This dissertation explores the ways in which a rhetoric of health and disease supported resistance to Britain in the decades prior to the Revolution in Massachusetts, and especially in Boston, crucible of the conflict. Corporeal language employed for political purposes had two dimensions. While using metaphors of the body to illustrate perceived assaults upon political liberty, such language also evoked material concerns for health that had long preoccupied the province. The revolutionary language of health and sickness expressed three key themes. First, claims that British and loyalist enemies sought to infect the province with corruption drew upon Boston's decades-long struggle to control communicable maladies brought via the city's crucial maritime commerce. Further claims accused the British soldiers occupying Boston of contravening provincial laws controlling contagious disease, and of being transmitters of pathogens. Second, obedience to the Sugar, Stamp, Townshend, and Tea Acts was represented as certain to derail the provincial economy on which healthful bodies human and politic depended. By depressing domestic development, these laws would undermine the conditions necessary for healthful labor. By promising a continuing flood of imported British goods, they threatened to undermine the frugality considered necessary to health. The mother country was represented as preventing the province from exploiting its innately salubrious environment, and these representations were supported by the conviction that many imported goods were unhealthful. None of these views was new, but reflected points of view and preoccupations often expressed during the province's struggles over currency and taxation in the 50 years prior to the Revolution. Finally, diverging disease profiles led to the invidious comparisons between Old and New England that became a key justification for resistance. Depictions of the mother country as irremediably corrupt and diseased both stood in for views about her moral and political status and reflected real assessments of the corporeal health of her subjects. Remaining within the empire was represented as reducing Massachusetts bodies to the sickly state of British ones, and the move for independence was ideologically and emotionally justified as a necessary health-saving measure.

This study uses probate records to explore gender patterns in testamentary customs from 1800 to 1860 as well as heretofore-unexamined shifts in testamentary relationships between men and women in the mid-1800s. In western Massachusetts, beginning in the 1830s, fathers favored wives and daughters over sons as their primary beneficiaries. This finding counters conventional wisdom that nineteenth-century fathers preferred to bequeath property to sons. Fathers' favoring wives and daughters as heirs, plus increasing numbers of “sole and separate” bequests to women, indicates that men protected women with bequests well before the passage of Married Women's Property Acts in the 1840s and 1850s, so this cultural change predated changes in the law. One possible explanation for favoring female beneficiaries is that sons were devaluing themselves as heirs by emigrating, thereby making themselves unavailable for supporting widowed mothers and dependent sisters. Another explanation might be that fathers had already made premortem land grants to sons, reserving only the residue for female heirs. A less quantifiable possibility is that propertied and prudent fathers may have had rising respect for women at a time when men's character issues such as debt and drinking were a target of public concern. “Sole and separate” bequests, which protected married women's property from husbands and husbands' creditors, suggest that men's debt and/or character were primary areas of willmakers' concern. This evidence, along with declining bequests of dower thirds, shows that men challenged socioeconomic traditions to benefit female heirs. If it is true, as Marylynn Salmon asserts, that “control over property is an important baseline for learning how men and women share power in the family,” then testators were engaged in a redistribution of power in western Massachusetts from 1830 to 1860.1 Finally, because women favored female heirs from 1800 to 1860, property women acquired tended to remain in women's hands, and because many women served as moneylenders in small towns where creditors were often individuals, women wielded economic influence behind the scenes. 1Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (1986), xii.

