This dissertation examines the local dimension of suffrage in the United States. The U.S. has a hyper-federalized system of election administration, in which county and municipal officials and institutions continue to play important roles, and I demonstrate that a systematic analysis and appreciation of these suffrage practices enhances our understanding of voting rights and American political development. The dissertation makes theoretical, historical, and normative contributions to our ideas about American voting. First, I argue that conceiving suffrage as a practice, rather than merely a formal right or an instrumental behavior, produces a more rich understanding of what Americans actually do at the polls. Historically, I show that prominent roles for local officials and a great deal of variation in voting practices at the county or municipal level have always been components of American suffrage. Such variation—which is today often treated as a scandal or, at best, an historical accident to be rectified—is in important ways a product of purposeful state action, and is closely connected to American ideas about popular sovereignty and the state. Normatively, I emphasize the redemptive aspects of the local character of American suffrage, challenging what seems to be the prevailing bias today against things local. I contend not only that local administration of elections is deeply rooted in U.S. history and thought, but also that local administration has at times been an important engine of inclusion, expanding the bounds of suffrage before state and federal law did so. Americans have always voted together in our communities, and have done so for reasons rooted in our fundamental political traditions.

After providing a survey of related literature and of Protestant antecedents in Colombia during the colonial and early national periods, the dissertation examines the expansion of foreign missions in Colombia during the early twentieth century. The main body of the work describes various aspects of Protestant life after 1930, including life stages, self-image, construction of community, and societal responses. Although many Colombians reacted adversely to Protestants, a general atmosphere of tolerance is evident. Protestants suffered greatly during the mid-century Violence, but not to an unusual extent in comparison to Colombians in general. However, the Protestants' oppositional religious identity and their sense of vulnerability during that period made their psychological experience of the Violence somewhat unusual. Through the end of the twentieth century, Protestantism provided an oppositional space in which many Colombians found a sense of security, empowerment and optimism in the face of tremendous challenges in a violent land.

Beginning in the early nineteenth century, American jurisprudence grappled with the issue of marital property. States under the Anglo-American legal tradition of common law revised marital property allocations to allow wives to hold certain categories of property separate from their husbands. These changes were enacted, in part, to insulate a wife’s property from the vagaries of the market but the judicial response reveals a larger narrative of ambivalence and anxiety about women, property, and the suggested mobility of separately held possessions. Marital property reform begins in an historical moment when the question of what a woman could own in marriage morphed into larger cultural anxieties such as the very meaning of ownership and “things” themselves in the face of new intangible properties. Writers of fiction also captured these anxieties, and created imagined scenarios of marriage and property to expose constructions of ownership, property, womanhood, and marriage. Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening attempts her withdrawal from her marriage by dismantling the Pontellier home and removing what she believes she owns to a separate physical space. The tragedy of her story can be understood for its legal impossibility under common law, as well as the restricted meanings of marriage and separate property under Louisiana’s civil law jurisdiction. At the end of Edith Wharton’s Summer, Charity Royall chooses to secretly reclaim a brooch that was a gift from her lover. Her action suggests a desire for privacy and could be viewed as fraudulent to her marriage vows. Pauline Hopkins’s character Hagar in Hagar’s Daughter repossesses material spaces which she was forbidden to own and control because of her race and gender, and uses the American justice system to support her claims to ownership and contractual rights. In contrast to Hopkins’s tenuous but nonetheless optimistic portrayal of contract, Marìa Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel Who Would Have Thought It? describes contract and the American legal system overall as empty promises. Marriage and property in Ruiz de Burton’s novel work as tropes through which to critique nineteenth-century American society and the destructive force of capitalism within its most intimate spaces.

This dissertation examines the memory of Ras Beirut and the various claims to its exceptionalism. I frame its history as a landscape of memory born of the convergence of narratives of exceptionalism. On the one hand, Ras Beirut's landscape inspired Anglo-American missionary future providence such that they chose it as the site of their college on a hill, the Syrian Protestant College (SPC, later renamed the American University of Beirut [AUB]). On the other hand, the memory of Ras Beirut's "golden age" before the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 inspired longings for a vanished past to Ras Beirut's oldest inhabitants. Shaped by the push of prospect and the pull of recollection, Ras Beirut emerges as a place formed out of the contest of these overlapping articulations of exceptionalism. Moreover, Ras Beirut's narratives have a wider significance and application in their transnational and interconfessional relevance. The missionary New England microcosm of the SPC represented the transnational transposition of memory onto Ras Beirut in an architectural narrative of exceptionalism. The monumental size and scale of their buildings oriented Ras Beirut and realized a "city upon a hill." Drawing from letters written to and from the US, I examine their ambiguous relationship to Ras Beirut that made them both part of the place and apart from the people. At the same time, the local Muslim-Christian community of Ras Beirut argued that Ras Beirut's distinct character rested on their own history of harmonious coexistence. In the early twentieth century, Arab Protestant converts settled in Ras Beirut and became known as the Protestants of Ras Beirut in their affixed identity and collective rootedness to place. This dissertation draws upon archival research and tangible sources in the changing architectural and urban environment. It also relies on oral history and memory to capture the multi-disciplinary making of place that best relates the textured history of Ras Beirut while giving meaning to everyday lived lives. In the process, the connections between the Middle East and the US unfold in transnational terms while the idea of Ras Beirut as a paradigm of coexistence unfolds interconfessional terms.

