Brian T. Corrigan ’05 (right)
Corrigan majored in history and will begin working as a project analyst for the law firm of Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky, and Popeo, P.C., in Washington, D.C. this summer.

Contraband Camps: The Cultural and Political Meeting Grounds of the Civil War

David Quigley, associate professor, history department

“Brian’s project is one of the two or three best I’ve seen at Boston College and is typical of a top-quality M.A. thesis in American History. His research on contraband camps—Union army safe places for fugitive Southern slaves whose legal identities were unknown—illuminates important dimensions of the African-American experience in local contexts during the Civil War. Brian conducted research at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, at several Boston-area repositories, and in Corinth, Mississippi. He makes a powerful case for the camps’ importance in determining later definitions and understandings of race, freedom, and democracy. Most successful, I find, are his chapters on the particular contraband experiences on the Sea Islands and at Corinth. Here, Brian manages to bring together all the themes of the first three chapters and gets at the complex particularities of the local transition from slavery to contraband to freedom.”