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"An Ill-Judged Piece Of Business": The Failure Of Slave Trade Suppression In A Slaveholding Republic, Sarah A. Batterson

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the U.S. suppression of the slave trade from the ratification of the Constitution in 1789 to the onset of the Civil War in 1861. Instead of studying the slave trade in isolation, this dissertation evaluates U.S. slave trade policy within the context of the development of federal power during the early republic and antebellum period. This work assesses the disconnect between the harsh laws against the slave trade and the United States' ineffectiveness at suppressing the trade, especially since, at its founding, U.S. involvement in the African slave trade seemed to have a looming expiration date.

By …

Shifting Alliances And Fairweather Friends: Luso-American Relations, 1941--1951, Paula Celeste Gomes Noversa. Rioux

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the diplomatic relations between Portugal and the United States from 1941 to 1951, a decade that resulted in a tremendous and permanent shift in Luso-American relations. It examines the wartime and postwar goals of both Portugal and the United States. It reveals how these two nations overcame their differences during the war and worked towards mutually beneficial ends after the war. Moreover this dissertation asserts that Antonio Salazar, Portugal's Prime Minister, permanently altered Portuguese-American relations and managed to supplant the assurances found in the flagging AngloPortuguese alliance with a series of American initiatives--the European Recovery Program, the …

From Sweetwater To Seawater: An Environmental History Of Narragansett Bay, 1636--1849, Christopher L. Pastore

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines environmental change on and around Narragansett Bay from first European settlement in 1636 to the dissolution of the Blackstone Canal Company in 1849. It uses one of the largest estuaries on the East Coast and one situated at the heart of early English settlement in New England as a means to write estuaries into Atlantic history. Examining the ecological and epistemological complexities that arose at the nexus of land and sea, where improvable space and the push of "progress" met an eternal or "profound" ocean, this study reframes estuaries as watery borderlands that people used but never …

The Origins Of American History In The Early Modern English Atlantic World, Ian J. Aebel

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is the story of how the English wrote the history of America between c. 1500 and c. 1700. Utilizing printed and manuscript sources, it argues that writing American history allowed English writers to navigate, negotiate, and contest the terms of a developing Atlantic empire. In doing so, the English created a vision of America to compete with the dominant Spanish narrative by the end of the seventeenth century.

The existence of America gave the English an opportunity to explore the prospect of overseas empire. After the Columbian encounter, English thinkers and writers transformed their historical methodology to accommodate …

Campaigning For Authenticity, Erica J. Seifert

Doctoral Dissertations

In the fall of 1976 Jimmy Carter wanted to be "an American President... who is not isolated from our people, but a President who feels your pain and who shares your dreams." With humble, hopeful, homey images of Plains, Georgia, campaign advertisements sold Carter as a fresh-off-the-farm, peanut-picking Cincinnatus---an authentic American to whom voters could relate.

Authenticity became increasingly important to candidate selection in the late twentieth century for multiple reasons. As a priority of the Babyboom Generation, the value of authenticity informed Americans' relationships to own another and evaluations of their cultural products. Political and cultural upheaval resulting from …

Creek Diplomacy In An Imperial Atlantic World, Deena L. Parmelee

Doctoral Dissertations

"Creek Diplomacy in an Imperial Atlantic World," argues that Creek leaders saw opportunities for Creek peoples to play an important political and economic role in the Atlantic world even while the Confederacy itself was still forming. This study explores Creek participation in the Atlantic world in two ways. First, it traces Creek diplomatic travel to European centers. Second, it examines Creek reception of European traders and diplomats in Creek towns. In this way, it traces Creek diplomacy in its external and internal forms, as Creeks moved outward to establish diplomatic relations with others, and dealt with outsiders who came to …

Slavery Exacts An Impossible Price: John Quincy Adams And The Dorcas Allen Case, Washington, Dc, Alison T. Mann

Doctoral Dissertations

On August 22, 1837, a Georgetown resident sold Dorcas Allen and her four children to James H. Birch, a District of Columbia slave trader He transported them across the Potomac to Alexandria, Virginia to hold them in the largest slave pen in the District. They faced, most likely, passage on a slave coffle to Natchez or New Orleans. That same evening, Allen, who had married and been living unofficially in the District as a "free Negro" for a number of years, killed the two youngest children and was restrained from harming the others, after their terrified shrieks alerted someone nearby. …

Making A "Black Beverly Hills": The Struggle For Housing Equality In Modern Los Angeles, Jennifer Mandel

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the black struggle for housing equality through mid-twentieth century Los Angeles, California. Alongside the rise of Los Angeles as a major metropolitan center, residential discrimination became embedded in the fabric of the city and African Americans found themselves forced to live on the increasingly run down Eastside. In response, a number of middle- and upper-class blacks led a campaign against housing discrimination by migrating to the Westside. While they were accused of abandoning low-income blacks and adopting white norms, affluent blacks defied racial restrictive covenants, endured white intimidation, and pursued lawsuits in an effort to live in …

