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Publication “Smash Colonial Violence!”: Internationalism and the Emergence of Black Feminist Politics, 1968-1985(2024-05) Linker, DestineyThis dissertation explores the transformation of radical Black women’s internationalist politics during and after the Black Power era. This dissertation emerged from two central questions: Did U.S.-based Third World (inter)nationalisms of the late 1960s and 1970s influence the development of Black feminism? What role did internationalist politics emphasizing anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism play in the articulation of intersectional politics within Black feminist organizations? Blending biography and Black women’s intellectual history, this project traces radical Black women’s internationalism along two poles: the formation of the first Black feminist organization, the Third World Women’s Alliance across the years 1968-1970 and the Black feminist reshaping of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center from the mid-1970s to the 1980s. I argue that anti-carceral and reproductive justice politics tied together by frameworks of internationalism and intersectionality contributed to the development of Black feminist politics of the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter 1 analyzes the politics of the Third World Women’s Alliance in New York City and the Bay Area of California. The chapter demonstrates that Black and women of color feminists in the Third World Women’s Alliance mobilized campaigns for reproductive freedom and against state imprisonment and repression of people of color in the United States using appeals to Third World solidarity. The remaining chapters of the dissertation pivot to the D.C. Rape Crisis Center as a locus for the development of Black feminism. Chapter 2 traces the Black feminist transformation of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, founded in Washington, D.C. in 1972 as one of the first rape crisis centers in the United States. The work of Nkenge Touré and Loretta Ross drove the institution to serve Black women and to adapt intersectional politics attuned to global systems of racism, capitalism, and colonialism; this process also influenced the development of a global vision of reproductive justice. Chapters 3 and 4 further investigate the importance of internationalist politics to specific D.C. Rape Crisis center organizing projects: the campaign to free Dessie X. Woods after her incarceration for self-defense against white sexual violence and the Center’s work with Prisoners Against Rape at Lorton Reformatory.Publication “Refuse to Run Away”: Transsexual Workers Fight for Civil Rights, 1969-1992(2024-05) Olmstead, ShayBetween 1969 and 1995, at least thirty diagnosed transsexual workers brought their employers before state and federal courts and agencies. Diagnosed transsexual workers were an extremely small sub-group within the wider universe of gender-nonconforming people. Already subjected to institutional bottlenecks that disproportionately limited medical treatment to white, wealthy, abled, heterosexual, and “passable” gender-crossers, diagnosed transsexuals were further restricted by an “unwritten rule” mandating their invisibility and active disassociation from (and, indeed, disavowal of) other, more marginalized queer people. While this “unwritten rule” offered some, diagnosed transsexuals a limited and conditional ability to assimilate into the white, middle-class mainstream, it also prevented diagnosed transsexuals from forming collaborative, street-level activist organizations with which to challenge discriminatory treatment. As a result, when these workers were fired or harassed shortly after their employers had learned that they were receiving or had undergone gender-affirming medical treatment, workers sought protection instead from an emerging liberal state. Using new laws designed to protect U.S. workers from sex- and disability-based employment discrimination, these workers brought legal challenges before a host of state and federal courts and agencies. Their claims forced state officials to grapple with the heretofore undefined categories of “sex” and “disability” and to ultimately (re)construct them in trans-exclusionary ways. These cases highlight the vastly uneven and occasionally contradictory nature of the U.S. “Cis States,” which by 1992 mostly extended employment protections only to workers who remained in the sex they were assigned at birth. In the end, because their legal actions were not paired with a significant extra-legal activist effort, most transsexual workers failed to find relief from the state. Although a few of these claimants have been briefly discussed in other historical texts, this dissertation is the first to holistically examine their employment-discrimination claims. Standing at the intersections of modern U.S. history, political history, the history of sex, gender, and sexuality, activist studies, labor history, and legal studies, it not only complements research on gay and lesbian political history but also presents an alternative narrative in which discrimination against transsexual workers set the stage for discrimination against cisgender sexual and racialized minorities.Publication "Reconciliation Over the Graves:" The Volksbund and Germany's Culture of Defeat in Post-War Europe(2024-05) Hough, Sean W.This dissertation focuses on the commemorative influence of the West German-based organization called the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (People’s Commission for the Care of German War Graves). The Volksbund oversaw the preservation and commemoration of German war graves under West German democracy, East German authoritarianism (clandestinely through the Protestant church), and across the cemetery spaces of Cold War Europe. The Volksbund created a commemorative approach based on the memory of soldiers who fought and died for their respective nations as heroes, regardless of victory or defeat, and produced a positive discourse of mutual respect and honor. By this metric, unpleasant discussions of the Second World War’s atrocities only served to divide Europe into perpetrators and victims – for whom both honor and respect was impossible. This study argues that the Volksbund contributed to West Germany, and ultimately reunified Germany’s integration into Europe through its conservative commemorative culture.Publication The way that good folks do: Junior Achievement and corporate culture.