'Lift every voice': Historicizing black communities in Revolutionary and early National New York City and Philadelphia.

Between 1750 and 1850, both Philadelphia and New York City grew into polyglot urban centers, with black and white immigrants arriving from all of the Atlantic continents. This study begins by crafting a theoretical framework to demonstrate that many blacks---not only sailors and other seamen---lived in what Paul Gilroy has termed the Black Atlantic, a multivalent world encompassing a variety of places and cultures around the Atlantic basin, including Barbados, Britain, Canada, French and Spanish North America, and Africa. Although the dissertation uses Gilroy's theory only as an initial conceptual starting point, it does agree with him that blacks in this region lived, not along ethnically absolute lines but in complex, dynamic patterns of syncretism in which new definitions of what it means to be black emerge from raw materials provided by black populations elsewhere in the diaspora. The study engages this framework to ask important questions about the historical structure of early free black communities. At its core, the project recognizes the attendant differences and exchanges of language, experience, and identity existing among blacks in Philadelphia and New York meant that individuals necessarily defined community in different ways. In turn, this contributed to the development of not one large black community but innumerable micro-communities, based certainly on race, but equally on the differences in identity, experience, and perception inherent in such a population. While the anecdotal and social-historical evidence helps to flesh out the lived experience of these communities, demographic and census data add a concrete form to their shapes. My work shows that the micro-communities black Americans inhabited in what became the sites for the first sizeable free black populations in the West were filled with moments of conflict and contestation as much as with moments of coalescence and cooperation. This point receives its clearest treatment in the penultimate chapter, where the study focuses on these micro-communities in a specific place and time. The recognition of micro-communities also nurtures an engagement with black claims to nationality, that most expansive, modern form of community.

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