History Department Dissertations Collection

Woodrow Wilson's Conversion Experience: The President and the Federal Woman Suffrage Amendment

Behn, Beth — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:03:01 PST

Over the course of his first six years in office, President Woodrow Wilson evolved from an opponent of woman suffrage to an advocate for a federal woman suffrage amendment. This study explores what transpired to bring about such a dramatic change in Wilson's position. It seeks to understand the array of forces that pressured Wilson and the extent to which he was, in turn, able to influence Congress and voters.

Nationalism & the politics of historical memory: Charlemagne Peralte's rebellion against U.S. occupation of Haiti, 1915-1986

Alexis, Yveline — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:10:38 PST

Historians have enhanced our understanding of United States foreign policy in Asia, Latin, and Central America. My dissertation contributes to this literature by exploring U.S. foreign relations in the Caribbean by taking a close look at Haiti. While both nations achieved independence during the Age of Revolutions, by the turn of the 20^th century, the U.S. occupied Haiti from 1915–1934. In investigating the history of U.S. and Haitian diplomacy, one figure appeared repeatedly in my archival research and fieldwork in both nations, Charlemagne Peralte.^ During the U.S. intervention, Peralte rose as a leader of a Haitian guerrilla group known as the cacos who positioned themselves as nationalists fighting for Haiti's sovereignty. Under Peralte's direction, the cacos battled the occupying forces and also promoted their cause as a global call for democracy. Though Peralte died in 1919, his significance to Haitians assumed epic proportions as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata of Mexico, Augusto Sandino of Nicaragua, and Che Guevera in Cuba. Haitians on the island and across the Americas in the Diaspora revive Peralte's history and meaning throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries. ^ Drawing on unexplored primary sources, marines' records, and oral histories, etc, my study seeks to move Charlemagne Peralte from the margins to the center in historiography surrounding 'bandits,' rebels, and national leaders. The work first traces U.S. and Haitian relations from their revolutions to the various events leading to the occupation in 1915. It then captures the tenor of the early occupation years by analyzing the various modes of resistance that erupted because of the intervention. Embedded in this protest against imperialism were Peralte and the actions of the cacos. The dissertation also reflects on the post-occupation years from 1948 to 1986 to examine the nations' foreign relations. Finally, the work documents the apotheosis of the cacos leader to examine the meaning behind the ongoing historical preservations of Peralte in Haiti and amongst the Haitian Diaspora community in the U.S. and Canada. The study documents how Peralte's story, and the historical remembrances of him, shed light on U.S. and Haitian diplomacy from the 19^th through the 20^th centuries. ^

"The lover's instructor": Courtship advice in Anglo-America, 1640-1830

Barske, Carolyn May — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:18:59 PDT

This dissertation examines the behavioral recommendations of courtship advice literature published in Britain and in British North America during the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These recommendations gave white middling class women and, increasingly during the eighteenth century, their male counterparts models of appropriate courtship behavior and ideal partners. I argue that shifts of opinion that began to emerge in these two areas during the eighteenth century, in large measure a consequence of the impact of the Enlightenment, the American Revolution and the growth of a more mobile urban society, involved a change in the cultural understanding of the power and autonomy of women in courtship. Middling white women's greater control in courtship dynamics also reflected a decline in parental control over courtship, women's better access to education and a changing societal understanding of women's roles as mothers, citizens and wives. I further discuss how British courtship advice literature heavily influenced North American authors and how after the American Revolution North American authors often struggled to distance themselves from their British counterparts in creating an uniquely American system of courtship. I contend that the advice contained in a diverse group of sources, ranging from sermons and short newspaper articles on breach of the marriage promise suits to extensive courtship advice manuals and novels, documents the efforts of authors of courtship advice literature to modify the traditional patriarchal system of courtship without completely overthrowing long held notions of gender inequality and coverture.^

Becoming Union Square: Struggles for legitimacy in nineteenth-century New York

Shapiro, Michael D — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 11:48:53 PST

This dissertation argues that even though Americans have had the freedom to assemble since the ratification of the Bill of Rights, it was not until the late nineteenth century that political leaders viewed the holding of public rallies by working-class men, organized as labor unions, as a legitimate form of political expression. Even then there were limitations on who could gather and when. I show that New York’s Union Square played a pivotal role in this transition from elite republican politics to mass democracy by providing a venue for governmental institutions, political parties, and eventually labor unions to present arguments justifying their legitimacy. I argue that physical spaces are historical characters just like the people that inhabit them, showing how Union Square’s location, geography, and cultural identity influenced the gatherings that occurred there, and vice versa. Many books on New York City include information about Union Square —one of the rare open spaces to be designated a National Historic Landmark—but this dissertation throughly examines the history of the space. ^ The area where New York City’s Common Council first developed Union Square in the 1830s was called the Fork in the Roads, since it was where the city’s two main thoroughfares, the Boston Post Road and the Albany Post Road, intersected. Like those roads, this dissertation tells two separate stories that become one in Union Square. One describes how Union Square transformed from an elite residential square with a gated park in its center to the city’s primary gathering space for political expression. The other details how working-class New Yorkers struggled for political legitimacy. The stories converge when the Central Labor Union organized the nation’s first Labor Day parade through Union Square in 1882. In the wake of that and subsequent Labor Day parades in cities and towns around the nations, state legislatures and eventually the federal government came to declare Labor Day an official holiday, suggesting that politicians were finally taking labor seriously. Meanwhile, Union Square had become the most important space for political expression in New York City, and continues in that role today.^

