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P.S. Don’T Tell My Mother: American Children Debate Race And Civil Rights, 1946-1991, Cara Anson Elliott Apr 2017

P.S. Don’T Tell My Mother: American Children Debate Race And Civil Rights, 1946-1991, Cara Anson Elliott

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Thousands of children throughout the United States participated in debates over race-based civil rights that occurred from the late 1940s through the early 1990s. One of the ways in which young Americans contributed to racial conflicts was by offering their opinions in letters and other writings. Children defended particular positions in the midst of national battles over integration, racial violence, desegregation, busing, urban uprisings, racial representation, poverty, and drugs. By communicating their interpretations of race and rights over the course of fifty years, children contributed to the development of American racial discourses. Children composed arguments both for and against racial …


Native Citizens And French Refugees: Exploring The Aftermath Of The Haitian Revolution, Frances Bell Jan 2017

Native Citizens And French Refugees: Exploring The Aftermath Of The Haitian Revolution, Frances Bell

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

“Native Citizens!” Citizenship, Family, and Governance During the Haitian Revolution, 1789-1806 Given the upheaval of the Haitian Revolution, and first head-of-state Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s insistence on divesting Haiti from all French influence, it is unsurprising that many historians have depicted Dessalines’s rule as a dramatic rupture; the end of an old state, and the beginning of a new one. However, despite Dessalines’s stated desire to divest from French influence, he continued to use the language of citizenship in legal texts, speeches, and proclamations, despite its strong association with French republicanism. By examining legislative texts and proclamations from 1793 to 1806, I …


A Mass-Produced Yet "Authentic" Food : A Transatlantic History Of Pasta, Identity, And National Values In Italy And The Us, 1890 To 1974, Melissa Faith Gray Jan 2017

A Mass-Produced Yet "Authentic" Food : A Transatlantic History Of Pasta, Identity, And National Values In Italy And The Us, 1890 To 1974, Melissa Faith Gray

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Pasta gained international popularity simultaneously as both a banal and a culturally symbolic food in the 20th century. This dissertation contends that as pasta emerged in US and Italian consumer culture, negotiation of its dual meanings unfolded in the market as discourses of national and regional identity. This study tracks the role of governments, science professionals, cultural elites, manufacturers, and advertisers in articulating the meaning of commodities and juxtaposes these voices to the experience and contributions of consumers. Between 1900 and 1930, US Government officials, home economists, and advertisers recast pasta from a food synonymous with negative stereotypes of an …


Refining The Desert: The Politics Of Wealth, Industrialization, And Environmental Risk In The Twentieth-Century Texas Oil Industry, Sarah Stanford-Mcintyre Jan 2017

Refining The Desert: The Politics Of Wealth, Industrialization, And Environmental Risk In The Twentieth-Century Texas Oil Industry, Sarah Stanford-Mcintyre

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This dissertation describes seventy years of West Texas oil expansion and decline juxtaposed against a growing environmental and public health crisis. It tracks the experiences of industry employees, demonstrating that their understanding of oil industrialization and the environmental cost of economic success was complex and historically contingent. Rather than assuming that simple greed allowed industry personnel to ignore resource depletion and environmental contamination, this dissertation argues that a workplace culture of individualistic risk-taking coupled with industry propaganda that bred a utopian faith in technology was reinforced by the region’s punishing geography, general isolation, and the limits of industrial infrastructure. This …


Masters Of Light And Flight/ ”This Most Republican Amalgamation”, James Jonathan Rick Jan 2017

Masters Of Light And Flight/ ”This Most Republican Amalgamation”, James Jonathan Rick

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Masters of Light and Flight: The Spectacle of Invention in fin-de-siècle U.S. Popular Culture, 1876-1917 Popular fascination with inventors in U.S. popular culture was at a high point in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. This paper analyzes the discourse surrounding inventors in the aviation and aeronautics industries: including Thomas Alva Edison, Nicola Tesla, Glenn Curtiss and Wilbur and Orville Wright. By analyzing invention as a spectacle, it sheds light on the relationships between the spectacle of invention and industrial modernity. On the one hand, inventors became popular symbols of control over the process of labor and …


“Defenceless Wives” And “Female Furies” / Botany And The Early American Family, Holly Gruntner Jan 2017

“Defenceless Wives” And “Female Furies” / Botany And The Early American Family, Holly Gruntner

