Keefer, Katrina

This thesis demonstrates how the proper application of theoretical archaeological and osteological methods to archival documents can be both illuminating and vital to create a fuller understanding of those who have been historically silenced. By performing an archival analysis informed by an archaeological background, the first four volumes of the Registers of Liberated Africans from Freetown, Sierra Leone are "excavated." In addition to demographic data, four categories of analysis are presented, including Types of Illness and Symptoms, Types of Trauma, Types of Injury and/or Illness, and Multiple Symptoms and Illness. This data was collected during participation in a much larger transcription project using a unique methodology. The following analysis was conducted using a collection of interdisciplinary theories, including theoretical osteoarchaeology, practical osteology, medical anthropology, archival and linguistic analysis and numerical presentation. Discussions include the frequency of diseases, slave ships and barracoons as disease environments, potential causes for common injuries, the difficulties and evolution of medical language, and the limitations of both archival and archaeological work for medical and trauma investigation. While both archival and archaeological methods miss key information, using them in tandem offers a more complete view of a historical person and their life experiences.

Author Keywords: Archive, Disease, Liberated Africans, Osteoarchaeology, Sierra Leone, Trauma

Beginning in the 1970s, games went from being trivial and innocuous elements of childhood culture to major touchstones of North American popular culture. Games came to symbolize the dangers of a rapidly shifting technological and cultural landscape. This led to a series of moral panics that were centered upon these new, often complex, and increasingly realistic games that were apparently a source of moral corruption for children and teenagers. This view of games as a moral hazard for young people was often taken up by the news and mass media, opening the path for many moral entrepreneurs to leverage 'common sense' Media Effects thinking and gamer stereotypes for their own personal gain. This thesis tracks the historical development of these interrelated phenomena from Death Race in 1976, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, the Mortal Kombat hearings and finally to Doom and the Columbine Massacre in 1999.

Author Keywords: Media Effects, moral entrepreneurs, moral panic, realism, role-playing games, video games

This thesis demonstrates how the proper application of theoretical archaeological and osteological methods to archival documents can be both illuminating and vital to create a fuller understanding of those who have been historically silenced. By performing an archival analysis informed by an archaeological background, the first four volumes of the Registers of Liberated Africans from Freetown, Sierra Leone are "excavated." In addition to demographic data, four categories of analysis are presented, including Types of Illness and Symptoms, Types of Trauma, Types of Injury and/or Illness, and Multiple Symptoms and Illness. This data was collected during participation in a much larger transcription project using a unique methodology. The following analysis was conducted using a collection of interdisciplinary theories, including theoretical osteoarchaeology, practical osteology, medical anthropology, archival and linguistic analysis and numerical presentation. Discussions include the frequency of diseases, slave ships and barracoons as disease environments, potential causes for common injuries, the difficulties and evolution of medical language, and the limitations of both archival and archaeological work for medical and trauma investigation. While both archival and archaeological methods miss key information, using them in tandem offers a more complete view of a historical person and their life experiences.

Author Keywords: Archive, Disease, Liberated Africans, Osteoarchaeology, Sierra Leone, Trauma

This study analyzes Christian European perceptions of group identity and beliefs in early modern geographic literature, as exemplified by John Ogilby's Africa (1670), a selective translation of Olfert Dapper's 1668 work, and its descriptions of West-Central Africa. Ogilby's work, congruently with contemporary geographic literature, employed the Christian religion as a key marker of group identity, using it as a lens to interpret and define the collective identities of African societies it described. Using a theoretical framework derived from Daniel Bar-Tal's Group Beliefs, the thesis demonstrates that Africa portrayed the officially Christian kingdom of Kongo as superior to its non-Christian neighbours, consistently represented in a negative light. This attitude reflected normative European beliefs of Christian superiority fanned by the period's intense denominationalism and religious anxiety. Africa's general ecumenism towards other Christian denominations and its maintained "othering" of non-Christian Africans was closely linked to Ogilby's own sense of self-identity and group beliefs shaped by his life experiences in the seventeenth-century British Isles.

Author Keywords: Africa, Christianity, Identity, Kongo, Ogilby, Syncretism