My dissertation is a study of the origins and legacy of participatory democratic thought in America. In June 1962, the Students for a Democratic Society signed the Port Huron Statement, in which they articulated their vision of citizens participating directly in the governance of their country and putting an end to many intractable problems in American life, including racial discrimination, poverty, and the paranoid logic of cold war policy (e.g., brinkmanship). The New Left ideal of participatory democracy captured the imagination of a generation of political activists in the late 1950s and early 1960s but never planted a firm foothold in American political soil. Largely dismissed as an unviable idea in such a large country, it had limited influence on the development of political institutions in the United States and would only receive serious consideration from political theorists. To understand why participatory democracy was so short-lived, I argue that one must trace its intellectual origins to the pragmatists who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries laid the foundation for this ethos. Thus, I focus on the writings of the early pragmatist philosophers, including Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Next, I turn to the legacy of participatory democratic thought and examine the work of Sheldon Wolin and Benjamin Barber, two contemporary political theorists who, respectively, represent radical and mainstream versions of this idea. Finally, I argue that once situated within the pragmatist tradition, participatory democratic thought proves not only impracticable but also theoretically untenable. This might compel political scientists to revisit questions about participation, civic education, citizenship, civil society, and representation.

This dissertation examines the "Negro market" and consumer activism within the context of the black freedom movement in New York City from 1930 to 1965. The "Negro market," a term used by the advertising industry to indicate a racially defined consumer market that was separate from the mainstream one, first emerged during the Great Depression. It expanded during World War II when the government gave more attention to racial matters and actively supported corporate attention to black consumers. In its first three decades, "Negro market" advertisers sought to reach African Americans without alienating whites, and strategies were shaped by advertising agencies, corporations, black media, and black marketing experts. During these years "Negro market" campaigns were conducted solely in black media. Although this reinforced the segregation of the consumer market, it did result in positive advertising images of blacks in the black press. Black protests in the early 1960s resulted in the integration of a small number of ads in mainstream media, changing the exclusively segregated approach of advertisers. Black New Yorkers used their consumer power as a tool in the black freedom movement, a movement that included campaigns for employment, integration, and positive black cultural portrayals. They also worked for consumer rights such as integrated commercial spaces, fair prices, and quality merchandise, and understood these rights as an important part of their struggle for racial equality. Groups from a variety of political perspectives---including housewives leagues, the NAACP, CORE, the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement, and the National Negro Congress---took part in these activities. Consumer weapons such as picketing and boycotts were only one aspect of black rights campaigns, and were often very effective. But there were limits to the usefulness of consumer action. By looking at business trade journals, the black press, advertisements, and the records of civil rights organizations, advertising agencies, corporations, and governmental agencies, this study traces the early history of the "Negro market," demonstrates the importance of consumer rights to black New Yorkers, and also shows the limitations of consumption as a method for achieving racial equality.

This study explores President Woodrow Wilson’s evolution between his 1912 presidential campaign and the mid-point of his second term from staunch opposition to a federal woman suffrage amendment to an active advocate for the cause. Besides clearly identifying the array of forces within and outside Congress that pressured Wilson and the extent to which he was, in turn, able to influence Congress and voters, this study more fully integrates the suffragists and anti-suffragists into American political history and situates the issue of woman suffrage in the broader context of Wilson’s two administrations. I argue that the National American Woman Suffrage Association, not the National Woman’s Party, was decisive in Wilson’s conversion to the cause of the federal amendment because its approach mirrored his own conservative vision of the appropriate method of reform: win a broad consensus, develop a legitimate rationale, and make the issue politically valuable. Additionally, I contend that Wilson did have a significant role to play in the successful congressional passage and national ratification of the 19th Amendment, though powerful currents of sectionalism, race, and economic interests sometimes limited the extent of his influence. A deeper understanding of the final stages of the woman suffrage movement holds relevance for our understanding of both Progressive Era America and our present times. Observing Wilson treading the fragile line between executive interference and reasonable influence provides great insight into Progressive Era conceptions of separation of powers and presidential power and leadership. Furthermore, debates over woman suffrage contributed to the larger late-19 th and early-20th century debates over the meaning of citizenship and the role of the state in an increasingly industrialized nation. Enfranchising one-half the population marked a significant moment in our nation’s history. This study deepens and enriches our understanding of the process by which that momentous event came to pass.