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

“Defenceless Wives” and “Female Furies”: Late Eighteenth Century Periodicals’ Depictions of Frontier Women The frontier had a firm hold on late eighteenth century popular imagination, trailing through newspapers and magazines of the era, which included, time after time, prominent accounts of the women who had made their homes on the outskirts of the “settled” colonies and early republic. My project examines the ways in which eighteenth century newspapers and magazines discussed frontier women’s experiences. Periodicals sought through their representations of women to illustrate the perils of the frontier by dramatizing women’s tales of trauma and woe, appropriating them in order …


Negotiating American Youth: Legal And Social Perceptions Of Age In The Early Republic, Holly Nicole Stevens White Jan 2017

Negotiating American Youth: Legal And Social Perceptions Of Age In The Early Republic, Holly Nicole Stevens White

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

“Negotiating American Youth” examines the venues in which young people and authority figures negotiated understandings of how age and communal or familial expectations affected one’s marriageability, independence and dependence, culpability, capability, and reliability in the Early Republican United States. Historians have characterized the period following the American Revolution as a progressive march toward legally uniform and modern interpretations of childhood, age, and family relationships that we might recognize today as more standardized. More specifically, historians of the Early Republic have often seized on newly codified definitions of age and independence as a means to explain changes in family relationships and …


Migrant Nation-Builders: The Development Of Austria-Hungary's National Projects In The United States, 1880s-1920s, Kristina Evans Poznan Jan 2017

Migrant Nation-Builders: The Development Of Austria-Hungary's National Projects In The United States, 1880s-1920s, Kristina Evans Poznan

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This dissertation charts the ways in which migrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire crafted new forms of identification in the United States, complicating their relationships with their home and host states. Transatlantic migration and migrants’ heightened nationalism were, I argue, causative factors in the dismantling of the Habsburg Empire into ethnically-based states after Word War I. Rather than focusing on a single ethnic group, Migrant Nation-Builders looks broadly at early multilingual immigrant institutions, Austro-Hungarian and American perceptions of panslavism, and the splintering of immigrant institutions in the United States along linguistic lines. The project traces the long arm of homeland authorities, …


The Francophone World And The Making Of An American Catholicism, Mitchell Edward Oxford Jan 2017

The Francophone World And The Making Of An American Catholicism, Mitchell Edward Oxford

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Although historians have long understood the importance of France to the institutional development of the Catholic Church in British North America, this portfolio is an attempt to demonstrate the significant role played by the Francophone world in shaping a distinctly American Catholicism in the United States. It does so by looking at two moments in the history of the American republic. The first is the attitude of the Continental Congress toward Quebec, which culminated in the invasion of Canada in 1775. In their attempt to sway Canada to the Patriot cause, Congress slowly reconciled themselves to guarantee religious liberty to …


Contesting Identity And Citizenship In National Parks, 1900-1935, Rebecca Capobianco Jan 2017

Contesting Identity And Citizenship In National Parks, 1900-1935, Rebecca Capobianco

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

“In the Bosom of the Storied Blue Ridge Mountains:” Contesting the Future of American Culture in Shenandoah National Park, 1924-1936 In the early 20th century, as the National Park Service gained traction, legislators in the east pushed to preserve large tracts of land in the “western” mind. Yet the forces that converged in the early twentieth century to produce the National Park movement and to envision what those parks should be were more complicated than Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson’s presidencies imply. Theoretically parks for “the people,” National Park locations, resources, and regulations were often governed by the social and …


Reading The Gothic At Madame Rivardi's Seminary/Prodigal Sons And Virtuous Daughters, Emily Priscilla Wells Jan 2017

Reading The Gothic At Madame Rivardi's Seminary/Prodigal Sons And Virtuous Daughters, Emily Priscilla Wells

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

In Reading the Gothic at Madame Rivardi’s Seminary, I study the reading patterns of young women in the early American republic using letters exchanged between students who attended Madame Rivardi’s Seminary in Philadelphia. By examining the language employed by young women in their discussions of gothic novels and romantic fiction, I argue that young women’s engagement with these texts defied the expectations of educators and moralists, especially in regards to the practice known today as sympathetic identification. By reading, comparing, and identifying with works from these two genres, young women participated in broader discussions regarding artifice and virtue in the …


"The Irish Servants Of Barbados 1657-1661: Illuminations On Subjecthood, Religion, Nationality, And Labor"/ "Moral Dynamite: Support And Opposition For Nationalist Political Violence And Nationalist Activity Among Irish-Americans In The 1880s", Jacqueline Wheelock Jan 2017

