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This dissertation is a study of free African American politics, in the cities of Baltimore and Philadelphia, between 1817 and 1863. At the heart of this black politics were efforts to assert the right of free African Americans to citizenship in their native United States. Claims on the ambiguous notion of citizenship were important to free blacks both as a means of improving their own lives and as a way to combat slavery. The dissertation begins with the organized black protest against the founding of the American Colonization Society. The contest over the notion, advanced by the ACS, that free blacks were not truly American, or that they could not ever be citizens in the land of their birth, powerfully shaped the language and tactics of black politics. The dissertation ends with the enlistment of black troops in the Civil War, a development which powerfully shaped subsequent arguments for full black citizenship. It argues that in this period, free African Americans developed a rhetorical language of black nativism, the assertion that birth on American soil and the contribution of one's ancestors to the American nation, had won for African Americans the right to be citizens of the United States. This assertion was made even more resonant by the increasing levels of white immigration during this period; African Americans pointed to the injustice of granting to white immigrants that which was denied to native born blacks. This discourse of nativism served as a means of weaving the fight for black citizenship into the fabric of American politics. The dissertation also argues that the cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore were part of a distinctive borderland where the issues of slavery and black citizenship were particularly explosive, and where free African Americans, therefore, found themselves with significant political leverage. / History

This paper seeks to understand how the Seventeenth-century Lenape Indians were pushed off their Delaware River land by Europeans, starting with the so-called good colonists: the Swedes and Finns. From the time of earliest Lenape and European contact in the 1630’s through mid-century, the Lenape held power in their homeland, Lenapewhittuck, along the Delaware River. By 1700, English colonizers had succeeded in removing many Lenape from this area. A closer examination of this period reveals how the Swedes and Finns of New Sweden who in some current historiographies are promoted as ‘good colonizers,’ were anything but as they acted in their own self-interest through their focus on daily survival and individual land acquisition around the Delaware River. Their presence created conditions that attracted increased numbers of European colonizers to the area, and these colonizers through the creation of a market in land pushed the Lenape away from their homeland. Recent historiography has revealed how the Seventeenth-century Lenape Indians were a powerful group who controlled their land. By understanding the Lenape in this way, Swedish and Dutch accounts of Indian and European violence and peacemaking coalesce to reveal Lenape power in the region. ‘Seeing’ Lenape power reveals how the creation of a European land market along the Delaware was key in tipping this balance in power that ensured Lenape departure. Swedish and Finnish possession of the area, when combined with the ability to securely own the land one farmed and pass that land to heirs, invited increasing numbers of settler colonists into the area. Translated land treaties made between the Lenape, the Dutch, and the Swedes and later English land survey deeds provide evidence of the establishment of a market in land along the Delaware River. Court records from the 1650’s recorded land transactions that demonstrate the incursion of individual European settler colonists through a newly established economic condition: individual land ownership. As more Europeans entered the area to possess land through their understanding of land use, these individual settler colonists challenged former Lenape land ‘sale’ treaty terms that had included the condition of shared usufruct rights. Overtime, this understanding changed as European land owners grew to regard their possession of land as ownership, to the exclusion of other Europeans and the Lenape. / History

My dissertation examines the history of gasoline retailing in the United States from just after 1910 to 1999. Primarily focused on retailers, I argue that the imperceptibility of gasoline at the point of purchase produced a system of “sensory retailing” in which retailers had to engage to sell and profit from their operations. I contend the sensorium became a marketplace whereby sensory perception produced emotions on which economic decisions were based. I call this system “neurocapitalism.” This began in the early 1920s following unsuccessful experiments with the visibility of gasoline as a sales technique. Over time, marketers relied more and more on sensory appeal which shifted their focus further away from gasoline which itself could never produce satisfactory profit. As retailers refined the sensory retailing method, they learned how three major objects at the gas station—the sign, the pump, and the building—all worked together as a single function. This system, I show, controlled, but was also influenced by, the sensorium. By developing and relying upon this system, marketers struggled to handle contradictions of having to advertise their sites, services, and products as places which at once provided emotional relief and further anxiety for customers. In working out this contradiction, gasoline retailers slowly began to view the automobile and the customer in the same way, and appealed to both with the same marketing techniques. By placing objects at the center of my method, I use anthropological and material culture ideas to show that people and objects have similar, often equal, agency in the making of consumption and should be seen as one explanatory actor. I posit that the meaning of one of America’s most frequent transactions was derived from processes driven by, and in, the sensorium. As such, my analysis suggests American capitalism is driven as much at the neurological level as it is at the economic level. / History

“Banking, Law, and American Liberalism: The Rise and Regulation of Bank Holding Companies in the Twentieth Century” excavates the history of the bank holding company, a corporation that owns or controls one or more United States banks, and the movement to prevent its monopolistic expansion in the twentieth century. Utilizing the battle for bank holding company reform as a lens through which to trace the development of antimonopoly law and policy, this dissertation argues that banking played a generative role in the origins and endurance of the American antimonopoly tradition. That tradition, it contends, neither began in the late nineteenth century with the advent of antitrust laws nor comprised a singular modality of reform. From the public provision of currency and credit to delegating and dispersing the privilege of money creation, from central banking to public utility regulation, antimonopolists pioneered differing methods and legal tools to combat the concentration of financial power. By the dawn of the twentieth century, powerful antimonopoly impulses had contributed to the entrenchment of a decentralized banking system comprised of predominantly small, local banks largely prohibited from expanding geographically or engaging in commercial business. The emergence of the holding company as a means of concentrating capital and control in the Gilded Age therefore served as an invaluable mechanism for evading the regulatory constraints of federal and state banking law. Through a bank holding company, enterprising bankers could acquire the stock of innumerable banks and businesses despite restrictions on branch banking and mixing banking and commerce. Though early efforts to prevent the use of the bank holding company device to escape regulation arose in the first decades of the twentieth century, they were largely ineffective. Rather, a wide-ranging and potent antimonopoly movement premised upon the danger bank holding companies posed to American democracy succeeded only in the aftermath of World War II. Culminating in the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956, the movement for bank holding company reform represents a pivotal, yet virtually unacknowledged, chapter of the American antimonopoly tradition. Challenging longstanding narratives of political economy that portray World War II as the “end of reform” and the antitrust movement as a faded passion, this dissertation argues that antimonopoly ideals survived long after their supposed demise and continued to structure national policymaking well into the postwar decades. Tracing the rise and regulation of bank holding companies ultimately reveals the complexity, breadth, and remarkable resiliency of American antimonopoly law and policy as it evolved across centuries. / 2027-11-30T00:00:00Z