<p> Archaeological excavations by the Proyecto Arqueol&oacute;gico-Paleoetnobot&aacute;nico R&iacute;o Jama (PAPRJ) in the Jama River Valley of northern Manab&iacute;, Ecuador, have established a cultural chronology spanning over three millennia of prehispanic occupation. One of these occupations, the Tabuchila Complex of the Late Formative Period (1000 &ndash; 500 BCE), remains poorly understood. Excavations at three sites in the Jama Valley in the 1990s recovered ceramic, lithic, obsidian, paleobotanical, archaeofaunal, and human skeletal remains from Late Formative Tabuchila contexts, with the goal of orienting Late Formative occupation of the northern Manab&iacute; region to its contemporaries in western lowland Ecuador. </p><p> This study employs modal ceramic analysis to recognize and catalogue formal and stylistic variation within the recovered Tabuchila ceramic assemblage. Through this analysis the Tabuchila assemblage is compared to other studies of Late Formative Chorrera assemblages to understand how Tabuchila represented a regional variant of and contributor to the formation of the Chorrera ceramic tradition. In addition, a sovereignty-based theoretical approach explores how this ceramic assemblage reflects deeper processes of emergent social complexity and early attempts at establishing inequality in northern Manab&iacute;&rsquo;s regional mound center of San Isidro. Results and discussions of the analysis examine a community connected with its Middle and Late Formative contemporaries across the western lowlands and engaged in feasting activity in the vicinity of the central mound of San Isidro.</p>

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A look at the genre of American literary history, as well as at the careers of four nineteenth-century writers, this neo-Marxist study treats the lives and works of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth and Richard Stoddard through the productive circumstances of their writing, and through our expectations as consumers of their personalities and texts. Typically, Whitman and Dickinson are recognized as creative individualists who defied the literary and social conventions of their time, while the Stoddards---when they are recognized at all---are remembered in less daring terms. Many critics today regard Elizabeth Stoddard's first novel, The Morgesons, as an unsentimental exploration of sexuality and an innovative foray into realism. Even so, these critics tend to see the radical potential of the novel as compromised by its flawed form, often considered an unsophisticated melding of domestic and realist fiction, and by the failure of Stoddard's subsequent works to build on The Morgesons' critique of middle-class womanhood. Richard Henry Stoddard, meanwhile, is seen as an unremarkable adherent to the genteel tradition, a chapter in American literary history now regarded as stagnantly establishmentarian and conformist. By contrast, Whitman and Dickinson stand forth as the artistic embodiments of personal freedom and innovation.;Close examination of the careers of Whitman and Dickinson (posthumous, in the case of Dickinson) reveals, however, that these celebrated individualists were not as removed from social determinations of identity as their personas suggest, and that their differences from the Stoddards were less a matter of temperament than of personality's articulation through commercialism and publicity. The Stoddards inhabited a literary world where the pre-commercial ideal of refined, amateur anonymity tempered the promotional impulse to peddle authors along with texts. The result for the Stoddards---and their genteel peers---was an authorial identity more conforming than conspicuous, and more explicitly social than subversive. Whitman and the posthumous Dickinson of the 1890s, on the other hand, were commodified in conjunction with the promotion of their texts---by Whitman himself and, in the case of Dickinson, by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. as part of the larger capitalist transformation of subjectivity (what Marxist critics term reification), this promotion of Whitman and Dickinson exemplified the influence of late nineteenth-century literary commercialism on the writing self. The careers of Whitman and Dickinson, in other words, were inextricable from the economic and historical circumstances from which authorship emerged as a profession distinct from the avocation of letters, and from which the author, as a static, marketable persona, emerged as a figure distinct from the writer. The autonomy and originality for which Whitman and Dickinson are acclaimed become, in this light, testaments to ideology. For such independence is a feature of their marketed identities that derives from the objectifying, isolating power of commercialism, rather than from genuine individuality and freedom. Such canonical independence derives, in fact, from what Marx calls the commodity fetish, a perceptual paradigm that isolates and objectifies people, as well as things, in a capitalist system.

The science fiction imaginary of mid-twentieth century America often takes as its subjects all manner of animate objects --- living machines like robots, cyborgs, automata, androids, and intelligent "thinking" computers. These living machines embody early cold war anxieties about the relationship between humans and their machines, as well as about human "identity" in a world perceived as increasingly technological and fragmented. Built with text and still or moving images, these figures' bodies are formed by metal and plastic, circuits and electronics, at times fused with organic parts -- at the same time that they are also represented as built from the innovation and imagination of cutting-edge American industry and science. These diverse machined bodies are sometimes straightforwardly humanoid in form, and at other times, they are less so, while still others may appear to share little in common with humans at all. as bearers of built bodies, living machines inhabit the interface between human and machine, exposing the ruptures and contradictions of the conception of the modem, technological body: the material and the immaterial, the animate and the inanimate, the subject and the object. While this study analyzes fiction by canonical science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke, its focus is on government documents and images regarding NASA's Projects Mercury (1959-1963) and Gemini (1962-1966), popular journalism articles and images, Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and less well-known pulp science fiction stories from the 1930s through the 1950s.

