{"id":53226,"date":"2019-02-07T03:51:51","date_gmt":"2019-02-07T07:51:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/utnews.utoledo.edu\/?p=53226"},"modified":"2019-02-05T11:51:12","modified_gmt":"2019-02-05T15:51:12","slug":"history-scholar-awarded-fellowship-to-write-book-about-female-plantation-owner-during-american-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/02_07_2019\/history-scholar-awarded-fellowship-to-write-book-about-female-plantation-owner-during-american-revolution","title":{"rendered":"History scholar awarded fellowship to write book about female plantation owner during American Revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

A history scholar at The University of Toledo has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) that will allow her to spend the 2019-20 academic year writing the history of Mary Willing Byrd, one of the few women who ran a large plantation in the early American South.<\/p>\n

Dr. Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch, associate professor and chair of the UT Department of History, will use the fellowship to complete her book, \u201cThe World of Westover: Mary Willing Byrd, Gender, Slavery, and the Economics of Citizenship in Revolutionary Virginia.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Pflugrad-Jackisch<\/p><\/div>\u201cI was shocked I had never heard of this woman when I first learned her name about 10 years ago, so I am excited by this opportunity to write an extensive study about her life,\u201d Pflugrad-Jackisch said. \u201cMary Willing Byrd explodes a lot of myths about Southern white women during the revolutionary era. She\u2019s not your typical Southern belle. Byrd believed that she was entitled to the same citizenship rights as white male property owners in the new republic, and she pushed to try and secure these rights for herself.\u201d <\/p>\n

Determined to track down and shine a light on Byrd\u2019s story, Pflugrad-Jackisch spent nearly a decade unearthing a paper trail of letters, court cases, and property records and records. Her archival quest took her to Virginia, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Michigan.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a stereotype that women slaveholders were more compassionate toward their slaves than men were, but women could be just as brutal as men could be,\u201d Pflugrad-Jackisch said. \u201cMary Willing Byrd is a fascinating example. A wealthy widow, she ran the Westover plantation for 37 years and was able to pay off the estate\u2019s enormous debts left by her late husband William Byrd III by using slave labor to make her plantation profitable.\u201d <\/p>\n

Pflugrad-Jackisch received one of 84 fellowships announced by the NEH totaling $4.6 million. The NEH, an independent federal agency created in 1965, works to serve and strengthen the country and convey the lessons of history by awarding grants for top-rated proposals examined by panels of independent, external reviewers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese new NEH grants represent the humanities at its most vital and creative,\u201d Jon Parrish Peede, NEH chairman, said. \u201cThese projects will shed new light on age-old questions, safeguard our cultural heritage, and expand educational opportunities in classrooms nationwide.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cWe are extremely proud of Dr. Pflugrad-Jackisch\u2019s award. This prestigious national fellowship was awarded to only 7 percent of the applicants,\u201d Charlene Gilbert, dean of the UT College of Arts and Letters, said. \u201cHer success is a testament to her brilliant scholarship and dedication to her research.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her manuscript, Pflugrad-Jackisch makes use of Byrd\u2019s correspondence to Thomas Jefferson and high-ranking military officials during the Revolutionary War, including the Marquis de Lafayette. These letters demand the return of escaped slaves and compensation for property lost when the British army under the command of the traitor Benedict Arnold raided her plantation along the James River, damaging all of her farming equipment. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis research has been quite tedious because Byrd\u2019s information is often catalogued in archives under the names of men, not her own name, or placed unlabeled in the \u2018miscellaneous\u2019 folders. She has a letter in the collection of Thomas Jefferson\u2019s papers, but you have to know it is there to go look for it,\u201d Pflugrad-Jackisch said. \u201cYou have to physically go and dig through boxes of male relatives\u2019 business records because Byrd is unlisted. You wouldn\u2019t know they were there. I found 33 of Byrd\u2019s letters in a collection marked \u2018Willing Family Business Records\u2019 that only listed the names of her brothers and nephews.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her role as manager of Westover plantation, Byrd directed the labor of more than 100 slaves; supervised the plantation\u2019s overseers; sold wheat, barley, corn and tobacco crops; and fended off her late husband\u2019s creditors in court. Her interactions with the state, military and market were out of the ordinary for a woman during that tumultuous time of upheaval.<\/p>\n

\u201cByrd\u2019s world provides scaffolding and a framework for the broader complexities of this era, bundling together the challenges of establishing credit, political loyalty, motherhood and slave management, themes that historians usually explore separately,\u201d Pflugrad-Jackisch said. \u201cThis project examines how the remaking of Virginia\u2019s legal, economic and cultural institutions during and after the war laid the foundation for the construction of gendered and racial hierarchies that would come to define women\u2019s citizenship by the beginning of the 19th century.\u201d <\/p>\n

Pflugrad-Jackisch\u2019s first book, \u201cBrothers of a Vow: Secret Fraternal Organizations and the Transformation of White Male Culture in Antebellum Virginia,\u201d was published in 2010 by the University of Georgia Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch, UT associate professor and chair of history, has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to finish her book about Mary Willing Byrd, a plantation owner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":812,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,1,3,7],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53226"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/812"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53226"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53291,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53226\/revisions\/53291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}