Revealing Communities
The Archaeology of Free African Americans in the Nineteenth Century
Distributed for Bard Graduate Center
Revealing Communities
The Archaeology of Free African Americans in the Nineteenth Century
Highlights the long-understudied history of free Black communities in the United States.
This volume makes a unique contribution to a growing body of scholarship bringing forgotten free Black communities back into public memory and expanding views of Black history. Each of the book’s nine chapters presents a different historical-archaeological study of a community on the East Coast to the Midwest in environments ranging from rural to urban. The authors share what their investigations into material traces and documents have uncovered about the experiences, accomplishments, and struggles of people who were self-emancipated, manumitted, or born into freedom. Among the topics covered are inter- and intra-community relations, land ownership, place-making, landscapes, cemeteries and burials, private life and interiors, work, health, imagination, and material and spiritual strategies used to cultivate individuals, families, and communities. The authors’ innovative approaches, combined with the affective power of sites and artifacts, illuminate creative and resourceful efforts to establish thriving Black communities, whose members often had different biographies, views, and economic statuses. At the same time, each chapter pays close attention to the external barriers, including prejudice and violence, that aimed to limit the freedom of Black Americans and that made their experiences of freedom different from those of white Americans.
384 pages | 68 halftones, 3 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2026
Bard Graduate Center - Cultural Histories of the Material World
History: American History
Table of Contents
Edited by Meredith B. Linn
Series Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction Revealing Communities: The Archaeology of Free African Americans in the Nineteenth Century
Meredith B. Linn
One The Coopers: Contextualizing Freedom for an African American Family in Federal Period Delaware
Michael J. Gall
Two Lucy Foster, Cato Freeman, and The African American Community of Andover, Massachusetts
Anthony F. Martin
Three Responsive Symbolism and Susceptive Terrains in African-American Communities
Christopher C. Fennell
Four Signs of Spirituality at the Center of a Nineteenth-Century African-American Community: Germantown’s Parsonage in the Hudson Valley, New York
Christopher Ray Lindner
Five Self-Sufficiency and Community in Seneca Village
Meredith B. Linn, Nan A. Rothschild, and Diana diZerega Wall
Six A Sense of Place: Two Nineteenth-Century African American Communities—Skunk Hollow in Alpine, New Jersey, and Weeksville in Brooklyn, New York—Viewed through a Historical Archaeological Lens
Joan H. Geismar
Seven The Lives and Times of Josiah and Joshua Eddy, Barbers, and AME Church Ministers in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia
Rebecca Yamin and Terry Buckalew
Eight Archaeological Groundings: Building Community at the Dr. James Still Historic Office and Homestead
Marc Lorenc
Nine Imagination and Middle-Class Materiality: The Archaeology of Free Black Quiet and Public Space
Paul R. Mullins
List of Contributors
Index