(1981) Gabler, Edwin"In America," wrote the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci around 1929, "rationalization has determined the need to elaborate a new type of man suited to the new type of work and productive process." By the 1920s, industrialization was hardly new to the United States; nor were the economic dislocation and cultural trauma of plough tenders becoming machine tenders and once-independent burghers becoming dependent employees* But the imperatives of industrialization—specialization, bureaucratization , national and world markets—had, in the decade following World War I, resulted in a corporate capitalist order as awesome in its social ramifications as in its unprecedented power. And that power, despite the debacle of the 1930s , would continue to expand and become more pervasive yet, through the heady years of Cold War prosperity and into our own less sanguine time.Publication The Making of Ras Beirut: A Landscape of Memory for Narratives of Exceptionalism(2013-09) Abunnasr, Maria B.This dissertation examines the memory of Ras Beirut and the various claims to its exceptionalism. I frame its history as a landscape of memory born of the convergence of narratives of exceptionalism. On the one hand, Ras Beirut's landscape inspired Anglo-American missionary future providence such that they chose it as the site of their college on a hill, the Syrian Protestant College (SPC, later renamed the American University of Beirut [AUB]). On the other hand, the memory of Ras Beirut's "golden age" before the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 inspired longings for a vanished past to Ras Beirut's oldest inhabitants. Shaped by the push of prospect and the pull of recollection, Ras Beirut emerges as a place formed out of the contest of these overlapping articulations of exceptionalism. Moreover, Ras Beirut's narratives have a wider significance and application in their transnational and interconfessional relevance. The missionary New England microcosm of the SPC represented the transnational transposition of memory onto Ras Beirut in an architectural narrative of exceptionalism. The monumental size and scale of their buildings oriented Ras Beirut and realized a "city upon a hill." Drawing from letters written to and from the US, I examine their ambiguous relationship to Ras Beirut that made them both part of the place and apart from the people. At the same time, the local Muslim-Christian community of Ras Beirut argued that Ras Beirut's distinct character rested on their own history of harmonious coexistence. In the early twentieth century, Arab Protestant converts settled in Ras Beirut and became known as the Protestants of Ras Beirut in their affixed identity and collective rootedness to place. This dissertation draws upon archival research and tangible sources in the changing architectural and urban environment. It also relies on oral history and memory to capture the multi-disciplinary making of place that best relates the textured history of Ras Beirut while giving meaning to everyday lived lives. In the process, the connections between the Middle East and the US unfold in transnational terms while the idea of Ras Beirut as a paradigm of coexistence unfolds interconfessional terms.Publication Sweating Femininity: Women Athletes, Masculine Culture, and American Inequality from 1930 to the Present(2013-05) Marino, Michella MaryDespite a long history of participation in sports, women have yet to gain equal access to this male-dominated realm. The national sports culture continues to regard them as marginal, if not invisible. For more than a century, women athletes have struggled against a subordinate status based on rigid definitions of female sexuality, an emphasis on white middle-class standards of beauty, and restrictive cultural expectations of motherhood. This dissertation, however, reveals a vital story of feminist women who have consistently stretched the boundaries of gender and have actively carved out their own identities as women, athletes, and mothers while playing an integral role in the development of sports. Drawing on oral history, archival materials, and a wide range of other sources, I provide a comparative analysis of women's experiences playing basketball and Roller Derby. These two sports have included women from their outset and at different times both challenged society's restrictions on women's femininity, sexuality, and physical abilities. One of my major objectives is to explore and explain the tension between women's representation and agency, between cultural constructs and women's lives, between images of women and their individual identities. Both women and men struggle for self-definition in the world they inhabit, and they often surmount formidable obstacles on the path to change not only themselves but also the ideals against which they measure themselves. In a culture that champions individualism, women "sweat" their identities because they want to be themselves, yet realize that self-definition is still shaped by a powerful set of cultural ideals and pressures about what it means to be male or female, man or woman, boy or girl. While these women sporting pioneers pushed their way into the public limelight, they worked to prove that athleticism could in fact be a part of the female identity, even while that