Black communities located in cities across the country became sites of explosive political unrest during the mid-1960s. These uprisings coincided with a period of intensified political activity among African Americans nationally, and played a decisive role in expanding national concern with black political struggle from a singular focus on the Civil Rights movement led by black southerners to consider the "race problem" clearly present in the cities of the North and West. Moreover, unrest within urban black communities emerged at a time when alternate political analyses of the relationship between black people and the American state that challenged the goal of integration and presented different visions of black freedom and identity were gaining considerable traction. The most receptive audience for these radical and nationalist critiques was found among black students and cadres of militant, young black people living in cities who insisted on the right to self determination for black people, and advocated liberation through revolution and the application of black power to secure control over their communities as the most appropriate goal of black political struggle. The following study examines grassroots political organizations formed by black people in Cleveland, Ohio during the early 1960s in order to analyze the development of the tactics, strategies, and ideologies that became hallmarks of Black Power by the end of the decade. These developments are understood within the context of ongoing political struggle, and particular attention is paid to the machinations of the multifaceted system of racial oppression that shaped the conditions against which black Clevelanders fought. This struggle, initially aimed at securing unrestricted employment, housing, and educational opportunities for black people, and curtailing episodes of police brutality against them, culminated in five days of unrest during July 1966. The actions of city officials, especially the Mayor and members of the Cleveland Police Department, during the Hough uprising clarified the nature of black oppression in Cleveland, thereby illuminating the need for and uses of both the formal political power of the ballot, as well as the power of the bullet to defend black people and communities through the force of arms.

Anemia in prehistory remains a “paleopathological riddle”. The problems in diagnosis and interpretation are not surprising since anemia continues to be an issue of concern in contemporary populations. The word “anemia” is derived from the Greek, anaimia, meaning bloodlessness, and is a pathological condition in which the blood is deficient in red blood cells, in hemoglobin, or in total volume. Despite over one hundred years of research on the various forms of anemia, health care professionals, public health officials, and anthropologists continue to be unsure of the precise characteristics and nature of skeletal manifestations of anemia. Further complicating the issue is the apparent correlation of anemia(s) with many other pathological conditions. Infectious pathogens are particularly confounding, because they have a symbiotic relationship with the hosts, and are as ubiquitous, in many respects, as the anemias. This study reviews the history of the interpretation of skeletal lesions indicative of anemia and infection, with particular focus on recent scientific debates that interpret anemia as a positive factor. In this interpretation, instead of evaluating illness, lesions are construed as markers of “health”, and anemia is ultimately characterized as an adaptive response to prevent or diminish the activity or vigor of infections. In my study, 96 individuals from three prehistoric sites in Tuscaloosa and Wilcox counties in Alabama are analyzed for standard markers of anemia and infection. An alternative method of analysis that employs visual representation of macroscopic, descriptive analysis and an expanded repertoire of skeletal markers of hypervascular activity in cranial and postcranial elements is proposed and subsequently applied to the sample of individuals. Cranial asymmetry is presented as a marker of metabolic distress when associated with other indicators such as porotic hyperostosis. In the final phase of analysis and interpretation, anemia is reviewed within an “adaptive” framework. It is concluded that a much more detailed analysis is required for studies of anemia and infection. It is also concluded that rather than contributing to the adaptive fitness of the population, anemia is more likely an indication of physiological exhaustion and metabolic failure in most instances. Furthermore, skeletal lesions associated with anemia and infection are not well suited to questions of adaptation. This is because of two important points. The first is that skeletal lesions on postcranial elements in children less than five years of age may be caused by either infection or anemia or both together, and are virtually indistinguishable in many cases. The second problem is that while cranial lesions result from childhood bouts of anemia, lesions associated with infection can occur throughout ones life. In older individuals in whom there is evidence of healing or remodeling, there is no way to determine whether the anemia and infection occurred simultaneously or as separate events. Anemia is not a true pathology. It is an abnormal physiological condition that can be symptomatic of many diseases, and can occur in tandem with these diseases. This study shows that a more synthetic approach is required in order to reveal cause and correlation relationships among indicators of metabolic discord and infectious disease, as well as many other pathological conditions.

In this dissertation, I explore the relationship between legal theory and legal practice. My focus is on the response of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American jurisprudence to a perceived crisis in American legal doctrine, a crisis that threatened to undermine the legitimacy and authority of the American legal profession. Uncertainty and complexity in the law were dominant characterizations of this historical moment, more generally understood as a time of rapid social and economic growth, producing a sense of chaos and fragmentation. I read formalism and realism (both broadly construed) as forms of legal modernism which provide alternative discourses of professional authority, emerging not necessarily as reactions to one another so much as to the perceived problems of expertise entailed by such historical transformations. My principal aim is to explore and articulate those dimensions of modernist legal thought which serve as the foundation for this new juridical discourse of professional authority, and to suggest some of the possible implications of failing to look at the early tradition of realist jurisprudence from this perspective. In this sense, I seek to lay the foundation for a more general critique and reconstruction of this tradition.

