This descriptive study identifies best practice for field trips for middle school social studies students, applies these principles in collaboration with the National Park Service at the Springfield (Massachusetts) Armory National Historic Site to offer a Civil War program to area students based on local documents and artifacts, and creates a model for other practitioners to develop local history programs. Based on the research, it describes elements of a successful field trip, defined as an effective learning experience which is fun and runs smoothly. The Civil War—Soldiers, Civilians and Armory Workers program was considered successful by the 736 middle school participants from urban, suburban, private and homeschool groups over three years. The basic program was modified for each group to address student needs and revised over time. Responses to the open-ended 3-2-1 Reflections measure were remarkably consistent across groups and years; participants considered the program successful. Participants reported learning about each major educational objective; longer activities were most often mentioned. Most respondents offered historical facts with very few errors. Most spontaneously offered positive comments while only 10% made negative remarks. Suggestions for improvement included having more and longer activities and less talking. Based on this research and the literature, models for best practice are presented for classroom teachers, for the Civil War program, and for historic sites. These each describe in detail the phases of effective field trips: (1) collaboration between teacher and site to set educational objectives, connect the setting and its resources to academic goals including state standards, and determine logistics; (2) classroom pre-trip activities to relate the trip to the curriculum and become familiar with activities; (3) during the field trip to engage in hands-on, authentic learning activities; and (4) post-trip activities to process what was learned. Recommendations for sites include offering one basic program tailored to individual needs, attending to volunteers, updating the program, and providing 21st century amenities. For participants, a successful field trip has activities that are hands-on, connected to curriculum, inquiry-based, authentic, set in the past, new, collaborative, multi-sensory, and creative; it also has good timing, passionate presenters, and welcoming facilities.

In a dissertation about museums on the American frontier in the early 19th century, I trace the demise of scientific cabinets and the accompanying rise of popular, pseudo-educational entertainments. Though I have written principally about Cincinnati between the years 1820 and 1830, I have also examined other Ohio museums operating in this decade and the cabinet of curiosities exhibited by General William Clark in St. Louis. I conclude that western museums in general gave way to dazzling but suspicious displays because these latter were far more profitable than scientific cabinets and because the promoters of popular entertainment were more interested in attracting audiences than were men of science in the West. In following the disintegration of scientific cabinets, I focus particularly on various museum efforts to attract public attention to systematized displays of western natural history and culture. The Western Museum in Cincinnati probably owned the nation's most extensive collection of regional specimens in the 1820s and 30s but its displays were not profitable enough to keep the institution in business. In the hopes of resuscitating the museum's fortunes, the owner of the museum built optical “machines” and cosmoramas that offered visitors a grander setting in which to behold pictures of local landmarks and local people. These were moderately popular. I show that their most successful incarnations succeeded by affording visitors images of aristocratic splendor; these provided the museum's customers with a flattering context for self-evaluation. I also show that the success of these exhibitions depended on the precision with which the museum's artists could copy nature. Ultimately, I argue, this enthusiasm for the accurate copy expressed itself in the wildly profitable household goods marketplace of the 1850s in which mechanically reproduced items were prized over all things handmade. In the latter chapters of my dissertation, I show how the Western Museum restored itself to prosperity by staging exhibits that provided visitors with a sharp, critical view of landscape and culture in the West. The criticism was directed by Frances Trollope, a recent immigrant to Cincinnati, who employed her children, their drawing instructor, and the sculptor Hiram Powers to construct painted, mechanized visions of the spiritual condition of western citizens. My dissertation shows that the windfall generated by Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans (1831) was anticipated by the success of her “Invisible Girl” and her “Infernal Regions,” shown at the Western Museum in Cincinnati between 1828 and 1830. I argue that these exhibits succeeded so well because, like her books, they proposed a drastic but resonant vision of life in the West in which the coarseness of local manners, religious customs, western art and nature itself in the Ohio Valley was indignantly denounced. Trollope's Infernal Regions was profitable enough to be copied by the other contemporary museum in Cincinnati; it was also recast in panoramic facsimile in St. Louis, and eventually transported, intact, in 1839, to the City Saloon on Broadway, in lower Manhattan.

