<p> &ldquo;A Discrete Hollow&rdquo; is a collection of work that spans the past three years of my life. This project involves itself with the discussion of isolation, and our resulting growth as sentient humans; this is painted upon the Los Angeles cityscape. Within my project&rsquo;s boundaries isolation resides in the banter of the cosmos as origin or expiry; in the anomaly of vagrancy; within a disjointed paternal and struggle for a permanent memory. These poems are shaped around the identity that is developed through separateness, and the reason discovered in uncertainty. This body of work is conjoined to Los Angeles as an inescapable coercion and background, and my poetry attempts to link identity through experience. This project is focused on the location of a unique self in a city that is founded upon facelessness.</p>

<p> This work focuses on Detroit from 1805 to 1812, with a focus on the changes brought about by the advent of the Michigan Territory and the reaction to those changes by the predominantly French-speaking citizens of the town. This work relies on previously underutilized petitions and memorials drafted and circulated by the francophone citizens of Detroit to argue that these citizens had a real and profound interest in the political and legal future of their town, contrary to what past historians have written. The thesis is organized into three chapters. The first gives a brief history of Detroit from its founding in 1701 until the start of the Territory of Michigan in 1805. The second examines the conflicting desires of the local population and the new administration in rebuilding the towns following its destruction by fire in June 1805, in particular the issues involving land title, locations of new lots, and the enclosure of Detroit's commons. The third chapter examines controversies surrounding the "Americanization" of the legal system in Detroit and the desire of the French-speaking population to have a system more in keeping with their traditional practices.</p>

This thesis analyzes a gradual political transformation in Texas during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It specifically analyzes the political climate following the 2014 Midterm Elections by using the valuable context of past Texas political history. In spite of the massive setbacks of the 2014 election cycle, the Democratic Party may actually have a bright future in the state of Texas. Demographic and economic trends provide the party with an opportunity to make steady gains. But such progress will not happen automatically: Democrats have to run candidates and take positions that appeal to the emerging Texas electorate.

<p> In discussion of Olympic Games and Los Angeles, 1984 is often the primary focus; but the Tenth Olympiad hosted by the same city in 1932 provides a more meaningful and lasting legacy within the Olympic narrative. This thesis looks at the stadium construction of Olympic host cities prior to 1932 and investigates the process by which Los Angeles came to host the 1932 Summer Olympics. The significance of the first athletic village and a history of the venues used for the 1932 competition will also be explored. This thesis will show that the depression-era 1932 Los Angeles Olympics provides a model more in line with original Olympic principals opposed to the current economically-driven system. Within that 1932 model is a means by which a host city can incorporate existing facilities adequate for a large festival and also, when and where construction is needed, provide future-use plans that serve a community beyond the duration of an Olympiad. Los Angeles and 1932 are unique in that the built environment that remains still serves the city in various ways, an idea not necessarily incorporated in twenty-first century Olympic models.</p>

This dissertation examines representations of the distinction between new and old money in 1920s American novels. New money is earned or acquired, while old money is inherited. The distinction itself reveals the ethos out of which it emerges; the sources of money only become important when money appears to be on the loose, circulating, and ending up in unpredictable hands. In the context of increased access to liquidity, the distinction of new and old money expresses a conflict over social legitimacy and the definition of an American elite. This concern with legitimation, in turn, gives rise to a set of binaries pertaining to social position, including the distinction of born versus inherited, authentic versus artificial, and historical versus fictional. I argue that representations of money, or “money stories,” become a legible discourse of social legitimation in this period. Bringing together texts typically segmented by the modes of naturalism, realism, and modernism, I reveal the dominance of this legitimating discourse and, in particular, the centrality of the distinction between new and old money across novels of the period. The project consists of readings articulating the distinction between new and old money. Chapter one situates Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street and Babbitt within the context of 1920s ambivalence around the frontier myth, arguing that, in Lewis, the problem of the loss of land is the problem of the loss of a legitimating ground for a moneyed elite. Chapter two reads Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence as a study in the dialectical relationship of new and old money, revealing old money’s account of genealogical inheritance as a carefully constructed response to new money’s power of purchase. Chapter three argues that new money is a particularly rich site for fiction in F. Scott Fitzgerald, who continually restaged the confrontation between old money’s silent, assumed history and new money’s profusion of fictional accounts of its past. Chapter four treatsJohn Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy as a reflection on the biographical form in the context of liquidity, taking stock of the money story, that peculiar genre of legitimation so prevalent in this period’s novels.

