<p> Anglo, Latino and indigenous cultures in the American Southwest have a tendency to mark or commemorate the spots where a person has died, either through oral legend or an actual physical marker. I have long been fascinated with the ceremonial aspects of this tradition and the particular psychological motivations for marking the scene of a violent passage. The problem took on a new dimension for me in an unexpected way in April of 2001 when I was working as a newspaper reporter at The Arizona Republic. An unhappy husband named Robert Fisher killed his wife and two children and then disappeared. His truck was found parked in a spot in a National Forest not far from a wilderness are called Hells Gate. The FBI considers him still a fugitive, but I was always convinced that he killed himself in those woods. And hence the fundamental problem of how one acknowledges the spot where a person has died when that spot cannot be located, and may not even exist. This thesis is an attempt to draw literary value from the gap in between these two very different mysteries: where did Robert Fisher go, and why do human beings feel a strange attachment to the places where human being were "last seen" in corporeal form. I made multiple trips to the National Forest near where Fisher was last seen, as well as two separate journeys into the Hells Gate wilderness itself, and wrote down my thoughts about the problem. I explored the tradition of erecting roadside crosses and other, more secular, forms of veneration at the spots of human disappearance. I cannot claim to have found any revolutionary insights on a question that tugs at one of the central mysteries of our existence - a simple question usually first asked in childhood: "what happened when we die" - but I have concluded that the asking of the question and the pilgrimages to these sites where, as I put it, "the where meets the nowhere", is one was of putting concrete expression to the ungraspable.</p><p>

The purpose of this project was to address the lack of scholarship on mid-twentieth century Haitian history and illustrate its significance. It employs primary and secondary sources in shaping a Gramscian historical narrative. Ideas of "everyday resistance" and internal and external politics are also be of significance to this work. In mid-twentieth century Haiti, the black-nationalist rhetoric of noirisme became the dominant political ideology. Blackness was amorphous and its application to politics was dependent upon class. In proclaiming blackness the average Haitian was attacking the class schism that beleaguered the island. Yet for the elite noirismewas a conduit to modernity and a useful tool for muting the division between rich and poor. With the election of Dumarsais Estimé in 1946, dialogue between the U.S. government, the Haitian elite, and the masses, relative to definitions of modernity played out within the new political reality of noirisme.

Tobacco was of primary importance to Spain, and its impact on Cuba’s economy and society was greater than just the numbers of farms, workers, or production, demonstrated by the Spanish crown’s outlay of monies for capital assets, bureaucrats’ salaries, and payments to farmers for their crop. This study is a micro- and macro-level study of rural life in colonial Cuba and the interconnected relationships among society, agricultural production, state control, and the island’s economic development. By placing Cuba’s tobacco farmers at the forefront of this social history, this work revisits and offers alternatives to two prevailing historiographical views of rural Cuba from 1763 (the year Havana returned to Spanish control following the Seven Years’ War) to 1817 (the final year of the 100-year royal monopoly on Cuban tobacco). Firstly, it argues against the primacy of sugar over other agricultural crops, a view that has shaped decades of scholarship, and challenges the thesis which maintains the Cuban tobacco farmer was almost exclusively poor, white, and employed free labor, rather than slaves, in the production of their crop. This study establishes the importance of tobacco as an agricultural product, and argues that Cuban tobacco growers were a heterogeneous group, revealing the role that its cultivation may have played in helping some slaves earn their freedom.

<p> Historic tenant farmsteads are often thought to be redundant archaeological resources because of their limited temporal range and function which acts to limit the diversity of their archaeological assemblages. However, work has not been done that confirms this equivalence, and archaeologists often write off tenant farmsteads as being too modern or too disturbed to warrant investigation. This is a problematic approach as tenant farmsteads are quickly eroding from the American landscape and a representative sample of sites need to be investigated and preserved before they&rsquo;re gone. This thesis tests different sampling strategies and field methods that may allow for the efficient investigation of tenant farmsteads without jeopardizing historical knowledge. The results show that the sites studied in this thesis are in fact redundant and a number of different methods can be used to investigate them in a much more efficient manner.</p><p>