identity was continually in flux. But until American society is ready to accept women as viable athletes, realize that athleticism can be a feminine and masculine quality, and allow women to play multiple roles, women will continue to sweat their femininity.Publication Woodrow Wilson's Conversion Experience: The President and the Federal Woman Suffrage Amendment(2012-02) Behn, BethOver 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.Publication Before the Second Wave: College Women, Cultural Literacy, Sexuality and Identity, 1940--1965(2009-05) Faehmel, BabetteThis dissertation follows career-oriented college women over the course of their education in liberal arts programs and seeks to explain why so many of them, in departure from original plans of combining work and marriage, married and became full-time mothers. Using diaries, personal correspondences, and student publications, in conjunction with works from the social sciences, philosophy, and literature, I argue that these women's experiences need to be understood in the context of cultural conflicts over the definition of class, status, and national identity. Mid twentieth-century college women, I propose, began their education at a moment when the convergence of long-contested developments turned campuses into battlegrounds over the definition of the values of an expanding middle class. Social leadership positions came within reach of new ethnic and religious groups at the same time that changes in the dating behavior of educated youth accelerated. Combined, these trends fed anxieties about a loss of cultural cohesion and national unity. In the interest of social stability, educators and public commentators tried to turn college women into brokers of cultural norms who would, as wives, socialize a heterogeneous population of men to traditional mores and values. This interest of the state to hold educated female youth accountable for the reproduction of a homogenous culture then merged with the desire of gender conservative students to legitimate their own identity in the face of challengers. In encounters with peers, women who aspired to professional careers and academic success learned that their gender performance disqualified them as members of an educated elite. Suffering severe blows to their self-esteem as a result of what I call "sex and gender baiting," they reformulated their goals for their postgraduate futures. Drawing on expressions of shame and fear in diaries and letters, I show through women's own voices the severity of the personal conflicts gender non-conformists experienced, offer insights into the relationship between historical actors and cultural discourses, and illustrate how the personal and the intimate shape the public and the political.Publication Fighting For the Nation: Military Service, Popular Political Mobilization and the Creation of Modern Puerto Rican National Identities: 1868-1952(2010-05) Franqui, HarryThis 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.Publication A Stitch In Time: The Needlework of Aging Women in Antebellum America(2010-02) Newell, Aimee E.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.Publication Seeking Shakers: Two Centuries of Visitors to Shaker Villages(2010-02) Bixby, Brian L.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.Publication Theatre Women and Cultural Diplomacy in the Transatlantic Anglophone World (1752-1807)(2016-09) Perot, SandraAnglophone theatre provided a solid cultural bridge between Britain and America and served as an influential, informative, and accessible mode of social, political and cultural exchange transported throughout the eighteenth-century transatlantic world. Unlike works focusing on colonial American restrictions on theater, or examining its subsequent role in constructing American nationhood and identity, I explore how theatre served to both cultivate and challenge transatlantic connections. I show that actresses and women playwrights played a distinctive role in this process; they exercised agency in helping shape Anglo identity, influenced the formation of the cult of celebrity, challenged physical gendered spaces and normative social behavior, and entered intellectual landscapes culturally, socially, and politically informed. Most scholarship examining Anglophone theatre isolates performances and plays by their location, genre, performer/author, or role. However, looking through the lens of the greater transatlantic world makes clear the contributions of Anglophone theatre women and reveals their influence on cultural and diplomatic exchange. By innovatively bringing together stories of actresses and women playwrights, and by examining their experiences and works as microhistories, I show that women both knowingly and inadvertently became instrumental as cultural diplomats who helped solidify connections between Britain and America, palliate the political differences of the period, and engage audiences in national identity conversations. Theater Women and Cultural Diplomacy creatively adopts a long-durée framework and incorporates diplomatic, cultural, and social history; theatre and performance studies; literary theory; biography; and gender studies to suggest how women provided critical cultural cohesion as well as social and political civic awareness. The interconnectedness of Anglo theatre includes conversations about materiality and immateriality, presence and absence, performance, publication, and circulation; gender and identity, intercolonial challenges and nationhood. While the bulk of my thesis focuses on the later eighteenth century, my analysis begins in 1660 when women first legally participated in British theatre and continues through the end of the eighteenth century when Anglophone theatre women contribute to both a new “American” voice and British identity. As early celebrities, actresses and women playwrights used theatre to challenge social norms and gender