This dissertation examines the lives of indigenous women in early colonial Peru, residents of the cities of Lima and Trujillo as well as nearby rural regions, between 1532 and 1700. It does so by interweaving two major thematic concerns. On one level, it includes historical investigations, based upon archival records (in particular some two hundred indigenous women's wills from these two cities), into the multiplicity of economic, political and social roles that made up women's daily lives. Their possessions, occupations, values, social networks and strategies for survival are compared, discussed and placed in historical context, without inappropriately generalizing or universalizing their experiences. On another interconnected level, the dissertation examines the hybridity of colonial relations, taking the cultures and institutions of colonial society as fields of contestation and power and investigating them genealogically. By counterpointing chronicles of conquest, notarial documents, and legal and bureaucratic records, the work develops a strategy for reading colonial history that is not predicated upon a neat but false distinction between “European” and “traditional” societies. The contribution of this dissertation is thus not only a rich base of information about colonial women but also the expectation that any such investigation must be creative and open-ended. The five chapters include analyses of the political causes and effects of representations of prehispanic indigenous society in the chronicles of conquest and early histories of Peru; the role of weaving and the development of a gendered division of labor in the colonial economy; urban women's economic roles and networks according to their wills; the cultural significance of their possessions, especially indigenous and European-style clothing; legal and extra-legal strategies regarding property and inheritance; and a genealogy of the “cacica,” indigenous women who held elite office during the colonial period via their claim to continuity with prehispanic political traditions.

I place the political career of one woman through an examination of her public rhetoric. Frances Perkins served as Secretary of Labor for twelve years, an accomplishment more impressive than that of being the first woman to serve in this post. I examine her career as the Secretary of Labor (1933-1945) in terms of selected portions of the speeches she delivered, articles and full-length works she published, and the legislation she helped to enact. To establish the characteristics of Frances Perkins's arguments, it is important to discuss the individuals who influenced her and how she interacted with them. The list includes: Professors Annah May Soule and Simon N. Patten; photojournalist Jacob A. Riis; politicians Timothy D. Sullivan, Alfred E. Smith, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt; social reformer Florence Kelley; and Democratic Party organizer Mary W. Dewson. The terms that frame the study are: (1) placement, drawing upon the Greek notion of topoi, that is, the place one goes to find arguments; (2) public; and (3) memory. The questions about Frances Perkins that most intrigue me are about: (1) the nature of the arguments she discovered which then inspired her to choose and sustain a long political career; (2) the way she developed her public persona; and (3) ways the accomplishments of admirable political women from the past can be woven into the fabric of time that is history. The following views of particular theorists dominate the theoretical framework of the study: (1) Kenneth Burke's notions of terministic screens and creative circumferencing; (2) Ernesto Grassi's belief in ingenium, "the source of the creative activity of topics"; (3) Lucy F. Townsend's concentric circle approach to the writing of biography; and (4) Carolyn G. Heilbrun's appeal to scholars to tell heroic tales of women. A topical philosophical view, informed by feminist criticism, maintains that logic and imagination are inseparable, that first principles precede deduction. Sophocles's Antigone is utilized to explicate this belief and to highlight the guiding principle in Frances Perkins's career--maintaining a balance between the needs of the individual and the needs of the state.

Born January 8, 1809, George Luther Stearns was from an old New England family. His father's death forced him to enter the business world at an early age. He rose from a clerk to a linseed oil manufacturer for the shipbuilders of his native Medford, Massachusetts. Later, the lead pipe factory he started solidified his wealth and standing in the manufacturing community. A conservative businessman, Stearns kept half his earnings in gold. From the Compromise of 1850 on, Stearns became increasingly active in antislavery efforts and involved with the Concord literati, including Emerson and Alcott. With slowness of speech, Stearns preferred working behind the scenes, allowing his money to speak for him. Although he did not join radical antislavery groups and other reform movements, in the cause of Kansas, he used his managerial skills effectively, eventually becoming chairman of the Massachusetts State Kansas Aid Committee. About this time, Stearns met John Brown, became involved with his commitment to free blacks in America, and emerged as chief financial backer for Brown's Harper's Ferry plan. After this episode, Stearns helped organize the Emancipation League and recruited the 54th and 55th Massachusetts. His success led Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to ask him to recruit blacks for the Union armies. As Assistant Adjutant-General for the Recruitment of Colored Troops, Major Stearns was most productive in Nashville, Tennessee, where he met Andrew Johnson. Sympathetic to the plight of "Contraband," Stearns also organized hospitals and schools, stopped impressment, and organized Unionists into a lobby for the emancipation of slaves in their state. Sensitive and quick-tempered, Stearns ran afoul of Stanton and resigned. He then channeled his energy into a civil rights movement and organized the Impartial Suffrage Association. After the Civil War, Stearns continued his efforts on behalf of blacks, sending out pamphlets and publishing a paper, The Right Way, to advance the cause. Finally his strength gave way, and Stearns, who suffered from bronchial problems, died of pneumonia in New York in April 1867.