This dissertation investigates the under-examined relationships between sibling characters in nineteenth-century American literature (1852-1900). Focusing on the depictions of siblinghood in such works as Herman Melville's Pierre, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Charles Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars, and Edith Wharton's Bunner Sisters, I explore how nineteenth-century American authors construct, comment on, and use the sibling bond as an attempt to reconcile tensions of personal and collective identity and the competing drives for family ties and individual experience. In these fictions and others, I argue, siblinghood is a space where the rules of relation are negotiable and unfixed---where brothers and sisters use each other variously as partners in sympathetic union, extensions of their selves, and objects of identification, and do so in ways both supportive of and detrimental to one another. I read these texts with an eye on siblinghood to suggest new perspectives on major nineteenth-century fictions, as well as new ways of thinking about the nineteenth-century family.;In the first chapter, I argue that Melville's Pierre is a seduction novel, in which the site of seduction is the double promise of siblinghood to offer a close and sympathetic relation and the opportunity for virtuous or heroic performance. My second chapter looks at how Louisa May Alcott's Little Women exposes a significant (yet largely unacknowledged) cruelty at the heart of the nineteenth-century American family: that siblings are taught to invest their energies and their affections in one another in youth, but they are also taught that marriage is their goal-which takes them out of their home, and away from their brothers and sisters. Chapter Three explores the significance of the many adult and elderly sister pairs in local color literature of the late nineteenth century, arguing that the depiction of siblings living in close, marriage-like relationships---far beyond the period of time that most siblings share an intimate bond under the same roof---is part of these fictions' larger project of describing and preserving a United States in the midst of massive and rapid change. and Chapter Four investigates the many nineteenth-century authors who set their novels and stories in motion by separating two siblings on opposite sides of the color line, then exploring their relationships and identities as a result of this split.

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The history of organized feeding programs in American workplaces and schools reveals a complex tale of coordinated efforts toward the goal of altering individual eating habits. A secondary benefit of this process accrues when that individual spreads the influence of new ideas to others. Working both in concert and isolation, various interests including both individuals and organizations, have attempted to alter the eating habits of their subjects toward the goals of increased Americanization, socialization, or productivity. their efforts have shaped the role of lunch in modern American food ideology. This dissertation examines that process, its major players, and effects beginning in the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries.;Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century progressives drove the opening wedge, introducing debate about the relationship between nutrition and industrial or educational efficiency. During World War II, experts in business and government transformed lunch from a matter of private concern to one of military necessity. After the war, issues over employee lunch remained contested terrain in many union-management conflicts. Also during the post-war era, the national defense character of the school lunch faded while educators, legislators, dieticians, and others who had become enamored with statistics, used the school lunch as a tool to "even up the starting line" in equal opportunity programs. Such experiments on young Americans had both positive and negative outcomes ranging from the institutionalization of the federal free- and reduced-price lunch program to the sometimes troublesome effects caused by federal distribution of excess agricultural commodities among school cafeterias. Finally, while the twentieth century was one of significant changes in women's roles both inside and outside the home, ideals of motherhood proved to be less elastic and amenable to shifting work and family patterns. The packed lunch, as a public demonstration of maternal commitment, also became the material site of conflict and contestation as to the very nature of motherhood.;Ultimately, Americans' lunch habits are shaped by a combination of forces including environmental constraints and the conflict generated from the encounter among home, workplace, school, and marketplace. Despite this legacy from the battle over lunch, individuals retain the responsibility and accountability for the personal food choices they make.

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From Jo March to Scout Finch, the American tomboy figure has become an icon of modern girlhood and a symbol of female empowerment. My dissertation traces the development of the tomboy figure from its origins in nineteenth-century sentimental novels to Harper Lee's classic Civil Rights novel, to Kill a Mockingbird (1960). to the informed reader, it may seem rather paradoxical that nineteenth-century sentimental culture produced the first recognizable tomboy figures, as this era is typically remembered for its indoctrination of conventional femininity. My project is the first to interrogate this apparent paradox and, in so doing, yields important insights into the tomboy figure's role as a social critic in the twentieth century. as tomboys express and struggle with issues of sympathy, invoking a key convention of sentimental fiction, they not only unmask the cultural performance of femininity and heterosexuality but also subvert racial and class hierarchies. By tracing the development of the tomboy narrative over time and through the retrospective lens of sentimentalism, my dissertation yields new insights into the origins of the tomboy figure, as well as the persistence of sentimental ideologies into the twentieth century and beyond.;My project centers upon five women authors: E.D.E.N. Southworth, Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Carson McCullers and Harper Lee. Chapter 1 examines Cap Black, the cross-dressing "newsgirl" protagonist of Southworth's popular sentimental novel, The Hidden Hand (1859); more specifically, this chapter investigates the ties between Cap's gender subversion, urban street life, and non-traditional familial experiences. Chapter 2 analyzes Jo March of Alcott's Little Women (1868) in relation to discourses of poverty, sympathy, and race in the Civil War era. Chapter 3 focuses on Laura Ingalls's struggles with sympathy amid the geographical, cultural and historical "landscapes" of the prairie in Wilder's Little House series, published during the Depression era. Chapters 4 and 5 consider Southern tomboys, Carson McCullers's Frankie Addams and Harper Lee's Scout Finch, who challenge heteronormativity, racial violence and segregationist politics in the twentieth-century South, particularly as they forge sympathetic alliances with other marginalized figures.