My dissertation challenges the prevailing view of late eighteenth century Britain as a Protestant state. By examining the development of Catholic peoples political and cultural positions in the British Isles and the empire between the Seven Years War and the passage of Catholic emancipation, my work shows how the British government adopted a flexible attitude towards Catholics. The latter part of the eighteenth century was marked by a moment of potential for Catholic-Protestant relations. Britain was transforming from an early modern to a modern society at this time. Older ideas of the need for a clear social hierarchy and an established church existed alongside a growing public sphere and the beginnings of nationalist thought. In these circumstances, some Britons believed it was both necessary and possible to extend legal concessions to Catholics without undermining the established church and the British Constitution. The Catholic Relief Acts of the 1770s and 1790s embodied this mindset by allowing Catholics greater civil rights while still keeping them in a legally inferior position. This time of potential reached its climax just after the passage of the 1801 Act of Union, uniting Ireland and Britain into one country. William Pitt originally intended to package the Union with a repeal of most of the remaining restrictions against Catholics in the hopes that it would pacify the Irish. However, George III refused to allow it, and, as far as Catholics were concerned, the United Kingdom came into being amid an atmosphere of disappointment and betrayal. When Parliament finally did pass Catholic emancipation in 1829, it did so under duress in order to avoid civil war in Ireland.

This dissertation explores African ideas and practices related to bodies, health, illness and death in the early modern Spanish Caribbean. African healing traditions were an essential part of the imagination of bodies, health, illness, and death espoused by the early modern inhabitants of the Iberian Atlantic World. They were instruments of integration, sharing, and adaptation. In the distinctively fluid and cosmopolitan societies and cultures of Spanish Caribbean cities, Africans, Europeans and their descendants developed a common ground for the conceptualization of their bodies' nature, and of the origins of health, illness and death. Drawing on material and documentary evidence from early modern Africa, Europe, and America, my project demonstrates how African systems of belief and practices were seminal in the emergence of ideas about the body. Furthermore, it shows the central place of African mores in the rise of Spanish Colonial socio-cultural structures in the Spanish Colonies in the Caribbean.

This paper explores the festival of carnival in the German city of Cologne from its beginnings in the Middle Ages to its modern celebration. It focuses on its development and convergence with local Heimat-identities and how interpretations of the deeper meaning of the festival came to inform these identities. It traces the movement from a medieval understanding of carnival as a representation of an evil world to be rejected at Lent to the nineteenth-century, where it became a representation of the jolly and light-hearted nature of Colognes citizens and a break from the drudgery of rigid life structures. This evolution is compared to traced developments in postwar Cologne, in which carnival came to be interpreted as a representation of the tolerant, democratic, and fundamentally un-Prussian nature of Cologne and its citizens This paper thus argues that folk traditions which inform local and regional identities, while often continuous in form, undergo discrete but radical moments of re-invention in terms of the interpretation of their meaning. The connection of such traditions to local identities, this paper concludes, illustrates processes by which supposedly traditional local and regional cultures are capable of undergoing constant modernizing processes in which they are able to take on new and progressive value claims.

The civil rights movement was the most important intellectual transformation since the Second World War; in terms of domestic influence, possibly the most important since the Civil War. Still, people often disagree about what it meant, and rarely measure its impact in the same way. I argue that the movement should be considered as an idea, which means accounting for how the movement became so widely available for use and reference by so many people. I describe not only a few of the ideas that contributed directly to the movement as popularly conceived, but especially those reactions to and interpretations of the civil rights movement by intellectuals, as a concept or term in their competing and complementary narratives of American history, the sum of which today comprises a quintessentially American style of political and cultural activity. The movement, considered as a powerful new idea, changed the nature of political practice and public discourse in the United States, but also fused with and incorporated existing conceptions concerning the nature of, and prospects for, American democracy.

This dissertation is an intellectual biography of James Hudson (1903-1980), a black minister and philosopher of religion. Standing just over five feet tall with a body that lacked a right arm and weighed less than 140 pounds, Hudson was a small man who became a giant in the mid-twentieth century struggle against Jim Crow. As a college chaplain in the Floridas capital city, he played an indispensable role in building that communitys civil rights movement. Specifically, Hudson connected Tallahassee to a powerful network of black religious intellectuals that, with his avid participation, built a freedom curriculum which systematized a militant ethics of Christian nonviolence. By teaching from this curriculum, he inspired local students and churchgoers to engage in noncooperation against segregation, beginning with a 1956 boycott of Tallahassees bus system. The Inter-Civic Council (ICC) Hudson and others founded to coordinate this protest, which followed the lead of similar boycott organizations in Baton Rouge and Montgomery, became an integral part of what sociologist Aldon Moris called the institutional soil from which the [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] would emerge. Furthermore, as one of the black Baptist churchs most widely read Personalist philosophers on the eve of the Civil Rights Movement, Hudson laid a critical foundation for Martin Luther King, Jr., another black Personalist, to become the movements premier spokesman. This manuscript examines Hudsons life, with particular emphasis on his thought and praxis. It adds to a small but growing body of literature about the movements ideational origins.