This dissertation explores the high water mark of southern resistance to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education: the five-year abolition of public education in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Through interrogating the "culture of civility" that guided this bureaucratic, legalistic strategy of defiance, it argues that both massive resistance and the unique trajectory of events in Prince Edward County are not the anomalies in Virginia history that state boosters suggest, but rather logically consistent outgrowths of a coherent political tradition known as "the Virginia Way." When blacks chose to step outside of the traditional channels of "managed race relations," white Virginians struck back in a manner consistent with their determination to maintain white supremacy without condoning a rise in vigilantism that might have threatened elites' control over the mechanisms of political power. It highlights the important role played by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in bolstering community institutions, lobbying for federal intervention in the crisis, serving the educational and social needs of the out-of-school children, and building the capacity of local community members to take on leadership roles in the struggle. It characterizes the Friends' work as providing the institutional framework for indigenous protest. By following the trajectory of AFSC involvement in the county, it weaves together the diverse narratives of massive resistance, community organizing and school desegregation into one multi-faceted struggle to control the terms of the future. Ultimately, however, the study explores the long-range consequences of abandoning, starving, or compromising public education. In tracing the Prince Edward story up to the present, it reveals the flimsiness of the safeguards guaranteed to keep private education accessible, the difficulty of reconstructing a gutted public system, and the multi-generational psychological, social, and economic impact of educational deprivation. It demonstrates the centrality of equal educational opportunities to every phase of the local freedom struggle, challenging the assumption that the school desegregation phase of the civil rights movement passed into history after 1960 without sparking sustained community campaigns for change or significantly contributing to the development of local cultures of protest.

‘Just Like Hitler’ explores the manner in which Nazism is used within mass American culture to create ethical arguments. Specifically, it provides a history of Nazism’s usage as a metaphor for evil. The work follows that metaphor’s usage from its origin with dissemination of camp liberation imagery through its political usage as a way of describing the communist enemy in the Cold War, through its employment as a vehicle for criticism against America’s domestic and foreign policies, through to its usage as a personal metaphor for evil. Ultimately, the goal of the dissertation is to describe the ways in which the metaphor of Nazism has become ubiquitous in discussion of ethics within American culture at large and how that ubiquity has undermined definitions of evil and made them unavailable. Through overuse, Nazism has become a term to vague to describe anything, but necessary because all other definitions of evil are subject to contextualization and become diminished through explanation. The work analyzes works of postwar literature but also draws in state sponsored propaganda as well as works of popular culture. Because of its concentration on Nazism as a ubiquitous definition of evil, it describes American culture through a survey of its more prominent, popular, and lauded works.

This study of the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) investigates the operations of the national office and examines its interactions with local branches, particularly in St. Louis. As the organization's president, A. Philip Randolph and members of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) such as Benjamin McLaurin and T.D. McNeal are important figures in this story. African American women such as Layle Lane, E. Pauline Myers, and Anna Arnold Hedgeman ran MOWM's national office. Of particular importance to this study is Myers' tenure as executive secretary. Working out of Harlem, she corresponded with MOWM's twenty-six local chapters, spending considerable time espousing the rationale and ideology of Non-Violent Goodwill Direct Action, a trademark protest technique developed and implemented alongside Fellowship of Reconciliation members Bayard Rustin and James Farmer. As a nationally recognized African American protest organization fighting for a "Double V" against fascism and racism during the Second World War, MOWM accrued political capital by the agitation of its local affiliates. In some cases, like in Washington, D.C., volunteers lacked the ability to forge effective protests. In St. Louis, however, BSCP official T.D. McNeal led a MOWM branch that was among the nation's most active. David Grant, Thelma Maddox, Nita Blackwell, and Leyton Weston are some of the thousands joining McNeal over a three-year period to picket U.S. Cartridge and Carter Carburetor for violating the anti-discrimination clause in Executive Order 8802, lobby Southwestern Bell Telephone to expand employment opportunities for African Americans, stage a summer of sit-ins at lunch counters in the city's largest department stores, and lead a general push for a "Double V" against fascism and racism. This study of MOWM demonstrates that the structural dynamics of protest groups often include a discrepancy between policies laid out by the organization's national office and the activity of its local branches. While national officials from MOWM and National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People had an ambivalent relationship with each other, inter-organizational tension was locally muted as grassroots activists aligned themselves with whichever group appeared most effective. During the Second World War, this was often MOWM.

The institutions of representation are the target of continuous reform and repair in the United States. This dissertation examines the concepts of representation that have been used to support both representational reform and the status quo. In examining these concepts, I argue that the breadth of the public discourse on representation has narrowed over time. This has been the result of changes in three ideas that constitute the concept of representation: human nature, community, and the purpose of government. The content and relative balance of these ideas shape the concept of representation over time and thus the character of representative institutions.

The dissertation analyzes the history of tourism at Shaker communities from their foundation to the present. Tourism is presented as an interaction between the host Shakers and the visitors. The culture, expectations, and activities of both parties affect their relationship to each other. Historically, tourists and other visitors have gradually dominated the relationship, shifting from hostility based on religion to acceptance based on a romantic view of the Shakers. This relationship has spilled over into related cultural phenomena, notably fiction and antique collecting. Overall, the analysis extends contemporary tourism theory and integrates Shaker history with the broader course of American history.

