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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 …