This dissertation examines the materiality of agricultural Improvement in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts. Improvement was a social movement with a history in Europe, and which largely operated to rationalize agriculture when it appeared in New England in the early 19th century. Alongside this modernization, Improvement also served to re-shape rural landscapes in keeping with particular social and economic processes of capitalism. This was because Improvement emerged at a time of great social instability in rural Massachusetts, and served to ameliorate the growing tensions between urban and rural socio-economic life. Utilizing both archaeological and documentary data, I deploy a dialectical method that situates landscapes as materializations of larger social processes, properly analyzed through a process of abstraction. Using this method, I explore two landscapes. First, I examine the literature written by the Improvers, particularly the journal New England Farmer, published after 1822. I investigate keywords in the journal to reveal the symbolic landscape articulated by the Improvers, and show that they envisioned a homogeneous New England landscape that was populated by free, White laborers, contrary to the demographic and social history of the region. The second landscape is the built environment of the E.H. and Anna Williams house in Deerfield, Massachusetts. I explore the materiality of the Williams house and its relationship to Improvement in two ways. First, I examine how the Williamses' management of manure was integrated with practices of capitalist farming, and how proper manure management was seen to arrest rural New England's perceived economic and social decline. Secondly, I examine the trash scatters excavated from the Williams yard to reveal continuities and discontinuities with the Improvers' emphasis on clean, ordered spaces. The Williamses actively manipulated space by enhancing the size of the front yard, and moving work activities behind this visible area. This ameliorated the tensions inherent in Improvement between visibility and productivity, and is reflected in the changing distribution of trash at the site. I conclude by suggesting that archaeological studies of rural life take moments of landscape change like Improvement into account, as a way of countering historical narratives of rural timelessness.

This study demonstrates that Roosevelt spent most of his life trying to reconcile two often competing values: the collectivist spirit of Progressivism and the individualism of the founding fathers. As President, TR used the power of the national government to break down obstacles that prevented everyone from competing on a level economic playing field, thereby providing them with opportunity to realize their individual potential. But he believed that much depended on the character of the individual and therefore relied on personal example, the bully pulpit, and an extraordinary number of public writings to preach the values of fair-play, decency, hard-work, self-control, and duty to family, community, and nation. In essence, Roosevelt played the role of the kindhearted tough guy---his American ideal---and he hoped that his words and deeds would inspire his fellow citizens to appreciate the importance of both individualistic and collectivistic qualities. Roosevelt accepted largeness in American life, including the new corporate scale of the economy. He rejected both the Wilsonian desire to break up corporations and the Socialistic wish to nationalize them. He preferred instead to strengthen the regulatory powers of the federal government, while remaining devoted to the principle of individual responsibility. He was simply unwilling to regard structural solutions like statutes, constitutional amendments, and regulatory bodies as an appropriate response to all of society's problems. Especially where the private behavior of individuals was concerned, Roosevelt believed rhetoric and example were often more effective than either institutional reform or law in elevating mankind to a higher plane of morality. In short, TR was not in the mainstream of Progressive reformers in that he set out to reform, not forsake, the individualist values that prevailed during the 18 th and 19th centuries; and the sum of his efforts (both institutional and personal) offers a third way, not yet chosen, to transcend the liberal-conservative dichotomy of both modern American politics and contemporary political scholarship.

This dissertation argues that even though Americans have had the freedom to assemble since the ratification of the Bill of Rights, it was not until the late nineteenth century that political leaders viewed the holding of public rallies by working-class men, organized as labor unions, as a legitimate form of political expression. Even then there were limitations on who could gather and when. I show that New York’s Union Square played a pivotal role in this transition from elite republican politics to mass democracy by providing a venue for governmental institutions, political parties, and eventually labor unions to present arguments justifying their legitimacy. I argue that physical spaces are historical characters just like the people that inhabit them, showing how Union Square’s location, geography, and cultural identity influenced the gatherings that occurred there, and vice versa. Many books on New York City include information about Union Square —one of the rare open spaces to be designated a National Historic Landmark—but this dissertation throughly examines the history of the space. The area where New York City’s Common Council first developed Union Square in the 1830s was called the Fork in the Roads, since it was where the city’s two main thoroughfares, the Boston Post Road and the Albany Post Road, intersected. Like those roads, this dissertation tells two separate stories that become one in Union Square. One describes how Union Square transformed from an elite residential square with a gated park in its center to the city’s primary gathering space for political expression. The other details how working-class New Yorkers struggled for political legitimacy. The stories converge when the Central Labor Union organized the nation’s first Labor Day parade through Union Square in 1882. In the wake of that and subsequent Labor Day parades in cities and towns around the nations, state legislatures and eventually the federal government came to declare Labor Day an official holiday, suggesting that politicians were finally taking labor seriously. Meanwhile, Union Square had become the most important space for political expression in New York City, and continues in that role today.

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.

