abstract: This dissertation examines the history of urban nightlife in New York City and San Francisco from 1890 to 1930 and charts the manifestation of modernity within these cities. While some urbanites tepidly embraced this new modern world, others resisted. Chafing at this seemingly unmoored world, some Americans fretted about one of the most visible effects of modernity on the city—the encroachment of sex onto the street and in commercial amusements—and sought to wield the power of the state to suppress it. Even those Americans who reveled in the new modern world grappled with what this shifting culture ultimately meant for their lives, seeking familiarity where they could find it. Thus, this dissertation details how both Americans who embraced the modern world and those who perceived it as a threatening menace similarly sought a mediated modernity, seeking out and organizing spaces within modern amusements that ultimately reinforced existing cultural hierarchies. Using the lens of spatial analysis, this dissertation examines how different groups of Americans used the spaces of nighttime amusement to interrogate how nightlife culture reflected and reinforced dynamics of power in a historical moment when social movements seemed to be upending existing power structures of race, class, and gender. Pioneering works in the field of the history of popular amusements tend to frame the experience of commercial amusements—and by extension modern life—as a liberating force lifting Americans from the staid traditions of the nineteenth century. But this dissertation charts the way Americans sought to moderate the effects of modern life, even as they delighted in it. Even as the modern world seemed on the cusp of overturning social hierarchy, Americans found comfort in amusements that structured space to reaffirm the status quo; while so much of the modern world appeared to break with the past, existing structures of social power remained very much the same. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2018

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<p> Mammoth Cave in Kentucky is the longest known cave in the world. This dissertation examines the history of how scientists and non-scientists alike contributed to a growing body of knowledge about Mammoth Cave and how that knowledge in turn affected land use decisions in the surrounding neighborhood. During the nineteenth century visitors traveled through Mammoth Cave along with their guides, gaining knowledge of the cave by using their senses and spreading that knowledge through travel narratives. After the Civil War, cave guides, now free men who chose to stay in the neighborhood, used the cave as a way to build and support their community. New technologies and new visitors reconstructed the Mammoth Cave experience. Competing knowledge of locals and science-minded individuals, new technologies to spread the cave experience, and a growing tourism industry in America spurred the Kentucky Cave Wars during the late-nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, cutthroat competition between caves crystallized support for a national park at Mammoth Cave. Park promoters met resistance. Cave owners&rsquo; knowledge of what they owned underground helped them resist condemnation. Those affected by the coming of the national park made their protests known on the landscape, in newspapers, and in courtrooms. The introduction of New Deal workers, primarily the Civilian Conservation Corps, at Mammoth Cave and a skeleton staff of National Park Service officials faced antagonism from the local community. Important discoveries inside Mammoth Cave hastened the park&rsquo;s creation, but not without lingering bitterness that would affect later preservation efforts. The inability of the park promoters to acquire two caves around Mammoth Cave was a failure for the national park campaign but a boon for exploration. The postwar period saw returning veterans and their families swarming national parks. While the parking lots at Mammoth Cave grew crowded and the Park Service attempted to balance preservation and development for the enjoyment of the visiting public, underground explorers were pushing the cave&rsquo;s known extent to new lengths. This new knowledge inspired a new generation of environmentalists and preservationists to use the Wilderness Act to advocate for a cave wilderness designation at Mammoth Cave National Park.</p><p>

