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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.