This is a study of popular political thought and its interaction with the culture of governance in three northern states before the Civil War. By putting matters of governance at the center of antebellum politics, this study differs from reigning society-based interpretations of the era. Drawing upon the polity-centered framework of Theda Skocpol and the broader cultural approach to the political public sphere pioneered by Jurgen Habermas, this dissertation emphasizes how political actors struggled to translate socially conditioned anxieties into political questions that bore fundamental relationship to governance. The story pivots on the rise and fall of the Know Nothing movement, a quintessential expression of nineteenth-century American populism. It argues that the movement's breathtaking fury and appeal flowed from a pervasive sense that governance was lacking in a broad moral purpose; that wire-pulling politicians, blinded by partisan calculation, had allowed dangerous special interests to threaten the public good. Like other populist movements, the Know Nothings framed their agenda with transcendent antiparty calls to eliminate office chasers and special interests from public life. While key differences distinguished the movement regionally, Know Nothings in each state cast the decade's principal issues--slavery, immigration, and economic insecurity--as crises of governance within a radically changing public culture. The decline of the Know Nothings suggests what happens to an antiparty reform movement once it becomes a formal political party. Though Know Nothing lawmakers in each state added a significant corpus of reforms to their prescriptive anti-Catholic agenda, this dissertation stresses the limits of populism--a combination of internal contradictions and cultural constraints that can be termed the third party dialectic. Despite the Know Nothings' rhetoric of patriotic unity, factionalism dogged the movement, while leaders undertook praetorian actions which contradicted the rank and file's antiparty designs. The study concludes by examining how the emergent Republican party established partisan loyalty at the grassroots in the context of sectional polarization. By the eve of the Civil War, the Republicans' antisouthern and herrenvolk appeals incorporated the popular ideal of governance devoted to the public good and the parallel fear of special interests in American public life.

Charles Sumner is one of America's greatest yet most neglected statesmen. A founder of the Free Soil and Republican parties, perhaps the most outspoken anti-slavery leader in the United States Senate from 1851 to 1874, and its powerful Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Sumner must be included in any history of the American anti-slavery movement and of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Yet he is often dismissed as a narrow zealot, while the intellectual and moral principles that propelled him into public life and guided his career are misunderstood or ignored by historians, including his most influential twentieth-century biographer, David Donald. By examining his life until his 1851 election to the Senate, this dissertation seeks to recover Sumner's true intellectual outlook and character, and thus to help restore him to his true stature in American history. Born in Boston, in the afterglow of the American Revolution and of the Enlightenment, Sumner was deeply influenced by the republican principles of duty, education, and liberty balanced by order, as well as by Moral Philosophy, the dominant strain of American Enlightenment thinking, which embraced cosmopolitanism and the dignity of man's intellect and conscience. As a young lawyer, Sumner was greatly attracted by the related principles of Natural Law, which since ancient times had conjoined law and ethics. These influences are symbolized by Sumner's closeness to John Quincy Adams, William Ellery Channing, and Joseph Story. Sumner, with many early nineteenth-century American intellectuals, desired to build an American culture that would combine the principles of American liberty with European culture. He thus eschewed law for reform—including education, promotion of the arts, prison discipline, international peace, and anti-slavery—and eventually politics, not from rashness or ambition, but from the belief in each individual's duty to work for the public good and in the humanistic ideals of the Enlightenment. Sumner grew increasingly disillusioned as the controversy surrounding these reforms divided Boston and the nation over the significance of that Enlightenment legacy, but he devoted his entire public career to the realization of the Enlightenment's vision of a civilized nation, both cultivated and just.

