested on violent acts and reproduced violent social and cultural structures. The contributors present a series of archaeological case studies that range from the mercury mines of colonial Huancavelica (AD 1564-1824) to the polluted waterways of Indianapolis, Indiana, at the turn of the twentieth century--a problem that disproportionally impacted African American neighborhoods. The individual chapters in this volume collectively argue that positions of power and privilege are fully dependent on forms of violence for their existence and sustenance.

55,000 biographies of people who shaped the history of the British Isles and beyond, from the earliest times to the year 2002.