"Unsettling the South" is a history of the first half-century of US expansion in the southern interior. It traces how debt, land sales, road building, war making, and migration transformed the United States from an indebted former colony into an expanding empire dependent on plantation slavery. It tells this history not only from the point of view of US-Americans but also from the perspectives of American Indian polities and enslaved African Americans. "Unsettling the South" challenges narratives that assume US dominion spread inexorably across the southern interior. Drawing on methods from environmental history, the history of capitalism, settler colonial studies, Native studies, and the history of slavery, the dissertation reveals the contradictions and conflicts produced by settlement and shows how they fractured both US and American Indian polities. In particular, it argues that disorder and autonomy--attributes usually ascribed to American Indian polities and blamed for those polities' distresses--were actually characteristic of the United States and US-American settlers. The trick of US settler colonialism in the southern interior was that it demanded strong centralized governments of southern American Indian polities, while at the same time, allowing US settlers, statesmen, and armies high degrees of autonomy. Finally, "Unsettling the South" demonstrates how the worlds of slaveholders, aspiring planters, and enslaved people were intertwined with American Indians. Enslaved people, driven into the southern interior, often passed through Creek, Chickasaw, and Choctaw country. Their owners and traders rode along paths made during the US-Creek War and settled near US forts and former American Indian towns. The cotton kingdom and its master-slave relationships took shape within a changing American Indian South.

<p> By exploring how Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne each write about art, I articulate a little-discussed aesthetic tradition centered around the aesthetic of effect. This tradition works to connect romantic ideas about the author with sentimental emphasis on the need for affective art.</p>

<p> Although Maryland was never a part of the Confederacy during the war, the large number of southern sympathizers within the city allowed for the Maryland Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to grow into a powerful organization. This thesis examines how the commemorative actions taken by the Maryland Division--and the UDC as a whole-- allowed women to gain more political and social power within their communities. The Baltimore Confederate Monument is a physical example of how the elite southern women of the Maryland Division commemorated the Confederate past and culture, particularly within a contested space. Despite being formally a part of the Union, Confederate women in Maryland continued to provide support for Confederate soldiers and to help memorialize the Confederate cause. As they worked to memorialize the "Lost Cause" and the Confederacy within their borders, the Maryland Division faced challenges both typical of their Southern peers as well as those unique to Maryland, given Maryland's position as a border state. In addition, this thesis specifically examines the Baltimore Confederacy Monument, both its design and how the city reacted to the monument. Both the statue and other memorialization efforts done by the Maryland Division allowed Confederate sympathizers within the state to work towards their ultimate goal of the vindication of Confederate culture.</p>

<p> The following examines the complexities of slavery in Maryland in the antebellum period and argues that as a result of Maryland's geographic location as a border between North and South, Maryland slaveholders desperately clung to the institution and attempted to shape their world into a slave society, regardless of the fact that slavery had long been dying out as an economic necessity. In the process, they called for federal protection of fugitive slave property, subscribed to a strict code of white southern conduct, and attempted to weed out any threat to slavery&mdash; mainly the state's large free black population. This concept is intended to argue against the idea that Maryland was a middling ground where ties to slavery were somehow weak or insignificant as a result of economic forces. As the Civil War approached, Maryland slaveholders in fact hardened the institution at the expense of Maryland's African American population.</p>

<p> Despite Henry James&rsquo;s reputation as a novelist of upper class manners, many critics have argued that his work also contains well-grounded criticism of capitalism and consumer culture. An even larger number of writers have analyzed James&rsquo;s idiosyncratic style, characterized by ambiguity and abstractness. Where these two analytic approaches overlap, the area examined in this dissertation, James makes a deeper critique of capitalism&rsquo;s redefinition of human purpose and its reification of the human mind and consciousness. James suggests, through his ambiguous and abstract language, that open-ended language which rejects concrete and conceptual meaning can gesture toward a space in which people can reclaim their full humanity and reject the reification of life &ndash; a space that is non-reified. Moreover, this non-reified space, while it can help an individual redefine her subjectivity, is brought to fruition when people share deeply intersubjective connections. By applying to four James novels the Marxist elaboration of commodification and reification by Georg Luk&aacute;cs, the detailed analysis of Jamesian grammar and syntax by Seymour Chatman, and the phenomenological discussions of language and intersubjectivity by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as the views of Gertrude Stein on the importance of allowing linguistic space that is not already filled with meaning, this dissertation finds James&rsquo;s gesture toward a space in which people can be fully human, experience each other as fully human, and rediscover language as a powerful force for mutual creation of the next moment and, from there, the world.</p>