This dissertation is a social history of indigent transiency, written using the records of criminal justice systems and poor relief infrastructure in order to examine the lives, experiences, and socio-political significance of vagrants and pauper migrants in the Mid-Atlantic between 1816 and 1850. It examines the causes for and consequences of illicit mobilities in this period, and argues that the policing of vagrancy and pauper mobility demonstrate key interpretations of the role of the state in defining and regulating class. It is the first study to link conceptually indigent transiency with the policing of vagrancy, limitations on the movement of African Americans, forced transportation of the wandering poor, and management of the spread of disease in this period. This study follows the vagrants and pauper migrants whose geographical movements were at odds with settlement laws, state constitutions, and welfare policies. It charts how the itinerant poor were forcibly transported to places deemed by the state to be their legal settlement through the process of pauper removal long after most historians acknowledge removal to have ended. It also considers the ways in which fugitive slaves and runaway servants experienced a transition from the oppression of an unfree labour status to the oppression of poverty after participating in illicit forms of mobility. This dissertation advances one central argument: that indigent transiency, in its many shapes and through the varied forms of its management, contributed significantly to contemporary understandings of citizenship, community, labour status, freedom of movement, the spread of disease, and the transformation of punishment in the early American republic. It proposes that indigent transiency was among the most important factors in determining how the poor lived, interacted with, and were viewed by local and state governments and their representatives, both under the law and by law enforcement, in this period.

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The purpose of this study is to explore the interconnectedness between the history and cultural memory of the United States-Mexico border with a focus on the period 1821 – 1854. In 1821, Mexico gained its independence from Spain; in 1836 it lost its northern province of Texas and in 1848 it acceded half of its existing territory to the United States. The study will explore the connections between this historical narrative and the cultural memory using three cases: Texas, California, and Arizona. The study provides an overview of the historical narrative demonstrating how such narratives are constructed. A model of Hispanicism based on Edward Said’s Orientalism will also be used to provide an understanding of how the cultural constructs and cultural memory reveal an hegemonic framework to the process. The thesis also sets this particular study within the context of limology, the interdisciplinary study of borders and borderlands. It will focus particularly upon Emanuel Brunt-Jailly’s 4 lens model of borders in order to provide a framework for the study. A range of cultural artefacts will be analysed in each case study to demonstrate how cultural memory structures the historical narrative. The main cultural focus for the Texas case study will be that of the Alamo cenotaph and Alamo films. The California case study will explore the cultural construct of the California Pastoral, a romanticised memory of the state’s Hispanic past. The artefacts examined include public festivals that celebrate California’s Hispanic past, the California novels of Gertrude Atherton and the myth of Joaquín Murrieta. The Arizona case study explores the concept of cultural amnesia though an examination of the process by which the Hispanic past is excluded from cultural memory. Finally the project seeks to apply the result in an exploration of the contemporary political framework.

This thesis examines the lives of single, white, slaveholding women in the nineteenth-century American South from 1830-1870. The central hypothesis is that singleness, in spite of its restrictions, was a route to female autonomy that had its roots in the antebellum era and that was intensified during the Civil War and post-war years. The Civil War acted as a catalyst for accelerating personal, social, economic, and legal changes in single women’s lives. It helped to revise and expand traditional gender models by destroying slavery that had tied to the patriarchal structure of the Old South. Many of the single women discussed in this thesis did not automatically fit into the traditional model of southern womanhood. They were either permanently single, or had married late, were widowed, divorced or separated. Yet they operated their lives within a tight framework of traditional gender conventions that gradually broke down in the antebellum, Civil War and post-war years. Single women clearly understood the importance of adhering to gender conventions. However, they were often able to manipulate them to their advantage, gaining acceptance and respect in southern society that provided an effective springboard to enhance personal autonomy. In the post-war period these processes continued to gain pace, as female autonomy was heightened by protection tradition ideals about women that could be used to their advantage in seeking a divorce or to gain their due in widowhood. Thus, from conservative ideology sprang radical social change. This thesis provides a wealth of evidence in the form of letters, diaries and court records in support of the central hypothesis that in spite of its restrictions, singleness was a route to greater autonomy for women in the nineteenth-century South.