<p> The labor movement&rsquo;s groundswell in the 1990s accompanied a period of intense competition and conglomeration within the retail book sector. Unexpectedly, the intersection of these two trends produced two dozen union drives across the country between 1996 and 2004 at large retail bookstores, including Borders and Barnes &amp; Noble. Historians have yet to fully examine these retail organizing contests or recount their contributions to the labor movement and its history, including booksellers&rsquo; pioneering use of the internet as an organizing tool. This thesis focuses on the aspirations, tactics, and contributions of booksellers in their struggles to unionize their workplaces, while also exploring the economic context surrounding bookselling and the labor movement at the end of the twentieth century. While the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) auspiciously announced a national campaign in 1997 to organize thousands of bookstore clerks, the only successfully unionized bookstore from this era that remains today is the Powell&rsquo;s Books chain in Portland, Oregon with over 400 workers represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 5. </p><p> Local 5&rsquo;s successful union campaign at Powell&rsquo;s Books occurring between 1998 and 2000 is at the center of this study and stands out as a point of light against a dark backdrop of failed union attempts in the retail sector during the latter decades of the twentieth century. This inquiry utilizes Local 5&rsquo;s internal document archive and the collection of oral histories gathered by labor historians Edward Beechert and Harvey Schwartz in 2001 and 2002. My analysis of these previously unexamined records demonstrates how Powell&rsquo;s efforts to thwart the ILWU campaign proved a decisive failure and contributed to the polarization of a super majority of the workforce behind Local 5. Equally, my analysis illustrates how the self-organization, initiative, and unrelenting creativity of booksellers transformed a narrow union election victory to overwhelming support for the union&rsquo;s bargaining committee. Paramount to Local 5&rsquo;s contract success was the union&rsquo;s partnership with Portland&rsquo;s social justice community, which induced a social movement around Powell&rsquo;s Books at a time of increased political activity and unity among the nation&rsquo;s labor, environment, and anti-globalization activists. The bonds of solidarity and mutual aid between Local 5 and its community allies were forged during the World Trade Organization (WTO) demonstrations in Seattle in 1999 and Portland&rsquo;s revival of May Day in 2000. Following eleven work stoppages and fifty-three bargaining sessions, the union acquired a first contract that far exceeded any gains made by the UFCW at its unionized bookstores. The Powell&rsquo;s agreement included improvements to existing health and retirement benefits plus an 18 percent wage increase for employees over three years. </p><p> This analysis brings to light the formation of a distinct working-class culture and consciousness among Powell&rsquo;s booksellers, communicated through workers&rsquo; essays, artwork, strikes, and solidarity actions with the social justice community. It provides a detailed account of Local 5&rsquo;s creative street theater tactics and work stoppages that captured the imagination of activists and the attention of the broader community. The conflict forced the news media and community leaders to publicly choose sides in a labor dispute reminiscent of struggles not seen in Portland since the 1950s. Observers of all political walks worried that the Portland cultural and commercial intuition would collapse under the weight of the two-year labor contest. My research illustrates the tension among the city&rsquo;s liberal and progressive populace created by the upstart union&rsquo;s presence at prominent liberal civic leader Michael Powell&rsquo;s iconic store and how the union organized prominent liberal leaders on the side of their cause. It concludes by recognizing that Local 5&rsquo;s complete history remains a work in progress, but that its formation represents an indispensable Portland contribution to the revitalized national labor movement of the late 1990s.</p><p>

<p> After the Civil War, pro-woman organizations flourished in the United States as local activists responded to a broad analysis of the causes and consequences of women&rsquo;s limitations in education, employment and civic life. This dissertation introduces the concept of "exalted womanhood" to encompass the widespread, if somewhat vague, belief that women&rsquo;s lives could be improved by transcending these limits. It argues that the proliferation of grassroots organizations and national networks was a self-consciously feminist strategy to elevate the status of women&mdash;efforts that went well beyond the suffrage movement during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. For many women, pro-woman work offered unprecedented opportunities for self-development, social prominence, and political involvement. </p><p> This study is set in Worcester, Massachusetts, a mid-sized industrial city in New England, that served as the site of the first two national woman&rsquo;s rights conventions in 1850 and 1851. Local memory of these events remained strong throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and helped sustain a complex feminist landscape. More specifically, the pro-woman activism in Worcester demonstrates how the broad agenda of the antebellum woman&rsquo;s rights movement splintered but continued to thrive in the post-Civil War era, as suffrage organizations, the Worcester Woman&rsquo;s Club and the Young Women&rsquo;s Christian Association emphasized different aspects of an earlier agenda. </p><p> In addition, the examination of pro-woman organizations in one urban community provides a new window into well-studied national networks. Local groups, working together however haphazardly created regional and national umbrella organizations including the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the General Federation of Women&rsquo;s Clubs, and the International Board of the Young Women&rsquo;s Christian Association. The motivating force of exalted womanhood resulted in the establishment of a vast feminist network connecting organized women from every corner of the country. The local created the national, not the other way around.</p><p>