This dissertation examines the mortality experiences of two emerging industrial cities, Northampton and Holyoke, in the Connecticut River Valley of western Massachusetts, during the period from 1850 through 1910, and the processes that delayed the transition to lower mortality levels in New England. This was a period in which these two towns, and many others in New England, grew rapidly due to early industrialization and urbanization. Death rates rose after the middle of the nineteenth century and stabilized at high levels, only falling again after the turn of the twentieth century. This work is an anthropological enquiry into why life seems to have been more precarious in the emergent cities of New England as mortality was declining throughout western Europe. Some characteristics of these towns, for example, changing occupational, ethnic and age composition, can be ascertained from decennial census data. However, in order to analyze the relationship of mortality to changing population characteristics I use linked individual-level census and death records from 1850 to 1912 to analyze mortality across panels defined by the timing of decennial censuses. I also look at how individuals might have attempted to mitigate the risks of mortality through strategies of household formation and household economies. The use of individual-level linked census-death data in these communities supports detailed analyses of the changing risks of mortality over the emergence and eventual maturation of these industrializing urban centers. I find that the mortality experiences of Holyoke and Northampton were shaped by the processes that formed these unique communities: a large population of young adults, influxes of poorly-paid immigrant labor, densely crowded living and working conditions, and delays in adequate infrastructure, particularly clean water and sanitary sewerage. During the period mortality rose and the most vulnerable groups experienced the worst life chances. Over time, the communities matured. The population aged, growth slowed, outlying areas became accessible to industrial workers through a regional trolley system, and public works were better able to keep pace with population. Death from infectious and parasitic disease became less frequent, and death from chronic or degenerative disease more prevalent.

This study describes a moment when tourism was created in America, and how, in the decades after, it was discovered by a broad swath of American society. Beginning as an infrastructure created for the recreation of wealthy, the tourist world created in the Hudson Valley became increasingly more accessible and visible in the years after 1790, most particularly after 1817. This new visibility heavily influenced artists such as Thomas Cole and writers like James Fenimore Cooper, who created for the tourist market. By the late 1820s, these images combined with the rising prosperity of the period and the falling cost of travel spurred thousands of Americans to travel to these storied sites. By 1830, all classes of Americans had became exposed to tourists and tourism. All this happened in the context of the changing society of American cities, especially New York. There, rapid growth led to increasing social disorder. A search by the gentry for safe enclaves resulted in the tourist sites, but the very infrastructure they created to facilitate their travels was later used by the very classes they had wanted to avoid. The large numbers new tourists from non-wealthy classes began to overload the traditional tourist sites, causing increasingly visible cultural tensions. By eighteen-thirty the Hudson Valley was being written of by the cultural avant-garde as being overexposed. A search for other tourist sites ensued. Exclusivity would be briefly found in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, but others in the gentry sought longer-term solutions including private clubs, summer homes, and semi-private resorts such as Newport. Places such as Saratoga, too, would find ways to reinvent themselves, especially in the light of the decline of other formerly exclusive sites like the nearby Ballston Spa. This study uses a large body of cultural evidence supported by dozens of diaries and letters to demonstrate that by eighteen-thirty the idea of tourism had penetrated deep into American culture, affecting art, literature and commerce. Although it would take another generation before tourism became a truly mass activity, by 1830 the basis of American tourism had been set.

Born in Philadelphia on June 9, 1877, Meta Warrick Fuller was one of America's first studio sculptors of African descent. She was one of those persons of ability and genius whom, according to W. E. B. Du Bois, "the accidents of education and opportunity have raised on the tidal wave of chance."* Fuller was born into a black elite family in a city whose black community was socially and intellectually active. She was among the fortunate few selected from the Philadelphia public schools to attend J. Liberty Tadd's art school. From 1895 to 1899, she studied at the Pennsylvania Museum School of the Industrial Arts, where her gift for sculpture emerged. Unwilling to limit herself to tradi-tionally "feminine" themes, she occasionally adopted the gruesome imagery of fin de siecle Symbolist literature and painting--a choice that represented a rare act of independence on the part of a woman artist. Fuller's work grew stronger in Paris, where she studied from 1899 to 1902. Influenced by the conceptual realism of Auguste Rodin, she became so adept at depicting sensitively the spirituality of human suffering that the French press named her "the delicate sculptor of horrors." In 1902, Fuller became the protege of Rodin. Samuel Bing, patron of such innovators as Aubrey Beardsley, Mary Cassatt, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, also recognized her abilities by spon-soring a one-woman exhibition at L'Art Nouveau Bing in 1902. An artist whose career spanned over seventy years, Fuller was versatile and productive. A woman of deep religious faith who believed her artistic gifts to be God-given, she created at least one piece of religious art a year in thanks. At various times, she was a literary sculptor, at others a creator of portrait art (which she studied under Charles Grafley at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts). Although she declared that she could not specialize in African- American types, Fuller became one of the most effective chroniclers of the black experience within the context of the American experience. *Crisis, XXXII, 6(October, 1926), 246.