Following the collapse of the insurgencies of the 1880s and 1890s, many former populists and Gilded Age radicals linked up with the region's new industrial workers, farmers, small businessmen and political organizers to fashion a socialism cast in a southern idiom. Armed with this heritage, the Socialist Party of America (SPA) would go on to occupy an important piece of a larger pattern of resistance movements that swept through Dixie between the 1880s and World War I. The SPA, not unlike the People's Party, Farmers' Alliance, Union-Labor, and the Greenbackers, provided something of a panacea for those marginalized either materially or philosophically by the New South creed. This study examines Socialist Party activity in the American South from the 1890s to 1920 and considers how the social, political, and economic character of the region in turn shaped the emergent socialist message. Explored is the formation of socialist politics, particularly through the links between the labor movement, agrarian radicalism, and the party's diverse membership. Played out in the region's manufacturing zones, developing coastlines, and in rural stretches were the tensions of industrialization, civic boosterism, and political disfranchisement as confronted by a vision of an alternative New South, anchored in the remnants of populism and fueled by socialist organizing efforts. In examining the one-party South, disfranchisement, and the poll tax, historians have accounted for the exclusionary and antidemocratic character of institutional politics but have slighted the independent political and cultural movements created by those very dispossessed. Indeed, New South industrialism and social change challenged conventional political relationships. The ballot box included union elections, and the South's power brokers just as often assumed the identity of an industrialist as they did political boss. Located in the union halls and workers, libraries, on city street corners, and in the region's mines, mills, and fields were southern politics of a different variety. By embracing socialism some Southerners created a community of adherents otherwise impossible in the alienating world of Democratic politics.

In America, the elected chief executive faces pressures, arising from roles the officeholder must play, that can potentially push in different directions. He must simultaneously be both a political figure who responds to and makes demands of other members of the polity, and an administrative chief who sees that the law is executed in a satisfactory manner. The executive challenge is to reconcile these possibly competing pressures successfully toward the end of providing leadership. Leadership, in this thesis, is the maintenance of a successful electoral coalition based on a stable, coherent program of governance, which is implemented once the candidate is in office. Because politicians and thinkers have conceived of politics and administration differently at different times, American politics has produced three broad conceptions of the executive: the constitutional executive, the partisan administrator, and the popular manager. Each conception of the executive also is a reflection of a broader political culture that an officeholder is able to emphasize. Each of these conceptions has appeared at both the national and state levels. This thesis examines the executive challenge using as a case study the development of the Massachusetts governorship from colonial and Revolutionary times through the present day. It then focuses on the political experiences of Michael Dukakis as an in depth examination of each conception of the executive. The position taken here is that the governors who were most successful at providing leadership were those who were attentive to competing political cultures and who sought to lead a discussion including all members of the community. Executives are most effective at exercising leadership when the officeholder remembers the legitimacy of other constitutional institutions; when the chief executive remembers that carrying out the law is a political activity; and when the president or the governor presents a vision while also allowing sufficient opportunity for discussion within and about that vision.

Since the 1940s historians have rewritten theories that positioned Puritans as sexually repressed and repressive. The current assumption, heralded in the foundational works of Morgan (1942), Demos (1970), Flaherty (1971), and Bremer (1976), is that married persons entered enthusiastically into their sexual relationships and that sexual intercourse between single women and single or married men was common. These historians hold that Puritan enthusiasm for marital sexual activity is reflected in sermons and didactic literature and in extramarital sexual activity, as evidenced by the large numbers of persons prosecuted for sexual offenses by the Quarterly Courts of Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1640–1692. Historians have also asserted that Puritans rejected the traditional sexual double standard, even to the extent of punishing men for sexual lapses with greater frequency and severity than women. Neither thesis can withstand close empirical analysis. I conducted a group study of women prosecuted for fornication or bastardy, and men prosecuted for fornication or named in paternity cases in the Essex County, Massachusetts, Quarterly courts between 1640 and 1692. I analyzed prosecution and conviction rates, sentencing patterns, and socio-economic and attitudinal data. Puritans brought the impressive machinery of the Quarterly Courts to bear, in the form of fornication prosecutions, against the small number of women who bore illegitimate children and couples whose first child arrived within 32 weeks of marriage. The official language of the courts represented sexual intercourse as “uncleanness,” “filthiness,” and “incontinence,” hardly suggestive of a sexually approbative society. Ministers and magistrates successfully curbed the sexuality of young persons who conformed to the dominant ideology that marriage was the only appropriate venue for sexual intercourse. The ideological conflation of femininity and chastity placed a heavy burden on the few women who bore illegitimate children. They were punished more severely than their male partners and regarded with contempt by the majority of women who made successful transitions from adolescence to marriage. Couples who married following out-of-wedlock sex faced less opprobrium. Usually husband and wife received the same punishment and were reintegrated into the Puritan community following a series of humiliating shame rituals.