"This Wilderness World": The Evolution Of A New England Farm Town, 1820--1840, Mary Babson Fuhrer

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation uses the extraordinary conflict that roiled one rural town in central Massachusetts during the second quarter of the nineteenth century as a lens through which to observe communal relationships in transition. Using the Amish as a model, the dissertation identifies traditional communal social organization as agrarian, patriarchal, communal, homogeneous, localistic, and consensual -- as well as closed, conformist, and suspicious of difference and innovation. The dissertation argues that conflict arose in Boylston during the 1820s and '30s as these traditional relationships gradually gave way to more modern ways of belonging, associating, and envisioning one's place in the wider …

The Maritime Revival: Antimodernity, Class, And Culture, 1870--1940, Glenn Michael Grasso

Doctoral Dissertations

Between 1870 and 1940, Americans redefined their perceptions, ideas, and cultural meanings of seafaring under sail. The Maritime Revival---a cultural phenomenon that took the workaday nineteenth-century maritime world and converted it into an archetypical exercise in essential Americanism---selectively picked stories, symbols, and specific lifestyles and elevated them to heroic status. Part of larger nineteenth-century revivalism, the Maritime Revival created an image of seafaring that was a small subset of the entire experience-as-lived. By the 1930s, Americans recognized a heroic, but lost, golden age of sailing ships that did not correspond to the maritime world that had once been a ubiquitous …

A Wild Web: The Tangled History Of Attitudes Toward Wildlife In A Dynamic New England Culture, 1945--1985, Mary H. Hopkins

Doctoral Dissertations

Attitudes toward wildlife are considerably more complex than one might suspect. This dissertation started with a hypothesis that population growth would correlate with increasing negative attitudes toward wildlife, but historical evidence only partially supports this hypothesis. Information about the frequency and types of wildlife references appearing in newspapers between 1945 and 1985 was gathered from a systematic sampling of six New Hampshire newspapers that represented towns with differing growth trends. While analysis of quantitative data minimized any correlation between growth and negative attitudes, qualitative data from newspaper articles, archival sources, government reports, books and articles, and other sources provided evidence …

Prodigal Sons: Indigenous Missionaries In The British Atlantic World, 1640--1780, Edward E. Andrews

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the hundreds of black and Native American preachers who worked as Christian missionaries in the early modern British Atlantic world. While scholars have generally accepted the convention that most missionaries were white Europeans who knew little about the native peoples they were trying to convert, there were practical and theological explanations for why native preachers not only became ubiquitous, but often outnumbered their white counterparts in Protestant missions. The language barrier, the opportunity to tap into extensive kinship networks, and early modern interpretations of black and Indian bodies all catalyzed the formation of an indigenous evangelical corps …

The Taxpayer As Reformer: 'Pocketbook Politics' And The Law, 1860--1940, Linda Upham-Bornstein

Doctoral Dissertations

Taxes and the citizens' tax burden have always been at the hub of American politics. This dissertation opens up consideration of taxpayers as political and legal actors, who saw paying taxes as a source of political legitimacy and empowerment. It examines the powerful connection between organized taxpayer activity, political reform, and the law.

Organized taxpayers have relied heavily on the law in general, and on taxpayers' lawsuits in particular, to promote their interests and political reform. During the last half of the nineteenth century courts, and legislatures throughout the nation came to recognize the right of taxpayers to bring suit …

Negotiating For Nature: Conservation Diplomacy And The Convention On Nature Protection And Wildlife Preservation In The Western Hemisphere, 1929--1976, Keri Lewis

Doctoral Dissertations

In 1941, as the United States entered the Second World War, leaders from twenty American nations signed into effect a broad-based treaty for the protection of migratory wildlife at the Convention on Nature Protection and Wild Life Preservation in the Western Hemisphere. This dissertation examines the unique set of questions, problems, and concerns framers of the Convention dealt with in the development of a conservation program to ensure the protection of migratory wildlife as it crossed political borders. Although it provided no solid system of enforcement, the provisions of the Convention opened the door for new, more specific conservation treaties …

Dissecting The Pennsylvania Anatomy Act: Laws, Bodies, And Science, 1880--1960, Venetia M. Guerrasio

Doctoral Dissertations

When the Pennsylvania Legislature passed a mandatory anatomy law in 1883, they were conceding to medicine and science the need for human dissection "material." The legislature was also conceding authority, entrusting physicians and scientists to regulate the messy business of human dissection. In addition to providing bodies for dissection, the Pennsylvania Anatomy Act of 1883 created a modern, state-level bureaucratic entity run by medical experts empowered with self governance: the Anatomical Board of Pennsylvania. Scholars have paid scant attention to the post grave-robbing history of anatomy and dissection in the United States. When the state engaged in body procurement for …