normativity, offer ways of reimagining women in a changed world, and effect cultural diplomacy. They would do so with exceptional poise, perseverance, and perceptiveness all in the face of three significant revolutions: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution.Publication Nixon's War on Terrorism: The FBI, Leftist Guerrillas, and the Origins of Watergate(2016-09) Chard, Daniel S.In 1969, militant factions within both Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panther Party (BPP) began to form the United States’ first clandestine revolutionary urban guerrilla organizations: the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army (BLA). These groups carried out bombings, police ambushes, and other attacks throughout the country, prompting responses from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the administration of President Richard M. Nixon. Several historians have analyzed U.S. leftist guerrillas’ motives, and much has been written on FBI operations against the Black Power movement and New Left, including the Bureau’s covert counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) designed to “neutralize” these movements. Most of this scholarship has been one-sided, however, framing FBI activities as “state repression” without analyzing how state actors understood and responded to leftist violence. Drawing on declassified FBI documents and materials in the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, “Nixon’s War on Terrorism” revises this literature, explaining for the first time how domestic leftist guerrilla violence reshaped the FBI and American politics during the Nixon administration. War with domestic leftist guerrillas transformed the FBI’s surveillance practices, spawned the United States’ earliest institutions explicitly dedicated to combatting “terrorism,” and triggered a bureaucratic struggle between the Nixon White House and the FBI that played a critical role in fomenting the Watergate Scandal and Nixon’s August 1974 resignation. This dissertation examines how the FBI came to expand its surveillance of the U.S. Left and revive mail-opening, warrantless wiretapping, and break-ins—illegal spy techniques that Director J. Edgar Hoover had employed widely against the Communist Party after World War II but banned during the mid-1960s. This is a story of unintended consequences and conjuncture. Leftist guerrillas did not achieve their goal of sparking a socialist revolution, and the FBI was unsuccessful in its aim of preventing guerrilla violence. The Nixon administration was also unable to halt guerrilla attacks. But together—through their conflicts with one another—leftist guerrillas, FBI officials, and the Nixon administration triggered Watergate, the Church Committee, antiterrorism politics, and a crisis of popular legitimacy from which neither the Bureau nor the federal government have ever fully recovered.Publication DISCOVERING BRAZIL IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY FRANCE, 1930-1964: FRANCO-BRAZILIAN CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE ERA OF DECOLONIZATION(2014) Dausch, Andrew R.This dissertation is a case study in the international exchange of ideas. It begins with the 1934-‐1940 French University Mission to establish the University of São Paulo—Brazil's premier institution of higher learning. I argue that the experiences and intellectual networks that French intellectuals formed with Brazilian social scientists in the 1930s provided a conceptual framework for thinking about France and its role in a postcolonial world. Brazil and its intellectual traditions forced thinkers such as Claude Lévi-‐Strauss, Fernand Braudel, and Roger Bastide to engage race and racial politics in a new key. By demonstrating the substantial links between Brazilian and French intellectuals as well as the influence of Brazilian ideas on French intellectuals, I make the argument that Brazil exported ideas about race-‐relations and what it means to be a modern multi-‐racial and post-‐ colonial state. The argument is significant because it challenges the traditional, if simplified, view, of colonial economies and the relationship between the developed and developing world. This standard view held that the West produced knowledge, technical know-how, and manufactured goods out of raw materials supplied by the rest of globe. As a result of the French University Mission, well-defined intellectual networks developed between French and Brazilian intellectuals that were not defined by an easy power differential. By demonstrating the substantial links between Brazilian and French intellectuals, and documenting the influence of Brazilian social scientists on French intellectuals, I invert this traditional model and show that Brazil was a source for thinking about France and its global role going forward. The purpose served by the Franco-Brazilian intellectual network differed according to nationality. This is why I adopt a transnational perspective on the international circulation of ideas. For Brazil, but more specifically, São Paulo, the establishment of the University of São Paulo provided Brazilian thinkers with access to the international social scientific community. While the U.S. certainly supplanted France post-war, Brazilian intellectuals retained affection for French thinkers that they did not confer on U.S. social scientists. As for France, this intellectual network provided French intellectuals with the resources to reinvigorate its own social scientific traditions in an era of increasing specialization. This is an argument that runs counter to the argument of the influential intellectual historian, H. Stuart Hughes, who argued that French social science between 1930 and 1960 suffered from being self-enclosed within a national tradition. What makes the story of Franco-Brazilian intellectual and cultural relations from the interwar era through the mid-1960s particularly