Religious leaders were key figures within African American society in the late antebellum South. They undertook a vital religious function within both the plantation slave community and the institutionalised biracial and independent black church and many became a focal point for African American Christianity amongst slaves and free blacks. These religious leaders also took on a number of secular responsibilities, becoming counsellors, mediators, and advisors, individuals that blacks would frequently seek out for their opinion, advice and solace. African American religious leaders held a position considered to be vital and prestigious. But such a position was also perilous. Black religious leaders had to reconcile the conflicting demands of two groups whose needs were almost diametrically opposed. Slaves and free blacks wanted to hear a message of hope, but the Southern elite wanted to hear a message of obedience to ensure that their authority remained unchallenged. Appeasing both groups was an almost impossible task. Failing to meet their demands, however, could be disastrous for black religious leaders. Slaves and free blacks who heard a message of obedience to the Southern white elite rejected the authority of the black preacher, who was then often unable to continue his ministrations. Conversely, those who were considered to be teaching a message that was undermining the planter's authority faced reprisals from white society. These reprisals could be violent. In order to survive, black religious leaders had to chart a difficult course between the two groups, giving a sense of hope to the enslaved but in a manner that did not appear to undermine white authority. Within historical scholarship, it has been argued that African American religious leaders shared a common role. By the late antebellum period, however, a divide had emerged amongst black religious leaders. Although they continued to share many of the same goals, responsibilities, and challenges, the form of Christianity practiced by black preachers on the plantation was not the same as that practiced by licensed black ministers in the biracial and independent black church. Christianity within the plantation slave community continued to include African traditions and rituals that had survived the transatlantic crossing. Christianity within the biracial and independent black church, however, had begun to reject these African traditions as backward and outdated, and had moved instead towards a form of religion that, whilst still emotional and uplifting, was also more formal and hierarchical, resembling the Christianity of white Southern evangelicals.Black preachers and licensed black ministers were preaching Christianity in the face of adversity and had the potential to become political leaders within the African American community. The realisation of this potential was hindered, not only by the constant supervision of these religious leaders by the white elite but also through the refusal of black preachers and ministers to use Christianity to justify acts of resistance. This research adds new insight to the role of African American religious leaders through a detailed understanding of their different approaches in delivering the Christian message.

This dissertation traces the history of Springfield Hospital from 1890 to 1980. I examine the case of Springfield Hospital as a springboard to examine the larger developments in the U.S. healthcare system in the twentieth century. Medical historians have done yeoman work in charting the story of hospitals to 1920 in terms of case studies: In this work, I try to take hospital history up to the present. Medical historians have also constructed powerful interpretative frameworks of national hospital development in the twentieth century. I build on their work and in some cases take issue with their analysis based on my examination of Springfield Hospital. Among my findings: Spingfield's medical staff records reveal real ambivalence among physicians about the development of the medical center model of healthcare. The records show as well a concurrent fight among physicians over competing definitions of professionalism. Trustee and Superintendent records suggest that the numbers of those unable to pay for healthcare was perhaps higher than has been commonly believed. Furthermore, Springfield's case indicates that private hospitals (and not just the largest urban teaching hospitals usually surveyed in hospital histories) did provide for large numbers of such individuals and did not simply try to hive them off to public facilities. Moreover, the cost and complications of caring for the medically needy substantially shaped Springfield's priorities and finances. This exacerbated tensions among the medical staff over the development of Springfield into a medical center. Most importantly, the problems associated with caring for the indigent made impossible effective realistic long-term planning. At Springfield, this helped cause the decline of the medical center model of health care and laid the basis for the dominance of local Health Maintenance Organizations.