The preservation of Iroquois thought: J. N. B. Hewitt's legacy of scholarship for his people

Merriam, Kathryn Lavely — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 11:48:51 PST

Iroquoian philosophy and political thought survived solely in the minds of old men and women at the end of the nineteenth century. These ideas endure today because of ethnographers who patiently transcribed the elder’s oratory. One such ethnographer was a Tuscarora tribal member named John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt (1857-1937). Hewitt was a linguist who worked at the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology for fifty-one years and dedicated himself to preserving Iroquois thought. He was self-educated and became expert while assisting other staff ethnologists. Hewitt’s “Iroquoian Cosmology Parts I & II” (1903, 1928,) sealed his reputation as the leading Iroquois scholar of his day. In spite of this accomplishment, Hewitt’s reputation faded quickly after his death. This dissertation seeks to understand why Hewitt decided to withhold some material from publication, and looks towards Hewitt’s complicated relationship with the Iroquois – for whom he was both a fellow tribal member and a professional ethnographer – for the probable answer. Finally, I re-evaluate Hewitt’s place in the field of Iroquois Studies as the last of a group of notable self-trained ethnographers and examine the lasting impact of his work on contemporary Tuscaroras and other Haudenosaunee people. ^

"Once again it happens": Collective remembrance and Irish identity in Catholic Derry, Northern Ireland 1896-2008

Shea, Margo — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 10:21:24 PST

This dissertation explores Catholic nationalist residents of Derry, Northern Ireland's expressions of memory over the course of the twentieth century. It contributes to histories of the city within the context of Northern Ireland and deepens understandings of memory and historical consciousness by charting memory work - discussions, writings, displays, commemorations, festivals, protests, religious celebrations, memorials, oral histories, personal accounts and community conversations that simultaneously invoke, draw on and construct the past. The uses of memory provide a map of changes as well as consistencies in Catholics' and nationalists' construction of their cultural, social and political identities. ^ Memory has often been credited with deepening divides between Derry's Protestant unionist and Catholic nationalist communities and exacerbating civil and political conflict. The ways memory work has invented, constructed, justified, continued, or alternately mitigated or collapsed political, religious, economic, social and cultural divides are central to the larger history of the city. Understanding how collective remembrance has changed over time adds to historical interpretations of the conflict. At the same time, the ways key events in the history of the conflict affected memory work lend insight that further memory studies. ^ The focus here on the memory work of Catholic and nationalist Derry both de-centers Troubles-related memory work and offers new explanations for civil conflict that come out memorial expressions. A demographic majority since 1850, Catholic nationalists in the city constituted a political minority until 1973. As they sought recognition locally, worked to influence broader debates over political, social and economic issues, and endeavored to maintain their Irish identity, they drew on the past both to articulate and to formulate their experiences. By following the ways political, religious and community leaders, journalists and ordinary people participated in the construction of the past, it is possible to ascertain the way they understood the present at different moments in the city's history. Through battles over Home Rule, responses to establishment of the Northern state, endeavors to obtain civil rights, efforts to maintain community cohesion through the Troubles and initiatives to heal privately and publicly in the post-conflict era, the concerns of Catholics and nationalists in Derry were expressed through their memory work.^

Fighting For the Nation: Military Service, Popular Political Mobilization and the Creation of Modern Puerto Rican National Identities: 1868-1952

Franqui, Harry — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 11:34:29 PDT

This project explores the military and political mobilization of rural and urban working sectors of Puerto Rican society as the Island transitioned from Spanish to U.S. imperial rule. In particular, my research is interested in examining how this shift occurs via patterns of inclusion-exclusion within the military and the various forms of citizenship that are subsequently transformed into socio-economic and political enfranchisement. Analyzing the armed forces as a culture-homogenizing agent helps to explain the formation and evolution of Puerto Rican national identities from 1868 to 1952, and how these evolving identities affected the political choices of the Island. This phenomenon, I argue, led to the creation of the Estado Libre Asociado in 1952. The role played by the tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans in the metropolitan military in the final creation of a populist project taking place under colonial rule in the Island was threefold. Firstly, these soldiers served as political leverage during WWII to speed up the decolonization process. Secondly, they incarnated the commonwealth ideology by fighting and dying in the Korean War. Finally, the Puerto Rican soldiers filled the ranks of the army of technicians and technocrats attempting to fulfill the promises of a modern industrial Puerto Rico after the returned from the wars. In contrast to Puerto Rican popular national mythology and mainstream academic discourse that has marginalized the agency of subaltern groups; I argue that the Puerto Rican soldier was neither cannon fodder for the metropolis nor the pawn of the Creole political elites. Regaining their masculinity, upward mobility, and political enfranchisement were among some of the incentives enticing the Puerto Rican peasant into military service. The enfranchisement of subaltern sectors via military service ultimately created a very liberal, popular, and broad definition of Puerto Rico’s national identity. When the Puerto Rican peasant/soldier became the embodiment of the Commonwealth formula, the political leaders involved in its design were in fact responding to these soldiers’ complex identities, which among other things compelled them to defend the “American Nation” to show their Puertorriqueñidad.