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In 1913, John B. Watson characterized behaviorism as a science that would be useful to "the educator, the physician, the jurist and the businessman." He appealed to the professional interests of may psychologists who may have differed with him theoretically. Behaviorism not only became a new school of psychology, but also demonstrated a means by which the profession of psychology could respond to the needs of a new corporate order. As formulated by Watson, behaviorism denied the existence of consciousness and maintained that only observed behavior was a legitimate object of study. But Watson also insisted that the goal of psychological investigation was the "prediction and control of behavior." Watson belonged to a new generation of professionals who came of age around the turn of the century. This ambitious group found that the very problems created by industrialization also created opportunities for those who could offer solutions to these problems. The notion of control is the underlying theme connecting the growth of science, technology and the emerging professions with the expansion of an urban society. The shift of authority from the family and the church to a bureaucracy of experts that provided social services gave rise to a demand for behavior control to which Watson directed his energies. In 1920, Watson was forced to resign from the psychology department at Johns Hopkins University under a cloud of scandal. He then joined the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York. As an advertising psychologist, he developed market research techniques and directed advertising campaigns. During the 1920s and 1930s, Watson increasingly turned his efforts toward spreading the behaviorist faith to a mass audience. Through an enormous output of books, magazine articles and radio broadcasts he was able to establish himself as an expert on subjects ranging from child rearing to economics. In effect, Watson became the first "pop" psychologist to an expanding middle class. Behaviorism was, above all, a faith in a radical environmentalism which appealed to both reformers and reactionaries. If behaviorism represented the freedom to re-make the individual, it also posed the possibility of directing human activity into pre-determined channels. It was the lattter aspect of behaviorism that Watson chose to emphasize. For, as envisioned by Watson, behaviorism was to serve the authority of those who desired a stable and predictable society.

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This study argues that John Hancock (1737-1793) has never received a proper historical evaluation and as a result his career remains largely misunderstood. Furthermore, in most studies of this period, Hancock is negatively portrayed as a vain, weakwilled, ambitious egotist, lacking ability, insight and purpose. This view is dangerously one sided and fails to give Hancock proper credit for his substantive contributions, especially for his important role in the pre-revolutionary war struggle with Parliament, his evolutionary role in the establishment of the American Presidency, his unheralded services on behalf of the Continental Congress, and his crucial part in securing Massachusetts' ratification of the Federal Constitution. I have sought also to fill in some other important gaps in our understanding of Hancock's life; specifically the sources of his adroit political skills which enabled him to dominate Massachusetts politics for almost two decades; the history of his bitter and continuous rivalry with Samuel Adams; the basis of his political beliefs; and finally some insight into his ambition for popular applause rather than real power. The first three chapters, therefore, explore Hancock's family background, his formal education, and his apprenticeship as a merchant in his uncle Thomas Hancock's counting room. Chapter four examines Hancock's short lived career as a merchant, tracing his attempt to corner the supply of whale oil shipped to England. The failure of this scheme soured him on trade and made possible his transformation from merchant to politician. Chapters five and six examine his rapid emergence as a skilled politician; one whose unerring sense of the public's mind and mood propels him into the forefront of the resistance movement against Parliament's enactments. The "Liberty Affair" adds to his patriotic public image while also broadening the base of his support. In Chapter seven Hancock's activities during the brief lull that existed prior to the tea crisis is examined with particular emphasis placed on his bitter struggle with Sam Adams for leadership of the popular party. His flirtation with the Tories is also examined and interpreted as an attempt on Hancock's part to become the mediator in Massachusetts' highly partisan political arena. In Chapter eight we see him forced to abandon this role as the political struggle gives way to open hostilities. Chapter nine examines Hancock's long unheralded contributions and services on behalf of the Continental Congress. Although he has never received any credit for his part, the energy he invested in his office as President of Congress, began the slow evolutionary process of transforming that office into what eventually emerged as the Executive branch of government under the Federal Constitution. Meanwhile his feud with Sam Adams continued to fester and deepen. Chapter ten explores Hancock's role in Massachusetts politics following his resignation as President of Congress. With great skill he used the controversy over a new state constitution to construct a political following which propelled him into the Governor's seat in a landslide election victory. His hold on the Governorship remained secure until his death. Chapter eleven concludes this study with an examination of Hancock's final public service, his part in securing Massachusetts' ratification of the Federal Constitution. Ironically, soon after his death in 1793, many, if not most of his contributions to his state and country, were quickly forgotten and only his faults as well as his signature on the Declaration of Independence were remembered. Hancock suffered the unfortunate fate of having his enemies and political foes write the subsequent history of his life. They were both unfair and unkind to his memory.

Henry Highland Garnet was perhaps the most influential black American of the nineteenth century. During the course of his sixty-five years, Garnet served as an abolitionist, political activist, educator, African colonizer, and foreign minister. His "Address of the Slaves of the United States,"