Blanche Ames Ames, an elite graduate of Smith College and a distinguished state and national leader in the woman suffrage and birth control causes, was one of a small cadre of educated women who, in the early 1900s, recast the iconography of political cartoons, long a means of discourse used only by men, to promote women's rights. In this, she was most unusual. Fortunately, because of her prominence, Ames's extensive family papers have been preserved in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College. She has not slid into obscurity as other women political artists and reformers have done. As a result, Ames serves as a sort of template of how an elite woman chose to become publicly involved in issues she might have funded others to pursue and also how women cartoonists went about adapting the political cartoon to promote their goals. It becomes clear from studying her letters and diaries that Ames was an unusually logical, pragmatic and determined progressive feminist, involved and engaged, who preserved a sense of humor, of irony, of detachment that allowed her to persevere in her causes without fanaticism, while carving an autonomous place for herself in a world uncertain of the wisdom of women's rights. Part of Ames's success was that she was buoyed at each step of her life from prep school to the presidency of the Birth Control League of Massachusetts by her fascinating family, the founder of which was the brilliant and outrageous Civil War Gen. Benjamin "Beast" Butler. Ames's parents encouraged her education and allowed her a growing autonomy in which to learn to think and then to act for herself. After an early and difficult struggle for autonomy in her marriage, Blanche and her husband, Oakes Ames, became partners in a joint campaign to create a sustaining family life at their North Easton estate at Borderland, while allowing Oakes to pursue a distinguished career at Harvard and Blanche an equally distinguished career as a suffragist, a political cartoonist, botanical illustrator, painter and birth control reformer. Thus the study of the life of Blanche Ames Ames is not just one of individual artistic or political brilliance, but also of how that brilliance was nurtured, encouraged and sustained throughout the vicissitudes of a life defined by a desire for real social reform by a domestic support system that too often goes unrecognized. This family support system, along with Blanche Ames Ames's activism and achievements as a political cartoonist and a leader in the suffrage and the birth control fight, are the focus of this dissertation.

"The Magic of the Many Which Sets the World on Fire": Boston Elites and Urban Political Insurgents During the Early Nineteenth Century is a broad analysis on social class and political culture in Boston and Massachusetts between 1800 and 1830. I have consciously focused on the political odyssey of congressman, Massachusetts legislator, and Boston's second mayor, Josiah Quincy, to investigate the political and cultural evolution of Boston during these three crucial decades. Quincy's political career--though central to the story--is utilized as a narrative hook that helps unveil the dramatic changes in the political and social culture that Massachusetts faced in between the first and second party systems. During the first three decades of the nineteenth century, Massachusetts and Boston, in particular, faced a dramatic period of political, cultural, and economic transformation. At the beginning of the century, the politics, economy, and culture of the state were controlled almost exclusively by a close-knit elite which ran roughshod over the ordinary citizenry. By the mid-1820s this elite faced an onslaught of serious challenges to its hegemony in Massachusetts. By 1823 the political arm of the elite, the Federalist Party, was gutted by a united lower-to-middling class electorate led by ex-Federalist and Brahmin, Josiah Quincy. This newly charged electorate refused to abide by the political standards of the past, resulting in the passing of the first party system. This study investigates the emergence of a dramatically new sort of political culture while also providing an analysis of a highly popular caesarist who helped destroy the first party system in Massachusetts, but could not survive the advent of the second.

One of the early leaders of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) was working-class woman and veteran trade union organizer Mary Kenney O'Sullivan (1864-1943). When she joined with several other trade unionists and social reformers to form, in 1903, the WTUL, Kenney O'Sullivan had already spent more than a dozen years attempting to forge a coalition between male-dominated organized labor and the social reform community in which Progressive-minded women played a vital role. Throughout, her primary goal was to improve the conditions of labor for women such as herself, primarily through trade unionism. In the early 1890s, then Mary Kenney was living in Chicago, working as a bookbinder. Frustrated by low wages and poor working conditions, Kenney formed Women's Bookbindery Union No. 1 as early as 1890. She went on to organize women in other trades, utilizing her connections with both the Chicago labor community and the social reform community, especially with the Chicago settlement, Hull House, and its founder, Jane Addams. In 1892, Kenney was briefly appointed the first national woman organizer for the American Federation of Labor (AFL). After her 1894 marriage to Boston labor leader, John O'Sullivan, and now known as Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, she would continue her trade union activity in that city, repeating the pattern of coalition building by relying upon both the Boston Central Labor Union and the local social reform community, particularly the settlement Denison House and the Women's Educational and Industrial Union. While she had some success in organizing women workers, Kenney O'Sullivan's personal efforts at coalition building were often frustrated by the sharp class and gender distinctions of her day. In 1903, she joined several other trade unionists and social reformers in an attempt to institutionalize this fragile coalition of labor and social reform through the formation of the WTUL. The WTUL, on the national level and through its principal local branches in New York, Chicago and Boston, sought to cooperate with the AFL in organizing wage-earning women into trade unions, as well as provide education and agitate for protective labor legislation. It also attempted to bridge the gap between working-class and reformist middle-class women. Kenney O'Sullivan was a leader in both the National WTUL and its Boston branch and, as such, she attempted to insure that the WTUL concentrate on trade unionism for women. The possibilities and limits of doing so within a cross-class, cross-gender alliance are especially evident during the WTUL's early years. From the Fall River strike of 1904 to the Lawrence strike of 1912, the efforts of Kenney O'Sullivan and other like-minded women continued to be frustrated by the class and gender contraints of this period. This dissertation attempts to reveal the complexity of those gender and class constraints during the Progressive Era by focusing on the efforts of Mary Kenney O'Sullivan at organizing wage-earning women.

