Background:

In 2004, Shannon Mahoney completed her Master's Thesis entitled Pay for Labor: Socioeconomic Transitions of Freedpeople and the Archaeology of African American Life from 1863 - 1930.  Shannon's dissertation, tentatively titled Community Building and the Black Freedom Movement: An Anthropological Study of Charles' Corner Virginia, 1862 - 1918, examines the role of community building by African American families on Virginia's Lower Peninsula during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries using multiple lines of evidence including oral histories with descendants, documents, and artifacts. The post-bellum residential community of Charles' Corner provides a compelling account of African American landholders during this critical period of cultural, social and economic transition.