32 In '44: A Management And Environmental Study Of Submarine Construction At Portsmouth Navy Yard During World War Ii, Rodney Keith Watterson

Doctoral Dissertations

After averaging the completion of less than two submarines a year in the 1930s, the Portsmouth Navy Yard completed an astonishing thirty-two submarines in 1944. The yard's outstanding performance during World War II was the product of a highly motivated work force and a management team that thrived in a decentralized wartime shipyard environment. Employing aggressive and innovative management techniques that included employee empowerment, small teams, and mass production techniques to the extent that they could be applied to submarine construction at the time, the shipyard delivered submarines at unprecedented rates.

There were downsides to the shipyard's crowning achievements during …

Accounting For Taste: The Early American Music Business And Secularization In Music Aesthetics, 1720--1825, Peter S. Leavenworth

Doctoral Dissertations

This study redefines popular music in early America as sacred music sung and performed in most churches and, starting in the 1790s, theater music imported from England. Rather than more static secular ballads and traditional dance pieces customarily understood as popular music, sacred and theater music intersected with more people more often and did so with more participation. Conflicting tastes of practitioners of religious music and secularizing influences from the theater created a series of reforms and counter measures that featured regional, as well as personal, fractures in American society. These personal and public debates, carried out in diaries, letters, …

Little Short Of National Murder: Forced Migration And The Making Of Diasporas In The Atlantic World, 1745--1865, Jeffrey A. Fortin

Doctoral Dissertations

Removal---or, the exile and forced migration of marginalized cultural and racial groups from one region of the British Empire and, later, the United States, to another less volatile region---emerged as a key tool in the construction of the Anglo-American Atlantic World. British officials used removal to secure the empire, ridding the realm of Catholic menaces, black insurgents, challenges to the throne and the brutal conflicts between English colonists and Native Americans. American leaders, after the conclusion of the American Revolution, viewed removal as a viable solution to the problem of slavery and the potential troubles induced by freeing the slaves. …

"Woke Up This Morning With My Mind On Freedom": Women And The Struggle For Black Equality In Louisiana, Shannon L. Frystak

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the role of female civil rights activists in the black struggle for equality in Louisiana. Drawing on the fields of history, sociology, political science, and gender studies, this project demonstrates that women were indispensable figures in the freedom struggle in Louisiana throughout the twentieth century, and highlights their roles as organizers, participants, and leaders.

The project focuses on the entire state of Louisiana, but more specifically in areas where civil rights organizations concentrated their efforts. While many historical studies of the movement begin with the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, this …

Indians And Immigrants: Survivance Stories Of Literacies, Joyce Rain Anderson

Doctoral Dissertations

This item is not available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

This project stems from my mixedblood heritage and from a community of mixedblood scholars. In this text, I relate stories of the early colonization of Southern New England, of the zones of contact between whites (primarily English) and Indians (primarily Massachusett or Wampanoag). I offer perspectives on competing views of literacy and explored texts translated from Massachusett Algonquin to see how Indians used writing to enact rhetorics of survivance which challenged the prevailing assumptions of the dominant culture. Within these texts we see how Indians continued to define themselves in …

A Loss Of Will: "Arminianism," Nonsectarianism, And The Erosion Of American Psychology's Moral Project, 1636--1890, Russell D. Kosits

Doctoral Dissertations

The concept of "the will" dominated American moral psychology for nearly three centuries. To possess a will was, among other things, to be made in the image of God and to have moral responsibility. College textbooks, as tools of moral inculcation, conveyed this moral psychology from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. A significant shift occurred in college psychology textbooks during the 1930s: the topic of will was being removed as a chapter heading---never to return. By the end of the decade, American psychology had lost its will.

What explains this "loss of will" in American psychology? From a …

Arthur Raper: Modern Realist In The New Deal South, Louis Mazzari

Doctoral Dissertations

Arthur Raper was a progressive sociologist and controversial voice for racial and social equality in the South during the 1920s and 1930s. Son of a white, North Carolina farm family, Raper became allied with modernist voices at Chapel Hill and the University of Chicago. Raper's research was widely discussed through the region and greatly influenced Southern race relations in the years leading to the civil rights movement.

Raper was the first white southerner to look critically and scientifically at the causes of racial violence. The Tragedy of Lynching (1933) was reviewed in hundreds of Southern newspapers and discussed throughout the …

Intercultural Contact And The Creation Of Albany's New Diplomatic Landscape, 1647--1680, Holly Anne Rine

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the process of Albany's rise to the center of American Indian-European relations on the northeast coast of North America between the years 1647--1680. By the year 1677 the Albany courthouse served as the meeting place for the negotiations that formed the Covenant Chain between the Five Nations of the Iroquois and the English colonies of North America. To reach this important development, however, took years of political, military, economic and cultural struggle. Moreover, these struggles were not merely between the Iroquois and the English who would eventually negotiate the Covenant Chain, but within them as well.

