Date of Submission

Fall 2019

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Anthropology

Project Advisor 1

Christopher Lindner

Abstract/Artist's Statement

An Eventful Contextualization of the Maple Avenue Parsonage & Germantown’s Former African American Neighborhood is a three-tiered study of the Maple Avenue community, which existed from around 1840 until 1911. Chapters one through three look at the Mid-Hudson Valley’s historic demography, the genealogies of Maple Avenue’s families, and then the recent archaeological discovery at the Maple Avenue Parsonage of several West African ritual emplacements. Chapter four calls upon the theoretical perspectives of the historical sociologist, William H. Sewell and the historical archaeologist, Douglas J. Bolender, to refute the archaeologist Christopher N. Matthews’s claim that the end of slavery in New York did not result in a structural transformation of society. In summation, this piece displays the retention of West African religious practices by the descendants of Germantown’s enslaved persons and the significant advancements that African Americans made following the end of slavery in New York in 1827

Open Access Agreement

Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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