"The Irish Servants Of Barbados 1657-1661: Illuminations On Subjecthood, Religion, Nationality, And Labor"/ "Moral Dynamite: Support And Opposition For Nationalist Political Violence And Nationalist Activity Among Irish-Americans In The 1880s", Jacqueline Wheelock

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The first paper, "The Irish Servants of Barbados, 1657-1661: Illuminations on Subjecthood, Religion, Nationality, and Labor" explores the Irish as subjects within the English Empire and their access to the immunities, rights, and tolerance of other subjects of non-Irish nationality. This paper attempts to demonstrate not only the various ways in which the Irish were conceived as subjects in the early modern English Atlantic but also the ways in which this subjecthood was articulated and deployed in often fluid and haphazard ways. This paper uses colonial Barbados in the late 1650s and early 1660s as a case-study and relies on …


"The Right To Think For Themselves": Native American Intellectual Sovereignty And Internationalism During The Cold War, 1950 - 1989, Lucie Kyrova Nov 2016

"The Right To Think For Themselves": Native American Intellectual Sovereignty And Internationalism During The Cold War, 1950 - 1989, Lucie Kyrova

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This project examines the intellectual discourses and ideas that underlined and shaped Native American transnational activism and indigenous global cooperation during the Cold War. It explores Native activists’ use of the political realities of the Cold War and existing concepts, such as the United Nations’ (UN) human rights agenda, as frameworks for their strategies and demands for treaty rights and sovereignty. By using existing concepts and international mechanisms, Native Americans expanded their presence on the international scene, securing a permanent place in the UN, from which they worked to redefine the meanings of individual human rights and international law to …


The Myth Of Unity: The Contra War, 1980–1990, Benjamin Wyatt Medina Nov 2016

The Myth Of Unity: The Contra War, 1980–1990, Benjamin Wyatt Medina

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This research focuses on the anti-Sandinista forces popularly known as the "contras" who operated in Nicaragua from 1980 to 1990, in particular the Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense (FDN), the Alianza Revolucionaria Democrática (ARDE), and the two main Atlantic Coast contra groups: MISURA (Miskito Sumu and Rama Indians of the Atlantic Coast) and MISURASATA (Miskito, Sumu, Rama, Sandinista Aslatakanta [Working Together]). This thesis looks at the different ways these contra groups viewed their conflict and explained it to national and international audiences, as well as to those within the anti-Sandinista movement. Because there was such heterogeneity within the contra movement, a comparative …


The City At The Falls: Building Culture In Richmond, Virginia, 1730-1860, Elizabeth Cook Oct 2016

The City At The Falls: Building Culture In Richmond, Virginia, 1730-1860, Elizabeth Cook

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Whether made of stone, brick, or wood, the built environment is a bricolage of materials, skills, aesthetics, and practical needs. This dissertation disassembles the colonial and antebellum cityscape of Richmond, Virginia, into its component parts in order to better understand the relationships between builders, materials, and occupational knowledge as elements of the built environment, as well as the building culture that united them. This approach challenges the historically exalted place of architects and urban planners as the primary producers of a city, and instead focuses on the contributions of previously unknown carpenters, sawyers, joiners, bricklayers, and masons. These craftsmen labored …


“Killing The Cattle, Hogs, And Fowls”/Stories Of Osceola, Andrew Stephen Vickory Oct 2016

“Killing The Cattle, Hogs, And Fowls”/Stories Of Osceola, Andrew Stephen Vickory

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

“Killing the Cattle, Hogs, and Fowls”: Creek Indians and Domesticated Livestock, 1700-1814 During the Red Stick War of 1813-14, the Creek Indian faction known as the Red Sticks killed the majority of cattle and hogs in Creek Country. The rejection of these animals was a purposeful tactic that carried great significance for the Red Stick movement, and was closely tied to Creek discourses concerning identity, autonomy, and community organization. By the early nineteenth century, Creeks already had a century-long history of experience with livestock, and the historical trajectory of those experiences is crucial to understanding Creek actions during the Red …


Muskogee Internationalism In An Age Of Revolution, 1763-1818, James L. Hill Oct 2016