Despite the fact that Puritans viewed themselves as honest embodiments of God's Word, they were routinely condemned as consummate liars, dangerous sharpers, and seditious malefactors. The perception of Puritans as hypocrites and tricksters began in Elizabethan England and gained wide currency during the Stuart monarchies. The disreputable attributes attached to Puritans followed them across the Atlantic when they settled New England. Throughout the seventeenth century the stigma of dishonesty and deceptiveness tainted perceptions of the Puritan plantations. By the eighteenth century, the English speaking world universally held New Englanders in low repute. Like their Puritan forebears, New Englanders during the decades prior to the Revolution were seen as deceptive, dishonest, and crafty. In Old England, Puritans created a cultural identity based upon privileging oaths as a sacred form of discipline and this preoccupation with oaths played a major role in generating their reputation for dishonesty and hypocrisy. They antagonized their neighbors by attacking the popular vernacular habit of swearing low-grade oaths. Worse still, they lied or found ways of lying to circumvent the oaths mandated by the crown and church to enforce religious conformity. Their reaction against English state oaths made them enemies of the crown and church and led them into exile on the Continent or in New England. In New England, Puritans created a civil and ecclesiastical polity complete with its own loyalty oaths which substituted the English oaths of allegiance. These innovations enraged the home government and generated scathing denunciations of New England Puritans. Resistance to English trade regulations, especially the subterfuge practiced around the required customs-house oaths, similarly contributed to Puritan's low repute. Puritans fretted over their reputation for dishonesty. In New England, the social structure they created aimed to eliminate hypocrisy and identify the godly. Nonetheless, the decades of oath controversies led Puritans to become adept at verbal play and resorting to literal interpretations of truth. These characteristics came to be recognized as a key component of the region's identity and endured into the eighteenth century to become the hallmark of the ‘Yankee’ personality.

The mita was a draft Indian labor system that Viceroy Francisco de Toledo developed in 1573 for the silver industry at Potos(')i (in colonial Upper Peru; current-day Bolivia). For a brief period the mita served, in combination with the introduction of amalgamation technology, stockpiles of previously unrefinable ore and a large capital investment by the mine and mill owners (azogueros) to cause a boom in production. By 1600, however, the stockpiles of ore had been exhausted and the boom had given way to decreasing levels of silver production at Potos(')i. The Indians who were serving in the mita (mitayos) had become more important to the industry, because they were now the principal means of obtaining ore, but their condition had deteriorated. As their own profits fell, the Indians began to flee from Potos(')i and from the provinces that were subject to the mita. Their migration, which was caused by tribute requirements and other labor obligations as well, disrupted the social, economic and political order that the Spanish were trying to impose upon the Indians. Their method of resisting the invaders was passive, but the Indians were neither conquered nor submissive victims of the mita. The group that was caught between the continuing demand for mitayos at Potos(')i and the decreasing number of Indians in the provinces was the caciques (Indian nobles). They were the key to the entire system, because they delivered the Indians to the mines and the mills. At first the caciques were able to meet their quotas by abridging the legal restrictions on the recruitment of the mitayos. But in the early seventeenth century they found themselves fined for the growing number of Indians that they were unable to deliver, and a new form of mita service was founded: service in silver, ostensibly to hire substitutes. By 1630, between one-third and one-half of the total delivery of mitayos to Potos(')i was made in money. The azogueros used some of the silver they received from the caciques for operating funds, rather than to hire laborers. The mita therefore became a capital subsidy as well as forced labor system. The Hapsburg government of colonial Peru opposed the new form of mita service because it was an unauthorized arrangement between the azogueros and the caciques to which it was not a party. The crown's ability to counter the de facto mita was restricted, however, by its isolation in Spain, by the time that was consumed by trans-Atlantic correspondence and by its own bureaucracy. The viceroys who were stationed in Lima were plagued by similar problems, and they depended upon the President of the Audiencia de Charcas and the Corregidor de Potos(')i to administer the mita on a daily basis. A constant interplay of personal and professional jealousies among these officials, the viceroy's reluctance to innovate and the contradictory orders that were issued from Lima and Madrid complicated the government's efforts to reform the mita to the point of near-total ineffectiveness. In 1670, the Viceroy Conde de Lemos determined that the system could not be purged of the azogueros' misuse of mita service in silver and the other abuses that stemmed from it, and he proposed that the system be abolished. The crown was reluctant to accept the loss of revenue that such an act would have entailed, and instead it ordered a total reformation of the mita. That program was executed during the 1680s, under the Viceroy Duque de la Palata. It too failed, because it was based on an untenable premise: that the Toledan mita could be re-established despite 110 years of economic, political and demographic change in Peru.

The evolution of Iroquoian culture coincided with the development of agriculture, warfare, and tribalization during the Late Woodland Period in the Northeast. Implicit in the currently-held in situ hypothesis is the assumption that these processes occurred endogenously, i.e., as local developments throughout the Iroquoian homeland, arising spontaneously from the adoption of maize horticulture. Two alternative hypotheses for Iroquoian social change are evaluated here; both assume that change was induced exogenously, from pressure generated from the interior of the continent, imposed on Iroquoia from the Ohio/Allegheny River drainage and the Lake Erie basin to the south and west. The three hypotheses are evaluated through an analysis of settlement in the New York Iroquoian homeland.