In 1930, the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham proclaimed the arrival of "dance as an art of and from America." Doris Humphrey, Ted Shawn, Katherine Dunham, and Helen Tamiris joined Graham in shaping a new art form: modern dance. Confrontational and experimental, modern dancers questioned their own roles in society, the role of art in America, and the place of America in the world. This dissertation is about how modern dance developed in the midst of debates about national identity. In the wave of cultural nationalism of the 1930s, modern dancers attacked ballet because of its elitist roots in European courts. Influenced by communist and socialist politics, they danced in bare feet, with unadorned costumes, and privileged individual expression and portrayals of abstract concepts over fairytale narratives and escapist entertainment. White women (many of whom were Jewish), gay men, and some African American men and women populated modern dance. Separate chapters explore how each of these groups negotiated what it meant to be an American through dance. Challenges to gender, sexual, racial, and class norms coalesced in idealized visions of American democracy and pluralism such as Graham's 1938 "American Document." Dancing American heretics, pioneers, and workers toppled corps of European swans, sylphs, and snowflakes. The convergence of these marginalized groups in modern dance demonstrates the critical role that social identities played in this movement of cultural nationalism. Modern dancers found in dance the medium through which they could explore what set them apart from the white male so often depicted as the consummate expression of American individualism: their bodies. The case of modern dance highlights the interplay of different identities--as women, Jews, or African Americans--that undercut a unified national identity. In this art form that attracted physically distinct groups of people, those distinctions, particularly of race, fractured ideas of a national culture. In the wake of World War II, Merce Cunningham led a new phase of modern dance that rejected nationalist themes and social purpose. In dancing America, modern dancers exposed the physical and social dimensions of nationalist beliefs in 1930s and 1940s American society.

In 1854, acting as a federal commissioner under the Fugitive Slave Law, Suffolk County probate judge Edward Greeley Loring returned the alleged runaway Anthony Burns to slavery. In protest, antislavery activists petitioned legislators to exercise a little-used power to demand that the next governor remove Loring from state office. For three years, Know-Nothing governor Henry J. Gardner refused to do so, and Republican Nathaniel P. Banks removed the judge in 1858 with considerable reluctance. For both men, and for their parties, Loring's ordeal had ideological significance beyond his personal fate. This dissertation traces this significance to a lasting debate between conservatives and radical reformers over the principle of judicial independence from popular influences. Advocacy of elections for judges and other reforms went back to the Jeffersonian era, but antislavery activists took up the theme to protest judicial submission to the 1850 fugitive law. They joined earlier critics who condemned the state judiciary as a self-serving clique. Loring, who owed his position to family, social, and political ties, made an exemplary villain despite his efforts to show objective fairness during the Burns trial. Radicals demanded his removal in the name of popular moral sovereignty, while conservatives defended him in the interest of judicial independence. The radical implications of removal were somewhat muted by the Personal Liberty Law of 1855, which lent the campaign some statutory authority. The states-rights aspect of the controversy, however, remained divisive even after Republican victories made the judge's fall a reasonable certainty. The final debates over Loring in 1858 exposed a continuing conflict between conservatives and radicals within the Republican party that had already hindered its early development. Loring's story as a whole illustrates the enduring significance of Jackson-era reform politics beyond the acknowledged demise of the Jacksonian party system.

