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The Texas Ranger tradition of over twenty-five years of frontier defense influenced the methods by which Texans provided for frontier defense, 1861-1865. The elements that guarded the Texas frontier during the war combined organizational policies that characterized previous Texas military experience and held the frontier together in marked contrast to its rapid collapse at the Confederacy's end. The first attempt to guard the Indian frontier during the Civil War was by the Texas Mounted Rifles, a regiment patterned after the Rangers, who replaced the United States troops forced out of the state by the Confederates. By the spring of 1862 the Frontier Regiment, a unit funded at state expense, replaced the Texas Mounted Rifles and assumed responsibility for frontier defense during 1862 and 1863. By mid-1863 the question of frontier defense for Texas was not so clearly defined as in the war's early days. Then, the Indian threat was the only responsibility, but the magnitude of Civil War widened the scope of frontier protection. From late 1863 until the war's end, frontier defense went hand in hand with protecting frontier Texans from a foe as deadly as Indians—themselves. The massed bands of deserters, Union sympathizers, and criminals that accumulated on the frontier came to dominate the activities of the ensuing organizations of frontier defense. Any treatment of frontier protection in Texas during the Civil War depends largely on the wealth of source material found in the Texas State Library. Of particular value is the extensive Adjutant General's Records, including the muster rolls for numerous companies organized for frontier defense. The Barker Texas History Center contains a number of valuable collections, particularly the Barry Papers and the Burleson Papers. The author found two collections to be most revealing on aspects of frontier defense, 1863-1865: the William Quayle Papers, University of Alabama, and the Bourland Papers, Library of Congress. As always, the Official Records is indispensible for any military analysis of the American Civil War.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is often considered the most important literary figure in modern Bengali history. He lived through the transformation of Bengali culture and society from colonial to anticolonial to post-colonial times. Tagore was a playwright, novelist, philosopher, and songwriter. He wrote and composed nearly 2,500 songs, called Rabindrasangeet. My interlocutors ascribe Tagore’s songs with a particular affective strength that has become a medium for the construction of diasporic identity. In this dissertation, I explore the lives of three generations of women – from precolonial Bengal, post-independence Bengal, and the modern diaspora – and the types of movement they have experienced. I identify a rupture between the familiar and the immediate that accompanies their movement, and characterize this rupture as creating space for multiple identities, reflections, and intimacies, and the continuous building, dismantling, and rebuilding of culture. I argue that the genre of Rabindrasangeet forms and reforms in the diaspora through embodied processes of micro-level performance. Through friendships, kinships, inter-generational relationships, and technologically mediated connections, Rabindrasangeet remains present. It is a tool for self-making, and used to convey unspoken feelings in a gendered world.

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This thesis is a socio-military history of the development and use of Belle Isle Military Prison; possibly the most notorious of all Civil War prisons. The prison compound stood on a seventy-five acre island in the James River, approximately one-half mile west of wartime Richmond. The island's use as a prison lasted intermittently from July 18, 1862 to February, 1865. During this period the Confederate authorities confined to Belle Isle over 20,000 Federal prisoners of war. The Confederate authorities were unprepared from the very outset of the Civil War to deal with such a large number of prisoners. Due to lack of planning and foresight, the Confederate authorities improvised in a piecemeal fashion and with "stop-gap" measures a prisoner-of-war system. Confederate prisons came into existence merely to relieve the overcrowding at other prison sites. Belle Isle was such a stop-gap measure. The island prison was used only after the other Richmond prisons were congested. The Federal prisoners at Belle Isle suffered from a number of diseases and illnesses, including pneumonia, pellagra, scurvy and dysentery. Possibly more devastating to the prisoners constitution were the psychological effects of prison confinement. So dismal were the conditions on the island that it became known by many prisoners as the "most infamous bit of land in the national geography." / Master of Arts