The Knights of Labor was 19th century America's largest and most successful labor organization, yet historians have given it scant attention. Much of the work that has been done concentrates on the Knights' decline and seeks to justify its demise. Aside from several superb community studies, few works have analyzed the Order's achievements or given it credit for the legacy it bequeathed to future working class movements. The last national survey of the Knights of Labor was completed in 1929. My study seeks to address the imbalance. The Knights organized more than a million workers in the 1880s and 1890s. What made it so successful? What were the experiences of those who joined? What did future organizers learn from the Knights? To answer these questions, I have turned to manuscript sources, the labor press, memoirs, 19th century commentary, and a variety of 20th century scholars and theorists. In the pages that follow I sketch a portrait of Knights' culture from both a local and a national perspective. I find that the Knights' rich culture--embracing ritual, ideology, music, poetry, fiction, material objects, leisure activities, and religion--defined the essence of Knighthood, and was an element of the Order's success. I identify five overlapping phases of Knights' cultural development, each of which was an amalgam of working class and popular cultures. Ultimately, though Knights of Labor culture was creative and strong, it could not overcome two larger problems facing the Order, internal factionalism and external oppression. Though the Knights of Labor faded quickly after 1890, it left a brilliant legacy upon which future working class movements were able to build.

Anthropologists studying sociocultural evolution are interested in the processes that contributed to social ranking in egalitarian societies. Individual agents must overcome the inertia of communalism to extend their authority into various domains of social life by controlling resources, people, and places essential for social reproduction. Native North Americans maintained relatively equal access to resources through reciprocity. Under some conditions, however, agents undermined reciprocity to establish privileged positions of status. I develop a political-economic model to explore how social inequality is created and perpetuated through labor mobilization and resource monopoly from archaeological remains in central Arkansas. The model explicitly articulates social negotiation and hierarchy formation with strategies and tactics of surplus extraction and its resistance to explicate how the material world is implicated in experimental social forms. I analyze the changing form, function, and distribution of settlements and artifacts associated with the establishment and abandonment of the Toltec Mounds site--the paramount center of Plum Bayou culture in the Arkansas River Lowland. Longitudinal trends in settlement patterns, mound construction, exchange relations, and the organization of technology are compared with expectations derived from the model to interpret the archaeological record. There is meaningful spatial-temporal variation in the distribution of people and objects which reflects fluctuations in social organization within and between regions. This interpretation contrasts with that of a gradual, linear trajectory of growth and development. Furthermore, changing population integration relates to political and economic processes that operate over large spatial arenas that transcend ecological, stylistic, and social boundaries. Mounting empirical evidence suggests that social ranking harbored contradictions between generosity and accumulation which allowed individuals the opportunity to resist surplus extraction. The result is a cyclical pattern of social integration and disintegration associated with diachronic shifts in central places suggesting that the processes that contributed to incipient social ranking were tenuous and politically unstable in central Arkansas. Ranking does not represent a reorganization of egalitarianism within all realms of life, nor do elite strategies to mobilize labor and monopolize surplus operate as a totality. Institutions of egalitarianism seem to lie immediately beneath the veneer of power and authority in rank societies.

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 is a study of how sixteenth-century Spaniards used fundamental aspects of material culture, and the ideas and attitudes surrounding them, to subjugate the Aztec empire of Mexico. Edicts, relaciones, court decisions, letters and chronicles have been employed to discern the attitudes of the time. Those attitudes reveal that food, clothing and shelter were used both to distinguish Spaniards from Amerindians and to bind conquerors and conquered to the same social system. Principles of hierarchy and reciprocity were employed by Spaniards and Amerindians to define the appropriate customs and means of exchange in a new, syncretic culture of conquest. Together, Spaniards and Amerindians created a sixteenth-century body politic and organic society in what Europeans deemed a "New World".