This dissertation explores the nineteenth century paternal relationship between industrialists and their predominantly skilled workers in a small northern community. As an archaeological analysis, artifacts such as houses and ceramics demonstrate the economic and consumption patterns observable throughout the United States during its industrialization. Discussion centers around the West Point Foundry, which operated in the Village of Cold Spring from 1818 to 1911 and originally owned half of the village’s property and employed half of its workers. Privately owned, it manufactured a variety of iron products including heavy ordnance for both the country’s Navy and Army. Methodological analysis paired documentary research, landscape and spatial analysis, and a reanalysis of several related archaeological collections from different social and economic classes of workers and owners. The Foundry and village is placed within a broader context of religious tolerance, paternalistic control, community planning and architecture, market accessibility, and worker turnover. It shows that the industrial paternalism of West Point Foundry owners was evident in Cold Spring’s development and generally decreased over the course of the nineteenth century. Among other signs, paternalism was visible in company housing built in half the area and the provision of land for a majority of local churches. Unlike other industrial communities where ceramic patterns can be explained by paternalism, consumption patterns better explain the ceramics archaeologically recovered from several Foundry related households. West Point Foundry worker ceramic assemblages display an abundance of tea wares and predominantly more bowls than plates, suggesting a diet that favored less expensive cuts of meat and investment in limited types of ceramics. An electronically attached Excel file details the original state of assemblages examined (WPFceramicsOriginal.xls ) and a second one details the final analysis of assemblages including vessel lists (WPFceramicsEN.xls). Economic indexes and capital consumption patterns in this industrial community as well as others explored were lower than their urban counterparts. Based on existing research by archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, architects, and urban designers, this research suggests different cultural practices within a single manufacturer industrial community from those in rural or urban contexts.

This dissertation is a regional study of Mexico during the reform phase of the Mexican Revolution. It analyzes the relationship between governing authorities and civil society in the southeastern state of Tabasco during the lengthy tenure of revolutionary strongman Tomás Garrido Canabal (1922–1935). Using a variety of previously untapped sources, this dissertation evaluates popular reactions to the governing mechanisms and cultural radicalism of the garridistas. It assesses how revolutionary labor policies, educational initiatives, anticlerical campaigns, and other reform measures, were received by Tabasco's diverse population. Ultimately, it concludes that while the garridistas were able to amass something of a popular following, the ideological intolerance and institutional rigidity of the Garrido State undermined the democratizing promise of its reformist agenda. To a great extent, the governing rigidity of the garridistas can be explained by the repeated efforts of their political opponents to overthrow them. These “enemy” schemes, which had local, regional, and national dimensions, were more and less successful. That the Garrido regime successfully weathered attacks on its rule for better than twelve years was due to the popular mobilization of its most loyal constituencies and the intervention of federal authorities. At a broader level, then, this thesis reflects on the complex way in which power was mediated and maintained in revolutionary Mexico.

