Nicole Viglini

Nicole Viglini is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department at University of California, Berkeley. Her studies focus on nineteenth-century U.S. histories of slavery, gender, the economy and the environment. Before studying history at the graduate level, she worked in art preservation and museum installation in New York and Oakland.

Research

Flora, Fauna, and the Economic Networks of Enslaved and Free Women in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana and Mississippi

My dissertation examines enslaved and free women’s knowledge, use, and trade of plant and animal resources on uncultivated lands in the nineteenth-century Gulf South, and how the circulation and marketing of these products in local communities fostered social connections and political cultures. While historians have long emphasized the limited cartographic knowledge of rurally enslaved women in the American South, my project establishes how enslaved girls from an early age became aware of local geographies, and how bondswomen often took great risks to teach their children about uses of natural resources in forests, swamps, and other spaces deemed outside the “civilized” boundaries of plantations. Analyzing how this knowledge affected and created connections between black and white neighbors, peddlers, free black entrepreneurs, and maroon communities, the project then considers free and enslaved women’s marketing practices in New Orleans and Natchez, how plant and animal materials circulated in the city environment, and the extent to which profits went toward free women’s purchase of family members. The project will conclude by considering how the onset of the Civil War affected women’s trade, and how antebellum marketing activities and socio-political connections laid the groundwork for freedwomen’s claims to property before the Southern Claims Commission.