Modern Freemasonry emerged in the early eighteenth-century as part of European Enlightenment culture and gradually spread to the American continent. Masonry immediately aroused suspicion and continues to evoke controversy today. This study documents the development and maturation of lodge principles during the eighteenth century and then moves to specific periods of conflict between masons and antimasons in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a comparative history of Freemasonry and antimasonry in the Russian Empire just after the Revolution of 1905, in France during the early decades of the Third French Republic, and in Massachusetts, 1826-1832. During each of these periods, in each area, antimasons coalesced to close lodge doors. Antimasons achieved temporary successes in two of the three cases. This study explains why antimasonry emerged as a political phenomena common to early constitutional states in the context of expanding male, suffrage rights, and an emerging market economy. It frames a dialogue between masons and antimasons concerning politics, religion, science, economics and morality, through an analysis of masonic and masonic presses and published works. Debate between masons and antimasons centered around new definitions of the public sphere, the separation of Church and state, the role of the press, and proper public morality in an elective order.

This dissertation examines the relationship between gender and political culture in the American radical pacifist movement during the World War II, postwar, and Vietnam War years. Between 1942 and 1972, male and female radicals in the American peace movement translated their beliefs into action as they protested against racial segregation, resisted conscription, and opposed U.S. foreign and nuclear weapons policies through direct action and civil disobedience. As they struggled to create a new paradigm of nonviolent protest, they discovered that political activism was as much about personal transformation as it was about dissent and social change. The history of this vanguard political movement belies accounts that relegate women to the margins of American radicalism and grassroots struggles for social justice and peace. Women played an integral role in the radical pacifist movement: they worked behind the scenes and on the streets, and made substantial contributions to its trajectory and growth. The motivations and experiences of female activists defy the standard equation between masculinity and militant action and refute essentialized associations between women's pacifism and maternal concern. Working alongside of men, these women transcended the distinctions between public and private and challenged the tendency to link female activism to separatist strategies for empowerment. The study's secondary focus on race complicates what traditionally is described as an organic alliance between white peace activists and the black freedom struggle. Radical pacifists were inspired by and hoped to contribute to the emerging civil rights movement. Nevertheless, the different priorities of these two movements created a tense and ambivalent relationship. By engaging in creative acts of nonviolent resistance, radical pacifists redefined dissent in terms of personal sacrifice and risk-taking, all within an egalitarian framework that sought to overcome gender and racial difference. They did not succeed in fostering a pacifist mass movement for social change, nor did they always act in concert with their egalitarian ideals. In spite of these limitations, these men and women modeled a militant style of activism that challenged the cultural and political norms of modern American society and helped to reformulate definitions of gender in the political realm.