Muskogee Internationalism In An Age Of Revolution, 1763-1818, James L. Hill

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This dissertation reevaluates the consequences of the American Revolution by examining how indigenous peoples preserved their role as regional powers in the decades following the birth of the United States. Focusing on the Creek Indians of the present-day southeastern United States, I demonstrate that they maintained ties with Britons, Spaniards, and other Native peoples, employing these connections to their advantage. Creeks created borderlands that connected their societies with those of the British and Spanish Caribbean. The Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of Florida and their surrounding waters became zones of encounter and exchange between Native peoples, British wreckers from the Bahamas, …


Cabinet Of Monkies: Dancing Politics In Anglo Culture, From Jacobite To Jacobin And Royalist To Republican, Amy Stallings Oct 2016

Cabinet Of Monkies: Dancing Politics In Anglo Culture, From Jacobite To Jacobin And Royalist To Republican, Amy Stallings

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Dance has long been known to play a significant role in the social lives of men and women in colonial British America. What historians have largely failed to note is the integral nature of dance, in particular the longways English country form, to the realm of politics and the formation of national identity. From the earliest days of its dissemination in print, English country dance served a political purpose. In 1651, under Oliver Cromwell’s dour Protectorate government, Royalists like publisher John Playford used dance as a subtle form of resistance. Urging the public to remember the monarchy fondly and to …


“The Improvements Made By America On The Ancient Mode”: Classicism And Nationalism In The Early American Republic, 1780-1850, Alexander Strickland Oct 2016

“The Improvements Made By America On The Ancient Mode”: Classicism And Nationalism In The Early American Republic, 1780-1850, Alexander Strickland

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Classicism, an interest in the history, society, and arts of the ancient world, became a staple of American culture with the first permanent European settlements, and reached its zenith in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The extant scholarship on early American classicism offers a wealth of information about how citizens of the nascent United States read and interpreted the sources of the ancient world. However, it has done little to address the political utility of that classicism. The first of the two studies presented here attempts to locate one possible utility of American classicism in the Federalist Papers. …


Trans-Atlantic Elements In The Domestic Policy Attitudes Of The British And American Conservative Movements, 1980-1990., Samuel Inigo Packer Jul 2016

Trans-Atlantic Elements In The Domestic Policy Attitudes Of The British And American Conservative Movements, 1980-1990., Samuel Inigo Packer

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This paper explores the relationship between British and American Conservative activists during the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan dominated the politics of their respective countries. It does so mainly via looking at the most popular right-wing magazines in either country at the time; The Spectator and National Review.


Blurring The Lines Between Collaboration And Resistance: Women In Nazi Germany And Vichy And Nazi-Occupied France, Katherine Michelle Thurlow Jun 2016

Blurring The Lines Between Collaboration And Resistance: Women In Nazi Germany And Vichy And Nazi-Occupied France, Katherine Michelle Thurlow

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

In Nazi Germany and Vichy and Nazi-Occupied France during World War II, women were involved in numerous activities that fell upon a spectrum of resistance and collaboration. Although these two categories appear at first glance to be complete opposites, women were able to maneuver their society by going back and forth along the spectrum. Individuals were motivated by their families and loved ones, survival, and ideologies to participate in both resistance and collaboration. Women in particular were able to play upon societal expectations in order to navigate the spectrum. They took a role, often following societal ideas of women being …


Apocalypse Now: War And Religion In Late Colonial And Early Republic America, Nicole Marie Penn Apr 2016

Apocalypse Now: War And Religion In Late Colonial And Early Republic America, Nicole Marie Penn

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

ABSTRACT French “Idolators,” British “Heretics,” Native “Heathens”: The Seven Years’ War in North America as a Religious Conflict With France and Great Britain as its primary belligerents, the Seven Years' War was an international conflict with a decidedly religious dimension, one based on the longstanding rivalry between Catholicism and Protestantism. In North America, the conflict galvanized clergymen in both the British and French colonies to frame the war as a religious struggle with potentially apocalyptic consequences. This discourse remains understudied by historians, and efforts to address religion's role in America during the Seven Years' War is usually one-sided, focusing either …


Uniting Interests: The Economic Functions Of Marriage In America, 1750-1860, Lindsay Mitchell Keiter Jan 2016

Uniting Interests: The Economic Functions Of Marriage In America, 1750-1860, Lindsay Mitchell Keiter

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This dissertation, "Uniting Interests: Money, Property, and Marriage in America, 1750-1860," examines how marriage was an essential economic transaction that responded to the development of capitalism in early America. Drawing on scholarship on the history of economic development, household organization, law, and gender, I argue that families actively distributed resources at marriage as part of larger wealth management strategies that were sensitive to regional and national economic growth. I focus particularly on women's property holding and how families deployed the legal protection of women's property as bulwarks against financial disaster. This project restores the family and women to the narrative …


Cherries From The Tree: National Identity And The Hero Construction Of George Washington, 1799-1829, Jack Thomas Masterson Jan 2016

Cherries From The Tree: National Identity And The Hero Construction Of George Washington, 1799-1829, Jack Thomas Masterson

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.


