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This is part one of a five-part series recognizing Virginia Wesleyan faculty members who have received faculty development grants.
by Christina Foster '07
The subject of history is one in which researchers work to develop new ideas about past events. It is not enough for historians to know that these events actually took place; they want to know why the events happened and how they impacted Americans' lives over past decades.
Many faculty members received summer development grants for the 2006 summer months, when they completed different types of research. Two history department members who received grants were Assistant Professor of History Dr. Richard Bond and Batten Associate Professor of History Dr. Daniel Margolies.
"My summer grant helped me to begin revising my dissertation," said Bond.
His project focuses mainly on slavery in pre-Revolutionary New York, or during the 17th and 18th centuries. Some do not realize that slavery in the United States was along much of the east coast and was not entirely located in the southern states. Bond says that many would be surprised to know that "New York had a slave population in excess of 20 percent at times, and in some of the countries surrounding New York City, almost 33 percent of the population was enslaved."
Bond's research on the slave population of pre-Revolutionary New York led him to another area of research.
"The second part of my project is interested in delineating the connections that existed between rural, urban and larger international environments."
Because people in colonial times did not tend to live in just one place, "the social economic and cultural networks that they inhabited spanned the globe." African-American slaves had familial and social connections to urban, rural and oceanic environments, as well as "linguistic capabilities and familiarity with multiple legal forms, [which] allowed free and enslaved blacks to cross national and local boundaries with ease."
Bond's research was drawn from various archival records in New York, London, Washington, D.C., and others, where he read colonial legal, economic and personal documents.
Margolies is interested in the politics of the empire in United States history. He studied this as well as the idea of extraterritoriality, or "the unilateral expansion of United States laws beyond national territorial boundaries."
"My project is the first full historical study of this extremely significant concept of extraterritoriality in American foreign relations," said Margolies. "The central focus of my project is the transformation of individual rights and business interests in the formation of empire as reflected in the case law of extraterritoriality in American foreign relations from 1850 to 1960."
Margolies used his summer development grant to help further his research on these specific topics. He also presented some aspects of his research at the 2006 annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations at the University of Kansas. He presented in June under the title "Territoriality, Extraterritoriality and the Guano Act of 1856."
He will also present a new paper on extraterritoriality at the 2007 Organization of American Historians at the end of March.