This study is a social history of the rural mulattoes/ladinos of the District of Mita in eastern Guatemala who rebelled against the Liberal government headed by Mariano Gálvez in Guatemala City in June of 1837. Known as the Carrera movement or the War of the Mountain, this popular uprising began with scattered revolts precipitated by an outbreak of cholera, but soon became a full-scale rebellion that articulated a set of demands and eventually spread across the state of Guatemala and beyond. While the importance of this rebellion in the political history of Central America is widely recognized, this is the first attempt to focus on the ethnicity and social position of the protagonists, to relate rural social structure and the patron-client system to the rebellion, and to link the everyday concerns of this rural population with their political actions. The methodology combines anthropological techniques with chronological history. The early chapters provide a structural analysis of the geography of the area, settlement patterns, households, the economy, and affective life to create a picture of a society that differed in important ways from that of the urban Liberals. The last chapter shows how liberal policies designed to create a new polity based on Enlightenment principles and a free-trade economy antagonized the local population and exacerbated long-standing differences between the urban power structure and rural groups. The Liberals' decision to end banditry on the Camino Real and the methods they pursued to accomplish this goal emerge as the definitive step in the polarization process. The rebels' first engagement with government troops took place in Santa Rosa and was led by local cattle ranchers Teodoro and Benito Mexia. This study finds that a peasant elite, typified by the “mulatto” Teodoro Mexia, played the critical role in catalyzing the rebellion by forging alienated sectors of the local population into a strong regional alliance and by drawing on their substantial resources to fund the war.

The present study examines organized labor's role in American political and economic life during the Nixon years. In the 1960s, most observers regarded American workers as economically secure and content. Events at the close of the decade, however, undermined the image of the affluent worker. Workers' support for conservative candidates George Wallace and Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign convinced many observers that blue-collar Americans had swung to the right. In the election's aftermath, analysts of various political persuasions tried to explain “the blue-collar blues.” According to the mainstream press, white workers had become more concerned with social issues—ghetto rioting, campus unrest, widespread anti-war protest, the breakdown of law and order—than about “traditional” economic issues. Richard Nixon hoped to capitalize on the Social Issue to woo white workers and fashion a new Republican majority. But the relationship between the Nixon Administration, a traditionally Democratic labor leadership, a radicalized student movement, and a volatile rank and file proved to be highly complex. Large-scale strikes against the General Electric and General Motors corporations in 1969 and 1970 showed that workers still considered economic issues to be of paramount concern. Workers and their unions did not uniformly support U.S. policy in Vietnam; indeed, during the Nixon years, unionists became more outspoken in their opposition to the war. Some unions even attempted a rapprochement with segments of the New Left. Organized labor denounced Nixon's attempts to combat the inflationary spiral the Vietnam War had triggered. Nixon nevertheless won substantial blue-collar support during his 1972 reelection campaign. He did so not by playing the social issues but by neutralizing the Vietnam War and economic concerns. Nixon's victory proved to be short lived, however. The economic recession of 1973 took its toll on the workers and their unions. The energy crisis launched a devastating round of de-industrialization. By 1974, Nixon's blue-collar support had collapsed. For all their discontent, white workers had not become members of the new Republican majority. They were displeased with their position in American society, however, and their votes were available for courting.

This dissertation is an attempt to portray the revolutionary character of the American Civil War through a comparative methodology utilizing the French Revolution as both point of influence and as a parallel example. Within this novel context, subtle trends in the ideological development of the Republican Party’s Radical wing undertake new meaning and an alternative revolutionary heritage takes shape around an idealization of the universalism of the French and Haitian Revolutions of the 1790s. The work argues that through a diffusion of ideas and knowledge of events from the streets of Paris into the fields of Haiti and onto the shores of the American coast, a small faction of militant abolitionists latched onto the ideal of the Haitian Revolution as their own legacy. By the late 1830s, this radical edge of the antislavery movement embarked onto two courses, both derived from and influenced by their newfound ideology. The first was towards violent direct action against slavery while the second aimed at legitimizing radical new legal theories and creating the political structure necessary to bring about their enforcement. While on the one hand John Brown and Gerrit Smith pursued militant action, on the other Alvan Stewart and Salmon P. Chase sought a political and legal redefinition of American society through the Liberty and eventually Republican parties. With the coming of war in the 1860s, these two trends, violence and radical politics, converged in the Union war effort. In the midst of the Civil War and the early fight for Reconstruction, Radical Republicans and their allies in the Union Army displayed themselves as American Jacobins. Through a set of comparisons with French Revolutionary events and political debates, this thesis argues that the result of the ideological development between the American Revolution and the Civil War Era in the United States was the creation of a revolutionary ideology parallel to that of French Jacobinism. By the time of their fall from power, the Radical Republicans had seen their ideals both lambasted as the radical edge of politics and then transformed into the status quo, helping to prepare the nation for modernity.