compelling, however, is that the interest in Brazil as a model for France's future did not remain a matter of academic interest. Between 1959 and 1964, a brief period of time in which Charles de Gaulle radically shifted gears from waging a bloody colonial war in Algeria to developing a politics of cooperation with the developing world, Brazil became an important site of contention between the French left and right. During this period, André Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, and de Gaulle himself visited Brazil. I argue that these visits, which were highly visible international spectacles, call attention to overlooked dimensions of geopolitics. Because most American-based French and Latin American scholars who work on international relations focus their attention on colonial relationships, or interactions with the United States, the relationship between mid-level powers, such as France and Brazil are neglected. In this dissertation, I argue that the cultural policy France developed with Brazil and other Latin American nations is integral to understanding what de Gaulle meant by an independent foreign policy in the Cold War era. This does not deny American hegemony, but rather shows how "soft power" provided room for challenging that dominance. I also argue that the shift to a politics of cooperation with the developing world was only possible given the French government's earlier efforts, such as the French University Mission to Brazil, to establish closer ties to Latin America.Publication Rights in Property and Property in Rights: Privacy, Contract and Ownership of the Body in Anglo-American Political and Constitutional Thought(2016-05) Garrison, Gary LThis dissertation examines the history of the idea that people possess property rights in their own bodies. I also argue such rights are an alternative foundation on which to base the right to privacy recognized by the Supreme Court in 1965. The Court found privacy to exist in an admittedly nebulous "penumbras formed by emanations" from other parts of the Bill of Rights. I argue that privacy can be grounded on property rights as well.many founders, Madison asserted property rights in bodies of others (slaves) and similar ownership interests in wives and children. Modern notions of property are far more rigid then they were two centuries ago. In a 1792 essay titled Property, James Madison explained man owned property in, among other things, religious beliefs, opinions and the liberty of his person. Madison, like many founders, was well-schooled in Enlightenment era thought and writings of John Locke and Adam Smith that argued men had property rights in their bodies. Unfortunately, With abolition of slavery and emancipation of married women from the status of femme covert, the notion of ownership rights in the body fell from favor. If white men could no longer assert claims to property in other bodies, there was nothing to stop the government from stepping in to fill the void. The rise of the "regulatory state" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a proliferation of laws attempting to regulate lives of Americans, particularly in the area of reproduction. From eugenic laws mandating some people be sterilized and prohibited from bearing children, to anti-contraception and anti-abortion laws essentially mandating other people be forced to bear them, government control of the body expanded. Through it all, however, ownership interests in one’s own body remained an economic fact if not a widely recognized constitutional right. Commodification of the body, be it through sale of tissue or even renting of a womb through surrogacy contracts, is a modern day reflection of the fact that we still acknowledge property rights in our own body. A government "taking" of that right should be treated as any other taking of property.Publication “If There Are Men Who Are Afraid to Die, There Are Women Who Are Not”: African American Women's Civil Rights Leadership in Boston, 1920-1975.(2016-05) de Chantal, JulieSince the 1980s, narratives surrounding the Boston Busing Crisis focus on South Boston white working-class’s reaction to Judge Arthur W. Garrity's forced desegregation order of 1974. Yet, by analyzing the crises from such narrow perspective, the narratives leave out half of the story. This dissertation challenges these narratives by situating the busing crisis as the culmination of more than half a century of grassroots activism led by Black working-class mothers. By taking action at the neighborhood and the city levels, these mothers succeeded where the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People and the Urban League had failed. This study is the first one to analyze the role of these “ordinary mothers,” who, through their actions and influence, transformed the civil rights leadership in Boston between the 1920s and the mid-1970s.Publication Engineering Victory: The Ingenuity, Proficiency, and Versatility of Union Citizen Soldiers in Determining the Outcome of the Civil War(2014) Army, Thomas FMy dissertation explores the critical advantage the Union held over the Confederacy in military engineering. The skills Union soldiers displayed during the war at bridge building, railroad repair, and road making demonstrated mechanical ability and often revealed ingenuity and imagination. These skills were developed during the antebellum period when northerners invested in educational systems that served an industrializing economy. Before the war, northern states’ attempt at implementing basic educational reforms, the spread of informal educational practices directed at mechanics and artisans, and the exponential growth in manufacturing all generated a different work related ethos than that of the South. Plantation slavery generated fabulous wealth for a tiny percent of the southern white population. It fostered a particular style of agriculture and scientific farming that limited land