This dissertation explores the relationship between gays and the family of origin in North America from 1945 to the early 1990s. Using personal correspondences, diaries, published and visual sources, I argue that the family has been a central preoccupation and animating force of gay culture, gay politics, and gay consciousness, and that gays in turn have shaped their parents' sensibilities and ideas of family intimacy. Beginning in the immediate postwar period, as companionate family styles became entrenched, gays and their parents revealed a mutual curiosity and intrigue between family members inherent in postwar family life. As the gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements developed, gays embraced a broad repeal of discretion about the personal and the sexual in their family lives, as well as in their own political and cultural articulations. During the AIDS crisis, however, gays began to esteem a closeness with their families based less on their recognition of sexuality and more on their material acts of care. Throughout, I also trace parents' early activist, advice, and memoir literature of the 1950s and 60s, and the turn to more formal organizations of the 1970s and 80s, most prominently, PFLAG (Parents, Friends, and Families of Lesbians and Gays). The writings of both parents and children chart a unique history of family communication, as it moved from metaphor, code and discretion in the immediate postwar years, to direct revelations and even obligatory "coming outs" by the end of the century. In the process, I show how gay personal lives went from being intensely private, to political, and finally to public. Examining the relationship of family members who considered one another quite consciously over this time period, and who often straddled an uneasy balance between longings and estrangement, I reveal some of the most urgent concerns and tensions within postwar companionate families, including shifting meanings of family care and nurturance, and concepts of intergenerational obligation.

For one hundred years (1693–1790) Franciscan missionaries continuously attempted to convert a variety of lowland indigenous peoples of the Putumayo and Caquetá rivers of what is now the Amazonian area of Colombia and Ecuador. The missionaries were challenged by a number of obstacles including difficult travel; a paucity of personnel and material support; epidemic and tropical diseases; and most importantly, a diverse Indian population that responded to the missionaries in many ways—ranging from acceptance on certain levels to violent rejection and expulsion. But the Franciscans and Native Americans were not alone in the region; they shared this frontier with other Spaniards, mestizos and even black slaves creating a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural borderlands. This dissertation, in accordance with the aims and focus of the “New Latin American Mission History,” analyzes these missions from the perspective of the different Native American groups involved whenever possible. Seeing the mission frontier as an intercultural zone of interaction and accommodation, it seeks to illuminate the history of this peripheral area of the Spanish empire. By examining the use and importance of “trade” between the missionaries and different Indian groups, this study focuses on the ability of the Franciscans to insert themselves into a regional trade network that existed for centuries but which was modified significantly by the presence of Europeans in general and the mendicants in particular. Trading and warring alliances between Indian groups and Europeans produced a dynamic region in which the Franciscans had varying degrees of success negotiating. At times, such as 1721 and 1790, the friars were rejected by the majority of indigenous peoples who violently expelled them. For the first half of the eighteenth century the friars came from Quito, while their base of action moved to Popayán and the new College of Missions located there during the latter half of the century. The consequences of this relocation and the rivalries and controversies between the Franciscans in Popayán and Cali, peninsular Spanish Franciscans and creole missionaries, and even between Franciscans and Jesuits, and their effects on the missions are a secondary concern of this study.

My dissertation is a study of the origins and legacy of participatory democratic thought in America. In June 1962, the Students for a Democratic Society signed the Port Huron Statement, in which they articulated their vision of citizens participating directly in the governance of their country and putting an end to many intractable problems in American life, including racial discrimination, poverty, and the paranoid logic of cold war policy (e.g., brinkmanship). The New Left ideal of participatory democracy captured the imagination of a generation of political activists in the late 1950s and early 1960s but never planted a firm foothold in American political soil. Largely dismissed as an unviable idea in such a large country, it had limited influence on the development of political institutions in the United States and would only receive serious consideration from political theorists. To understand why participatory democracy was so short-lived, I argue that one must trace its intellectual origins to the pragmatists who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries laid the foundation for this ethos. Thus, I focus on the writings of the early pragmatist philosophers, including Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Next, I turn to the legacy of participatory democratic thought and examine the work of Sheldon Wolin and Benjamin Barber, two contemporary political theorists who, respectively, represent radical and mainstream versions of this idea. Finally, I argue that once situated within the pragmatist tradition, participatory democratic thought proves not only impracticable but also theoretically untenable. This might compel political scientists to revisit questions about participation, civic education, citizenship, civil society, and representation.