Usufruct In The Land Of Tribute: Property, Coercion, And Sovereignty On Early Colonial Eastern Long Island, Peter Jakob Olsen-Harbich Jan 2016

Usufruct In The Land Of Tribute: Property, Coercion, And Sovereignty On Early Colonial Eastern Long Island, Peter Jakob Olsen-Harbich

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

In reexamining the early colonial history of Eastern Long Island, this thesis combines archaeological, archival, published records, and oral historical sources to explore the relationship between property, coercion, and sovereignty among the Algonquian-Ninnimissinuok and English settlers of New England. It begins with an overview of historical and contemporary models of political economy among Native groups in the pre-contact and pre-settlement era Northeast, emphasizing the importance of neo-evolutionary anthropology as an instructive corollary to more traditional functionalist and evolutionary theories of Native political economy. Special emphasis is placed on passages from classical ethnographic sources that gesture towards coercive and meaningful inequality …


"Dread Of Elder Titles": John Haywood And The Occult Origins Of The Confederacy, Charles Allen Wallace Jan 2016

"Dread Of Elder Titles": John Haywood And The Occult Origins Of The Confederacy, Charles Allen Wallace

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This work unearths the dark work of John Haywood (1762–1826), an overlooked Tennessee historian and judge who provided foundational historical and legal arguments for the Confederate nation. Published in 1819, his apocalyptic Southern history, The Christian Advocate, simultaneously justified Indian Removal and simplified white Southerners’ claims of title to land. He thus became the first thinker to give Southerners a sense of place in the deep history of the South; the first to convince them they belonged where they lived. andrew Jackson, for example, memorized passages from the Christian Advocate to convince himself: Southern Indians are the armies of Gog …


Relationships, Credit, And Value: Analyzing Money As A Social Institution In Late Eighteenth-Century Virginia, Amanda White Gibson Jan 2016

Relationships, Credit, And Value: Analyzing Money As A Social Institution In Late Eighteenth-Century Virginia, Amanda White Gibson

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.


Private Schools For Blacks In Early Twentieth Century Richmond, Virginia, Sharron Smith Jan 2016

Private Schools For Blacks In Early Twentieth Century Richmond, Virginia, Sharron Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The Virginia State Constitution of 1869 mandated that public school education be open to both black and white students on a segregated basis. In the city of Richmond, Virginia the public school system indeed offered separate school houses for blacks and whites, but public schools for blacks were conducted in small, overcrowded, poorly equipped and unclean facilities. at the beginning of the twentieth century, public schools for black students in the city of Richmond did not change and would not for many decades. Before 1918, there was no public high school for black students to attend. Whites made it clear …


The Gilded South/Exporting Abortion, Jenna Frances Ray Jan 2016

The Gilded South/Exporting Abortion, Jenna Frances Ray

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This master's portfolio consists of two distinct essays. The first concerns the development of the American South, and the specific role of the Confederacy, with regard to questions of foreign expansion. The second concerns the way that abortion policy as a subject of American foreign policy changes as a result of the 1973 Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade.


Subjects Or Rebels: The Dominion Of New England And The Roots Of Anglo-American Conflict / The Right To Fortifications: American Communities And The Politics Of Harbor Defense: 1794-1812, Samuel Aldred Slattery Jan 2016

Subjects Or Rebels: The Dominion Of New England And The Roots Of Anglo-American Conflict / The Right To Fortifications: American Communities And The Politics Of Harbor Defense: 1794-1812, Samuel Aldred Slattery

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

ABSTRACT Subjects or Rebels: The Dominion of New England and the Roots of Anglo-American Conflict This paper argues that the process by which the English Crown’s initially modest attempts to tweak New England colonial governance dovetailed into a reactionary denial of all colonial liberties. The imposition of autocratic imperial rule and armed occupation of New England reflects the fundamental bankruptcy of the “imperial constitution,” namely, the incompatibility of the right of colonists to representative assemblies and the imperial authority of the English state. Because on a constitutional level the two were incompatible, a protracted conflict between colonists and metropolitans had …