My dear Mrs. Ames: A study of the life of suffragist cartoonist and birth control reformer Blanche Ames Ames, 1878--1969

Clark, Anne Biller — Tue, 25 May 2010 11:02:20 PDT

Blanche Ames Ames, an elite graduate of Smith College and a distinguished state and national leader in the woman suffrage and birth control causes, was one of a small cadre of educated women who, in the early 1900s, recast the iconography of political cartoons, long a means of discourse used only by men, to promote women's rights. In this, she was most unusual. Fortunately, because of her prominence, Ames's extensive family papers have been preserved in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College. She has not slid into obscurity as other women political artists and reformers have done. As a result, Ames serves as a sort of template of how an elite woman chose to become publicly involved in issues she might have funded others to pursue and also how women cartoonists went about adapting the political cartoon to promote their goals. It becomes clear from studying her letters and diaries that Ames was an unusually logical, pragmatic and determined progressive feminist, involved and engaged, who preserved a sense of humor, of irony, of detachment that allowed her to persevere in her causes without fanaticism, while carving an autonomous place for herself in a world uncertain of the wisdom of women's rights.^ Part of Ames's success was that she was buoyed at each step of her life from prep school to the presidency of the Birth Control League of Massachusetts by her fascinating family, the founder of which was the brilliant and outrageous Civil War Gen. Benjamin "Beast" Butler. Ames's parents encouraged her education and allowed her a growing autonomy in which to learn to think and then to act for herself. After an early and difficult struggle for autonomy in her marriage, Blanche and her husband, Oakes Ames, became partners in a joint campaign to create a sustaining family life at their North Easton estate at Borderland, while allowing Oakes to pursue a distinguished career at Harvard and Blanche an equally distinguished career as a suffragist, a political cartoonist, botanical illustrator, painter and birth control reformer.^ Thus the study of the life of Blanche Ames Ames is not just one of individual artistic or political brilliance, but also of how that brilliance was nurtured, encouraged and sustained throughout the vicissitudes of a life defined by a desire for real social reform by a domestic support system that too often goes unrecognized. This family support system, along with Blanche Ames Ames's activism and achievements as a political cartoonist and a leader in the suffrage and the birth control fight, are the focus of this dissertation. ^

A Stitch In Time: The Needlework of Aging Women in Antebellum America

Newell, Aimee E. — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 10:57:55 PDT

In October 1852, Amy Fiske (1785-1859) of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, stitched a sampler. But she was not a schoolgirl making a sampler to learn her letters. Instead, as she explained: “The above is what I have taken from my sampler that I wrought when I was nine years old. It was w[rough]t on fine cloth it tattered to pieces. My age at this time is 66 years.” Drawing from 167 examples of decorative needlework – primarily samplers and quilts from 114 collections across the United States – made by individual women aged forty years and over between 1820 and 1860, this dissertation explores how Fiske and women like her experienced social and cultural change in antebellum America, and probes their personal reactions to growing older. Falling at the intersection of women’s history, material culture study and the history of aging, this dissertation brings together objects, diaries, letters, portraits, and prescriptive literature to consider how middle-class American women experienced the aging process. Chapter 1 explores the physical and mental effects of “old age” on antebellum women and their needlework. It considers samplers modified later in life through the removal of the maker’s age or the date when the sampler was made. Chapter 2 examines epistolary needlework, that which relates a message or story in the form of stitched words. Chapter 3 focuses on technological developments related to needlework during the antebellum period, particularly indelible ink and the rise of the sewing machine, and the tensions that arose from the increased mechanization of textile production. Chapter 4 considers how gift needlework functioned among friends and family members. The materials, style and techniques represented in these gifts often passed along an embedded message, allowing the maker to share her opinions, to demonstrate her skill and creativity, and to leave behind a memorial of her life. Far from being a decorative ornament or a functional household textile, these samplers and quilts served their own ends. They offered aging women a means of coping, of sharing and of expressing themselves. In the end, the study argues that these “threads of time” provide a valuable and revealing source on the lives of mature antebellum women.

Seeking Shakers: Two Centuries of Visitors to Shaker Villages

Bixby, Brian L. — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 09:25:29 PDT

The dissertation analyzes the history of tourism at Shaker communities from their foundation to the present. Tourism is presented as an interaction between the host Shakers and the visitors. The culture, expectations, and activities of both parties affect their relationship to each other. Historically, tourists and other visitors have gradually dominated the relationship, shifting from hostility based on religion to acceptance based on a romantic view of the Shakers. This relationship has spilled over into related cultural phenomena, notably fiction and antique collecting. Overall, the analysis extends contemporary tourism theory and integrates Shaker history with the broader course of American history.