This is a social and legal history of the role played by Vermont's courts in regulating sexual activity during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It relies on a quantitative and qualitative review of civil and criminal cases brought and disposed of in four of Vermont's county courts, as well as the decisions of Vermont's Supreme Court. Unlike urban areas that developed alternative administrative centers of regulatory power, Vermont's rural county courts were its most important site of sexual discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Civil suits were brought by and on behalf of women and girls for sexual defamation, sexual assault, breach of promise to marry, and bastardy, along with suits brought by fathers resulting from their daughters' seduction. Such suits had high success rates and awarded large monetary damages. Judges and juries focused more on the harm caused by uncontrolled male sexuality than on female moral transgressions. Men were on notice that they would be punished for violating sexual norms, including unwanted sexual advances. This study also examines how prosecutors, judges, and juries dealt with criminal sexual offenses such as adultery and forcible and statutory rape. Supreme Court decisions liberalizing the evidentiary requirements for a conviction coupled with concerns about a surging divorce rate and flagging morality led to a dramatic increase in adultery prosecutions after the Civil War. The state imprisoned hundreds of men and women for this offense. In forcible rape cases, courts allowed evidence of prior sexual acts on the part of the alleged victim to be used to impeach her credibility on the question of consent, but they also made clear that the question of consent depended on the woman's perspective. A man's perception that the sexual advance was welcome carried little weight. The state also raised the age of consent from eleven to fourteen (1886) and then sixteen (1898), leading to a surge in statutory rape prosecutions. As with forcible rape cases, guilty verdicts were obtained in a large majority of cases. And as with civil cases, judges and juries punished men for failing to control their sexual impulses.

The Connecticut River Valley (CRV) industrialized early, yet lacked nearly all of the factors that apparently underlay the successful industrialization of eastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island and the Philadelphia region. Lamoreaux's model of bank insider lending was applied to explain this enigma. According to this model, since many insiders were industrialists, extensive insider lending among New England banks resulted in a flow of funds to manufacturing. To test this hypothesis, a random sample of borrowers from two commercial banks and a complete sample from two savings banks was culled from bank loan ledgers. Federal and state censuses town histories were used to determine occupations of the borrowers and the nature of the businesses that borrowed. The data was analyzed to determine the extent of bank lending to Insiders, and to manufacturers and artisans. Contrary to Lamoreaux's model, little insider lending was found, and the insiders were not industrialists. Individual banks lent only modest amounts to manufacturers and artisans, and bank lending was a very small source of industry capital. The largest recipients of bank credit, as a percent of bank loans, were the local elites of lawyers, followed by merchants and farmers. Loans to individual farmers were typically small, however. Loans to industries and artisans went to a wide variety of industries and firm types. While commercial banks lent short term, the savings banks lent long term, noticeably to railroads. These results suggest that access to credit was a factor that shaped the unique pathway to both rising Industrialism and capitalism in the CRV during the antebellum period.

This dissertation examines the political, social, and aesthetic purposes that building and buildings served in the early American republic by exploring post-revolutionary politics, society, and architecture in a single community: Boston from 1783–1803. Its main chronological narrative traces the process by which younger members of the Federalist elite, frustrated with post-war developments that prevented them from claiming political and social power, came to remake the town in an English-influenced style and why other stylistic influences (especially those from France) were de-emphasized. The argument is that younger Federalists used building and buildings to gain hegemonic control of post-revolutionary politics and society, quell the radicalism of the American Revolution, and communicate their elite status in a supposedly classless society by fundamentally altering the physical and built environment of the early republic town. Rather than a celebration of revolutionary-era republicanism, then, the building projects undertaken by young Federalists were actually un-republican attempts to create visible distinctions between classes, bring voters into dependent relationships with them, and re-establish an elite-led political and social order that the American Revolution temporarily interrupted. Thus, it explores the ways in which architecture and building were embraced, eschewed, and harnessed in response to and in an effort to shape politics and society. Fusing political, social, and economic with architectural and building history, this study combines documentary and material culture evidence to contribute to an ongoing effort to use material culture to advance historical inquiry and reveal previously under-explored territory. Consequently, sources include traditional documentary sources as well as the most important buildings erected or enlarged in Boston between 1787 and 1807, including: the Hollis Street Meeting House, the Massachusetts State House, the houses of Harrison Gray Otis, India Wharf, Holy Cross Cathedral, the Tontine Crescent, and Faneuil Hall. While offering a new interpretation of post-revolutionary building, this study also offers a different view of Charles Bulfinch, Boston's first native architect, as it casts him not as the main agent of change to the post-revolutionary Boston built environment, but more as a dependent cog in a larger process that remade Boston in the first decades of the republic.