Suicide in the Early American South

FAIN: HR-50245-06

Terri L. Snyder
California State University, Fullerton (Fullerton, CA 92831-3547)

The proposed project is a history of suicide in the early American South from the colonial period through the Civil War. During these years, suicide was a recurring theme in public, private, and popular documents, but historians have paid little attention to its prevalence or significance. The American Revolution marked a dramatic change in the legal, cultural, and political meanings of suicide and the emergence of distinctively southern attitudes toward violence. My goal in this project is to analyze these various narratives of self-murder, situate them in a comparative colonial, regional, and transatlantic context, and analyze how and why the legal, cultural, and political meanings of suicide in the South change over time.

Associated Products

Suicide, Slavery, and Memory in North America,” Journal of American History, vol. 97, no. 1 (June 2010), 39-62. (Article)
Title: Suicide, Slavery, and Memory in North America,” Journal of American History, vol. 97, no. 1 (June 2010), 39-62.
Author: Terri L. Snyder
Abstract: In early North America, the subject of slave suicide alarmed traders and masters; their commentary, along with coroner’s inquests, abolitionists' accounts and slave narratives, leaves little doubt that slaves did destroy themselves. Terri L. Snyder considers suicide among slaves in North America from three perspectives: the perception of slave self-destruction, the ecologies of slave suicide, and how one particular collective suicide was later remembered by ex-slaves in the 1930s. Her examination of suicide within North American slavery over the long sweep of American culture removes suicide from the realm of resistance, looking at it from the perspective of the ecologies that fostered self-destruction. This view also historicizes our understanding of suicide within North American slavery, and the ways in which suicide is understood today. The memory of suicide among ex-slaves in the Coastal Sea Islands reflects the power of cultural memory to reshape past tragedy, transforming memories of suicide into stories of power and transcendence.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/content/97/1.toc
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of American History
Publisher: Organization of American Historians/Oxford University Press

Prizes

Judith Lee Ridge Article Prize
Date: 4/1/2011
Organization: Western Association of Women Historians
Abstract: The Judith Lee Ridge Prize is an annual $250 prize that recognizes the best article in the field of history published by a WAWH member.

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