This dissertation uses social movement theory to examine the participation of black lower class southerners in movements supporting territorial separatism from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. This group participated in British resettlements to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Sierra Leone during the Revolutionary Era and colonization movements to Liberia sponsored by the American Colonization Society during the antebellum period in order to acquire land and liberty. The apex of southern black territorial separatism occurred after the Civil War when black southerners attempted to achieve these goals by independently initiating emigration movements to Liberia and the Midwest. The southern black masses were motivated to participate in movements for territorial separatism by their desire for economic independence and political equality. <p> Movement emergence is examined using spatial processes and grievance theories and examinations of movement structure use political processes and resource mobilization theories. Movements supporting separatism emerge after severe changes in political or economic power are worsened by violence and are also affected by physical proximity. Areas of movement structure such as ideology, participation, the diffusion of information, framing, organization, leadership, and strategy are analyzed and show remarkable consistency throughout the multiple phases of southern black territorial separatism. <p> Lower class blacks in the South rationalized separatism as a means to practically improve their condition. They expressed views different from those expressed by Northern upper class black supporters and their experiences offer researchers an alternative view regarding the development of Black Nationalism in the United States.

Kinship networks were central to early Americans achievement of socio-economic and political goals. By comparing case studies of Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Anglo-American families, this dissertation shows how very important kinship was to early American life across cultures. The Colbert, Ward, Ridge, and Donelson families each used kinship relationships to pursue familial goals during the colonial and early republic periods. While these families all used kin-based strategies to achieve their goals, their aims differed drastically according to whether they were American Indians or Anglo-Americans. The Colbert, Ward, and Ridge families pursued trade-related goals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but focused more and more on preservation of sovereignty as pressure from Anglo-Americans to cede land increased. The Donelson family used their kin networks to invest in a variety of business ventures, but primarily in land speculation. This comparison of American Indian and Anglo-American familial strategies illustrates how kinship networks were used similarly to pursue conflicting goals. The continuous use of kin-based strategies by the leaders of these cultures indicates that family was an essential part of early American intercultural political and economic negotiation and should be recognized as a powerful force in American history.

This dissertation examines a strain of Americanism, rooted in the civic ideals of cultural pluralism and democracy, that developed shortly before World War I and continued throughout the twentieth century. Among the key advocates of this view were members of the folk music revivalmusicians, public folklorists, and record producers, as well as musical entrepreneurs and enthusiastswho worked to popularize this version of nationalism through folk music. The revivalists used the music of racial, regional, and ethnic groups to illustrate the inherent cultural diversity of the United States. By providing outlets for members of these communities to present their musical traditions to a national listening audience, the revivalists did not merely speak for these groups of citizens, but also enabled these citizens to speak for themselves. Is so doing, the revivalists helped lay the groundwork for the rise of multiculturalism that emerged in the 1970s. Furthermore, the revivalists sought to help these groups, many of which were politically, socially, and economically marginalized, gain access to the political process. Acting upon a perceived moral responsibility to ensure that the nation lived up to its democratic ideals led many revivalists into social programs associated with the political Left beginning during the Popular Front era of the 1930s and continuing through the early years of the New Left. Examining these activists motivations on a grassroots level reveals that the Old and New Lefts shared a similar faith in American democratic ideals and thus were far more ideologically connected than has been historically understood. In interpreting the revival leaders efforts over the course of the movement, I challenge the rigid divisions between the American Old and New Left, explain the long history of multiculturalism in the United States, and contribute to the broader understanding of how Americans have struggled to construct a national identity.

As the Athens of the South, Nashville is the home of Fisk, Meharry, Tennessee State and American Baptist Theological colleges, four of the Souths oldest black centers of higher education. The role of these schools students in the modern Civil Rights Movement however, has been largely attributed to the black church tradition. Yet, long before scores of Nashville college students planned, organized and executed one of the most disciplined nonviolent direct-action campaigns against segregation during the 1960s, black college students, faculty and alumni enjoyed a century-long history of often complicated and sometimes multifarious activism. While the study reveals the institutional, personal and collective risks of black college activism, it attempts to answer one principal question: As centers of black thought, agency, self-determination and social responsibility, do black colleges deserve more credit for their role in the black resistance narrative; and if so, have they been cheated by orthodoxy which contends that the black church alone is at the epicenter of black activism? The archival sources for this project include public documents, institutional and personal correspondence, student publications, newspapers, as well as administrative and board records. When woven together, these histories will bring to bear the causal factors that are both exceptional to the Nashville movement as well as representative of the larger narrative of student activism. In doing so, this project reconsiders the place of black colleges, and by extension of it black educational efforts in the larger struggle for civil rights stretching back to the early 19th century. It argues that black college student activists in Nashville and across the South during the modern Civil Rights Movement, whether they knew it or not, stood in the much longer tradition of black college activism.

This dissertation explores the formation of Civil War memory through a social history of remembering within the Middle Tennessee heartland in the sixty-five years after the war. I tell the story of essentially two competing conceptions of the pasta Union-Emancipationist memory, rooted mainly in the experiences of African Americans, and a Confederate-Reconciliationist tradition championed by whitesand analyze efforts by these groups to locate, articulate, sustain, champion, transfer, and institutionalize memories of the war years. Attention to local circumstances permits me to delineate the process of social memory formation and to detail the ways in which social memories of particular groups either failed to establish themselves in regional consciousness or were championed and institutionalized as a collective memory. By 1890, a Confederate revivalism, which accompanied a resurgence in the politics of white supremacy, dominated cultural representations of the past within the region. I feature the role of what I term memory entrepreneurs, individuals and groupssuch as the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacywho worked to attach broad social memories to the identity needs of social and political groups. By the end of the studyin 1920a Confederate-Reconciliationist memory is housed in the regions libraries and archives, funded by State government, taught in the regions colleges and universities, and inscribed upon the landscape in countless memorials and shrines to the Confederate cause. By contrast, constituencies of Union-Emancipationist memory lose their cohesiveness and lack the resources to combat the consolidation of a Confederate memory cult.