This dissertation studies the emergence of a Keynesian political-economic strategy in America during the interwar period. It is concerned primarily with one crucial aspect of this process: the ideological role played by key political, economic, and managerial elites in the emergence of such strategy. It thus traces the political discourse articulated by the Taylor Society, the institutional home of scientific management, from its inception as an industrial research organization to its development as an important policy-making network during the New Deal. It focuses on key figures in the Taylor Society including Morris L. Cooke, Harlow S. Person, Henry Dennison, and Mary Van Kleeck, as well as those who were closely associated with the society, such as Rexford G. Tugwell, Louis D. Brandies, George Soule, Frances Perkins, and Sidney Hillman. The historical narrative shows how during the 1930s the Taylor Society became an important component of the political and economic network that put forward a Keynesian strategy based on the expansion of mass consumption (and thus social purchasing power) via the intervention of the state. This network was critical of the corporatist program, embodied in the National Recovery Administration, in which that state would sanction cartel-like arrangements among capitalists to reduce destructive competition, restrict production, and fix prices. This system of industrial self-regulation entailed minimal state intervention and a reduced role for the unions and the collective bargaining. The Keynesian strategy advanced by the Taylor Society and its allies, on the other hand, advocated an expanded and strong role for the state and unions in the political economy, along with macroeconomic policies that promoted social purchasing power and expanded mass consumption. During the "Second New Deal" the Keynesian elite entered the corridors of power and many of its members took key administrative positions in the welfare state. From these positions they attempted to shape the American political economy.

Ira Allen was the quintessential late-eighteenth-century frontier entrepreneur. At the age of 21, he founded the Onion River Land Company, a loose family partnership designed to speculate in land titles to the disputed northern New England territory known as the New Hampshire Grants. By the time he turned 40, Allen claimed ownership of more than 100,000 choice acres along the eastern shore of Lake Champlain. Where most of his contemporaries saw an inhospitable wilderness, Allen anticipated a Champlain Valley of thriving communities, busy commercial centers, and extensive trade, all under his profitable control. Combining a romantic faith in the future of the backcountry with a relentless drive to acquire more land, he devoted his life to the elusive goal of prosperity in the area he called "the country my soul delighted in." Yet there was more to Allen's tangled career than land speculation and development schemes. He was a key figure in the oligarchy that preserved the independence of the fledgling State of Vermont during the American Revolution, serving as Vermont's first Treasurer, Surveyor-General, and tireless ambassador-at-large. Absorbing the rhetoric of the national struggle against England, he adapted it for local application by writing books, pamphlets and broadsides that described Vermont as an unyielding opponent of foreign and domestic tyranny. After the war, Allen led the drive to create the University of Vermont, which he envisioned as a beacon of republican virtue and educational opportunity for the common man. When his Green Mountain empire collapsed, he planned revolutions in Canada and Mexico in desperate, unsuccessful attempts to regain his lost power and wealth. In his grand dreams, remarkable achievements, and ultimate failure, Ira Allen was an outstanding example of the backwoods leaders whose blending of personal and public priorities influenced the development of the American frontier from Maine to the Carolinas.

This dissertation examines the political economy of the United States in the second quarter of the twentieth century, focusing on the public career of David E. Lilienthal. This is not a biography, but rather, uses Lilienthal's career as a lens for viewing the American economy at a time when the relationship between the state and private economic enterprise underwent a profound transformation. A student of Felix Frankfurter at Harvard Law School, Lilienthal went to work as a labor lawyer with Donald Richberg in the aftermath of the 1922 railroad shopcraft strike and helped craft the legislation that culminated in the Railway Labor Act of 1926. During 1931-1933, Lilienthal reorganized the Wisconsin Public Service Commission under Governor Philip La Follette, establishing a reputation as a regulatory activist that resulted in his appointment to the board of the newly-chartered Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). After a protracted struggle with TVA chairman Arthur E. Morgan, Lilienthal gained control of the agency, where he remained until the end of World War II. During the interwar period, Lilienthal was a participant in the formation of what has come to be known as a "Keynesian" political-economic perspective. Working with colleagues such as Frankfurter and social reformer Morris L. Cooke, as well as elements from both corporate capital and organized labor, Lilienthal designed an agenda for aggressive federal intervention in the marketplace with a macroeconomic approach for coordinating the relationship between mass production and mass consumption. Through the Electric Home and Farm Authority's low-cost appliance program, through high-wage, pro-union labor policies at the agency, and most importantly through the TVA's promotion of cheap and plentiful electricity, Lilienthal was experimenting with the growth-oriented policies that came to characterize Keynesianism. This position became prominent in the New Deal during the mid-1930s, creating salients within the federal government of a social democratic state. By the end of the decade, however, political opposition and the conservative implications of this growth perspective moderated the Keynesian agenda for the TVA and the New Deal.