use. It curtailed manufacturing opportunities, and it stifled educational opportunities for the middle and lower classes because those in political power feared that an educated yeomanry would be filled with radical ideas such as social equality, and, worst of all, abolition These differences in the North and South produced unique skill sets in both armies, and consequently, resulted in more successful and resourceful Union engineering operations during the war. Between 1861 and 1865 the North engineered victory.Publication "'We Began the Contest for Liberty Ill Provided': Military Leadership in the Continental Army, 1775-1783"(2015-05) Sculley, Seanegan P.In 1775, a Virginia gentleman-planter was given command of a New England army outside of Boston and the Continental Army was born. Over the course of eight years, a cultural negotiation concerning the use of and limits to military authority was worked out between the officers and soldiers of the Continental Army that we call leadership today. How this army was led, and how the interactions between officers and soldiers from the various states of the new nation changed their understandings of the proper exercise of military authority, was codified in The Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States. The result was a form of military leadership that recognized the autonomy of the individual soldiers, a changing concept of honor, and a new American tradition of military service.Publication “Nantucket Women”: Public Authority and Education in the Eighteenth Century Nantucket Quaker Women’s Meeting and the Foundation for Female Activism(2015-05) Kovach, Jeffrey D“NANTUCKET WOMEN”: PUBLIC AUTHORITY AND EDUCATION IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY NANTUCKET QUAKER WOMEN’S MEETING AND THE FOUNDATION FOR FEMALE ACTIVISM MAY 2015 JEFFREY D. KOVACH, B.A., FRANKLIN AND MARSHALL COLLEGE M.A., WILLIAM PATERSON UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Barry J. Levy The women’s monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, on Nantucket in the eighteenth century regulated the private lives of its members, particularly matters of marriage and sexuality. This regulation inhibited the behavior of female Friends, but it also served to create a culture of education and public authority for the island’s women. The women’s meeting maintained meticulous records of its proceedings and created a structure of oversight and hierarchy that allowed it to take every step possible to ensure the fitness of potential brides. As Quakerism had no mechanism for divorce, ensuring marriage remained holy according to the dictates of the meeting was essential to the preservation of the Quaker family on the island. The family unit was of utmost importance on Nantucket in part because of the island’s whaling economy. As men engaged in the often gruesome and violent hunt for whales, their absences from home could extend for two to three years. This placed the financial well-being of the family in the hands of wives, who entered into the very public world of business on behalf of the family. For children, the primary role model of their youth was their mother. In later years, as boys apprenticed with family members and other whaler Friends, girls learned Quaker tenets and the essentials of running a family economy and religious community from their mothers at home and in the meetinghouse. Seeing women in positions of public religious authority and financial independence had an impact on future generations. Nantucket produced several female activists of the nineteenth century with ties to the Quaker meeting on the island. Sisters Lucretia Mott and Martha Coffin Wright, abolitionist Anna Gardner, scientist and women’s rights advocate Maria Mitchell, and Unitarian preacher Phebe Hanaford could all trace their roots back to the Nantucket Quaker meeting of the eighteenth century. Both the women’s rights movement, highlighted by the 1848 convention in Seneca Falls, New York, and the abolitionist movement had strong connections to Nantucket. This was a direct result of the strong public female leadership that emerged on the island in the eighteenth century.Publication From (Un)known to Known: Biography, Archives, and the Methods of Modern U.S. Women’s History(2023-09) Talley, GinaThis dissertation examines the experiences of women who did not fit the intended life path for educated white women in the early twentieth century, the operation of wealth and power, and the genre of biography, both historical biography and biography written for a non-historian audience. Further, questions related to the construction of the archive—whose documents are saved and whose are discarded—inform this dissertation. Each chapter examines an individual's life in the early twentieth century and follows their trajectory through later life, a less-explored stage. Julia Morgan (1872-1957), Ida O'Keeffe (1889-1961), Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), and Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962) form the foundation of this dissertation, while Georgia O'Keeffe's (1887-1986) life and legacy is also explored. Through the methods of women's history, feminist biography, and microhistory, this dissertation utilizes archival research, correspondence, published and unpublished autobiographies, and "canonical" biographies written about historical subjects. This dissertation investigates how individuals have challenged biographers due to a lack of "preferred" sources or how biographers, often ignoring complicating evidence, sought to enshrine a "genius" myth as a part of an individual's legacy. By examining the connections between a woman's public and private life, as well as often overlooked, everyday, quotidian matters, this dissertation offers a model for future investigations into individuals who left sparse records, as well as how to reexamine individuals whose "myth" was created by biographers.