Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Class, Class Mobility, And The Consumption Of Household Technology In Salem, Massachusetts, 1890-1914, Candace Stephens

Graduate Masters Theses

This study looks at the rise of household technologies available in Salem, Massachusetts from 1890-1914, and examines how these technologies, from importation to sale and consumption, defined class and class aspirations in the city and reflect transformations seen throughout the United States during the turn of the twentieth century. So that we can best understand how technology was used within individual homes, this research centers almost exclusively around four families whose businesses, and residences are dissected to better identify how their consumption of goods and technology created new opportunities, as well as problems, for household members and domestic servants employed …

Worker Cooperatives And Revolution: History And Possibilities In The United States, Christopher Wright

Graduate Masters Theses

Worker cooperatives have a long and tortured history, but recently they have been advancing globally on a more stable foundation than before. In this essay I provide a theoretical context for the current growth of cooperatives, drawing on Marxist theory to illuminate their potential. I also consider the sociology and economics of worker cooperatives, in addition to expounding and evaluating their history in the United States.

A case-study of a cooperative printing press in Jamaica Plain gives a more intimate portrayal of worker co-ops, and hopefully provides lessons for future cooperators. I interpret society as on the cusp of a …

"A Good Sized Pot": Early 19th Century Planting Pots From Gore Place, Waltham, Massachusetts, Rita A. Deforest

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis looked at the elite status of cultivating gentlemen at the site of the Gore Place greenhouse through the medium of planting pots. The goal of this thesis was to analyze the planting pot remains and to subsequently answer three questions: what kinds of activities were performed in the greenhouse, who was conducting those activities, and most importantly, how they played in to Christopher Gore's self presentation as having elite status. This project analyzed over 2,000 pot sherds found during the excavation of the 1806 Gore Place greenhouse. The outcome of a minimum vessel count of the planting pots …

A Macrobotanical Analysis Of Native American Maize Agriculture At The Smith's Point Site, Kelly A. Ferguson

Graduate Masters Theses

The Smith's Point site was a seasonally inhabited Native American encampment in Yarmouth, Massachusetts occupied from the Middle Woodland through the early Colonial periods. Excavations at the site in the early 1990s yielded the remains of a multi-component site including both an agricultural field and an adjacent living area. The macrobotanical remains from the agricultural and living area features were examined for this thesis project in order to investigate subsistence practices at the site. The findings show that Native Americans actively shaped these ecological niches for purposes such as maintaining and improving their subsistence base. These landscape management activities included …

Denison House: Women's Use Of Space In The Boston Settlement, Heather Marie Capitanio

Graduate Masters Theses

Established in 1892, Denison House Settlement in Boston, Massachusetts was the third college settlement of its kind in the United States. Like other settlement houses of the time, Denison House was established as a base for community refurbishment and statistical study. Located at 93 Tyler Street in the rundown South Cove area of Boston, it offered its lower class "neighbors" a variety of activities and facilities within its perimeters. Judging only from late nineteenth-century attitudes and mores, one would assume that the women who worked and lived at Denison House would have been turned away by the poor residents of …

Beef, Mutton, Pork, And A Taste Of Turtle: Zooarchaeology And Nineteenth-Century African American Foodways At The Boston-Higginbotham House, Nantucket, Massachusetts, Michael Andrew Way

Graduate Masters Theses

In 1774, nearly ten years before slavery was abolished in Massachusetts, an emancipated African American weaver named Seneca Boston purchased a tract of land in the Newtown section of Nantucket, Massachusetts. It is here that over the next thirty years Seneca Boston and his Wampanoag wife, Thankful Micah, would build a house, now known as the Boston-Higginbotham House, and raise six children. The Boston-Higginbotham House was home to the descendents of Seneca Boston and Thankful Micah for over one hundred years. Throughout the 19th century a vibrant and active African American community was developing in Newtown, and several generations of …