This work examines the origins of the Cold War from the perspective of domestic American politics. Specifically, the role of the so-called "Catholic vote" in the New Deal coalition built by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. Catholics comprised roughly one-quarter of the population and were concentrated in the major urban and industrial areas of the country. These were the same areas that dominated the electoral college and thus were of primary importance to anyone seeking national office or proposing national policy. FDR frequently modified his position on national issues if it appeared this "Catholic vote" might be jeopardized. Throughout the 1930s, as charges of Communist influence on FDR and the New Deal increased in intensity, the official position of the Catholic Church was hardening into a strict anti-Communism. The potential, then, existed for widespread defections of Catholic voters from the New Deal coalition over the issue of Communism. Using a variety of primary sources but especially the presidential papers located at the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York, and the archives of the Archdiocese of Boston in Brighton, Massachusetts, this work will demonstrate the impact of Catholic opinion on national policy, especially foreign policy, as it was reflected in the attempt to keep the Catholic vote in the Democratic Party. The response of first FDR and then Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to Soviet domination of largely Catholic Eastern Europe following the war suggests that religion, especially Catholicism, is the overlooked paradigm of the Cold War.

One hundred and forty-six women, most of them young immigrants, died in the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City's Lower East Side on March 25, 1911. One of the worst industrial disasters in the history of the United States, it confirmed the belief of progressives that unregulated industrialism had gone awry. This tragedy, however, have rise to a campaign for protective labor legislation in the Empire State and provided historians with an example of the reform impulse in the years prior to World War I. This dissertation makes the case, both implicitly and explicitly, that this disaster, if examined in both a social and a political context, can be used to increase our understanding of three broad aspects of the history and historiography of the progressive era. First, it can help us to evaluate the debate among historians over the true extent and effectiveness of the reform movement. Secondly, it will help us examine how coalitions of diverse and incompatible groups temporarily united to demand reform legislation, and finally it can allow us to interweave many histories of the era--the immigrant experience, American radicalism, trade unionism, the suffrage movement, and progressive reform--that formerly have been analyzed as separate stories. The idea of limitations is emphasized in each of the dissertation's predominate themes. The reform initiative, in terms of both its liberalism and the effectiveness of the legislation it produced were limited. Furthermore, the degree of cooperation generated by the reform coalition that responded to the Triangle Fire was temporary and produced few enduring associations. The ongoing historical debate regarding the meaning and the results of progressivism has produced extensive but incoherent opinions which call for further scholarly clarification. This dissertation not only provides a framework for further analyzing the events surrounding the Triangle Fire, it also produces additional information about progressivism--its membership, its goals, its achievements, and the political and social environment which produced the movement.

Recent welfare histories highlighting reformers, bureaucrats, and recipients of aid have added immeasurably to our understanding of welfare policy formation, but have ignored the extent to which the parameters of change were set by public opinion. Public opinion, informed by cultural values, constrained state action in ways that have been little explored. Examining the periodicals and newspapers of the mainstream, union, and African American presses as well as film, oral histories and autobiographies, I find differences by class and race, but also widespread and repetitive expressions of concerns shared by both races and by both the middle and lower middle classes. These included a strict standard of neediness, impatience with long-term aid, and a hierarchy of worthiness that privileged the previously middle-class over the working poor and families over unattached adults. In the broadest generalization, the story of is one of discontent. Ambivalence and discontent were present in the Progressive era with the inception of mothers' pensions and continued in the 1920s as social work professionalized and public and private aid increased. Discontent continued in the 1930s as public aid took on a complex and bureaucratized structure and as unprecedented need forced difficult decisions regarding worthiness and need. Throughout these changes the middle classes both created and reacted to the changing structure of welfare as they accepted or rejected programs based on a rough consensus of what constituted worthiness, need, and effective response. Many remained convinced that programs did not aid the right people sufficiently and aided the wrong people too much. Increasingly they felt estranged from those who ran the programs, the social welfare professionals. Assumptions, based in class, proved more powerful than idealogies such as gender (or maternal) solidarity and their stigma on poor adults equally as powerful as racial assumptions would come to be.