Moreover, …

Playing The Man: Masculinity, Performance, And United States Foreign Policy, 1901--1920, Kim Brinck-Johnsen

Doctoral Dissertations

"Playing the Man": Masculinity Performance, and US Foreign Policy, 1901--1920 argues that early twentieth century conceptions of masculinity played a significant role in constructing US foreign policy and in creating a new sense of national identity. It focuses on five public figures (Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Reed, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson). Although their conceptions of masculinity varied, each of these central historical figures based his or her US foreign policy position on the idea that in the conduct of US foreign relations, the United States needed to "play the man." Similarly, even when their policy …

Intelligence Versus Impulse: William H Seward And The Threat Of War With France Over Mexico, 1861--1867, Albert Joseph Griffin Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that U.S. Secretary of State William Seward conceived a diplomatic strategy that enabled the U.S. to oust the French and their puppet emperor, Maximilian, from Mexico in 1867. The genius in Seward's approach lay in accomplishing this goal without committing U.S. forces. Using original diplomatic correspondence, this dissertation shows how Seward capitalized on both the weaknesses of the French, and the strengths of republican Mexico. It demonstrates how Seward bargained for the time needed for his strategy to work, even when many around him were pressing for precipitous action. It argues that Seward's diplomatic strategy succeeded in …

Vocational Science And The Politics Of Independence: The Boston Marine Society, 1754--1812, Matthew Gaston Mckenzie

Doctoral Dissertations

Between 1754 and 1812 the Boston Marine Society developed vocational scientific practices adapted from day-to-day work routines to expand the navigational knowledge of New England's coastlines. For this reason, the Marine Society's navigational work suggests important parallels with the history of colonial science in other areas during the late eighteenth century. Notwithstanding most other studies in the history of American science, the Boston Marine Society indicates that colonial Boston shipmasters were not dependent upon learned societies for their navigational research needs. Rather, they adapted their mutual aid society and developed methodologies to collect navigational observations, analyze them for reliability and …

Asanti Daughter Of Zion: The Life And Memory Of Harriet Tubman, Katherine Clifford Larson

Doctoral Dissertations

We all believe that we know Harriet Tubman (1820--1913): slave, famous conductor on the Underground Railroad, abolitionist, spy, nurse, and suffragist. Her successful, secret journeys into the slave states to rescue bondwomen, men, and children have immortalized her in the minds of Americans for over one hundred and thirty years. One of the most famous women in our nation's history, we have come to know the narrative of her life only through juvenile biographies. These stories made Tubman's life a legendary one by reconstituting her into a historical and cultural icon suitable for mass consumption as the "Mother of her …

"Everybody Get Together": The Sixties Counterculture And Public Space, 1964--1967, Jill Katherine Silos

Doctoral Dissertations

Historians and cultural analysts have traditionally considered the sixties counterculture an apolitical phenomenon by historians and other analysts. Yet concentrated examination of the public activities of the counterculture in San Francisco from 1963 to 1967 reveals that they were engaged in the creation of a public political culture that challenged the power of civil authorities to regulate the uses of parks, streets and sidewalks. In doing so, the counterculture constituted a distinct community with a political agenda.

This thesis is demonstrated through an analysis of the development of an ethos toward public space in the Beat movement and Merry Prankster …

"The Cradle Of Liberty": Faneuil Hall And The Political Culture Of Eighteenth-Century Boston, Jonathan Mcclellan Beagle

Doctoral Dissertations

Built in the early 1740s as a combination marketplace and town hall, Boston's Faneuil Hall became famous for its role in the American Revolution, earning it the affectionate nickname "The Cradle of Liberty." This dissertation examines the building as an expression of Boston's evolving political culture and community identity in the eighteenth century. At the time of Faneuil Hall's construction, the seaport was struggling to reconcile its proud Puritan heritage with the demands of an imperial existence as part of the British Empire, a process that provoked controversy. Among the most explosive issues was that of a fixed and regulated …

Nature And Identity In The Creation Of Franconia Notch: Conservation, Tourism, And Women's Clubs, Kimberly Ann Jarvis

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the significance of the successful 1923--1928 conservation campaign that created a state park and war memorial in Franconia Notch in New Hampshire's White Mountains. The Franconia Notch campaign utilized a century's worth of artistic and literary interpretations that created Romantic images of the natural beauties of the White Mountains and Franconia Notch which, together with the ideas of the Progressive Era conservation movement and the cooperative efforts of the state of New Hampshire, the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, and the New Hampshire Federation of Women's Clubs, resulted in a combination of circumstances that …