This dissertation uses the military, technological, and environmental context of the Civil War, the First World War, and the Second World War to explain the evolution of American literature in the era of total war through eight key novels and related visual media. Because industrial weapons and massive draft armies had the capacity to destroy whole landscapes, visual and material artifacts of these wars emphasized the relationship between humans and the wastelands of war. When official rhetoric after each war emphasized regrowth and rebirth, redefining battlefields as sacred ground, the war novels of this period questioned heroism, idealism, and even humanism. Considering these novels as environmental texts reveals that they are not abstract political arguments but material correctives to the state's claim to speak for the dead. They must be read in terms of the technologies and landscapes to which they refer, necessitating a historical engagement with battlefields and artifacts as well as a critical engagement with theories of material ecocriticism and biopolitics. This framework of study reveals the ways that changing ideas about the environment shaped the modern American war novel and the ways that the material politics that these novels expressed also changed the representation of war in popular culture.

This dissertation analyzes the personal computer's (PC) domestication during the 1970s and 1980s in the U. S. I argue that in adopting the PC Americans debated and asserted ideas of technology, race, family, and gender. Revising previous explanations that situated the home computer as the natural development of mainframe machines, This dissertation argues that the device emerged from American amateur electronics culture. Furthermore, the new discourses of the personal computer centered the home as its material center that inflected and challenged the PC's other environments, such as schools, public entertainment venues, and civil institutions. While journalistic accounts of personal computing have relied on technical details and hagiography, I uncover the computer's impact on the family circle through analysis of films, newspaper articles, marketing materials, and hobbyist literature. This dissertation reads "against the grain" to recover the voices of makers and users outside the dominant culture and to understand how the home computers' emergence contributed to their marginalization. in doing so, it portrays the computer less as a force for social liberation and more as a reactionary and conservative force used to curtail and reverse 1960s civil and political flux. in short, it finds discourses around personal computers contested and fostered 1.) assertions of its technology as particularly suited for a patriarchal heteronormative family; 2.) parental worries about creativity and education that perpetuated racial inequalities in schools and 3.) threats to masculinity in public entertainment venues, such as the arcade.

This thesis argues that the GIF, as an underexplored analytical vertex within the broader matrix of media ecologies, should be understood as a generative nodal point in the American system of racialized violence. Thought in relation to its medium specificity, the GIF's materiality, particularly its capacity for infinite looping, is critically interrogated for its potential to amplify the circuitry of dominating racialization that felicitously condition the GIF's circulation. I open my argument with focus on a subset of the GIF genre known as the reaction GIF, which, in its frequently racialized form, is situated within the interconnected genealogies of the figures of the mammy, the minstrel, and the machine. The reaction GIF is shown as a contemporary iteration of minstrel performance, known as blackface minstrelsy, that is deeply imbricated with the subordinating racialization of Black women. I demonstrate that the violent genealogies of mammy, minstrel, and machine facilitate the machinic transfiguration of Black women made into GIF content, a process of making-machine of the Black woman subject. Making-machine is the site of ontological capture the racialized reaction GIF institutes, and those Black women caught within its digital field become the inhuman iconography of the medium's motif. To substantiate this account of the racializing properties of the GIF, the text engages the GIF at the level of its mediatic specificity and through questions of affective labor and its expropriation. I contend that the mediatic properties of the GIF are central to its modulating brokerage of affect, and it is this capacity to disperse infinitely differentiated affective impulses that underpins the racialized reaction GIF's making-machine of Black women subjects.

This work examines race and class in early Washington, D.C. punk from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. It is my contention that written punk memoirs rarely give a contextual look at each movement. From rose-colored memoirs, many inside or outside the punk community view the movements as genuine rebellions against mainstream American music and values. It is my view that subversive movements do not emerge completely free from institutional oppression. The same is true with punk. to examine punk's beginnings, I analyze punk movements in the United Kingdom and Los Angeles before turning to a detailed account of early Washington, D.C. punk. in order to contextualize early DC punk, I give a robust historical background of the city of Washington, DC from its' beginnings up to the 1960s. From there I examine two DC bands, Minor Threat and Bad Brains, giving special regard to how each band moves throughout racialized areas of DC. It is my aim to complicate how we view cultural movements that seem, on the surface, to reject mainstream American values.

The racialized logics that uphold and perpetuate U.S. settler colonialism are not confined within U.S. borders. Instead, the legacies of white settler colonization and American Indian resistance are woven into processes of Americanization, globalization, transnational migrations, and cultural exchange. The role of white settler cultural production in the ongoing process of U.S. settler colonialism is well-established, as well as the advent of mass culture in facilitating cultural exchange between the U.S. and Europe. Regarding the specific relationship between the United States and Italy, many studies have noted the immense influence of the mythology of the American West in Italian cultural production and, conversely, the impact Italian emigrants to the United States left on American culture and society. The ways in which U.S. settler colonialism intersects with and connects these histories brings to light how U.S. settler colonialism has evolved into an international, rather than solely American, project. “Italy’s American West: Brava Gente, American Indians, and the Circulation of Settler Colonialism” positions the Italian state and Italians as settlers-from-afar of the American West in this evolution. The simultaneity of circulations of American mass culture in Italy, Italian colonialism in Africa, and mass Italian emigration to the United States imbued the development of Italian national identity with U.S. settler colonial logics and expanded the global influence of U.S. settler colonialism. Buffalo Bill’s two tours of Italy in 1890 and 1906, the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and Western-themed Italian comic books published from 1948 to today intertwined U.S. white settler cultural production with Italian cultural production. Viewing this cultural production under the umbrella of “transnational settler colonialism”—the circulation of U.S. settler logics and Native resistance in the movements of people and ideas between Italy and the United States—frames them as evidence that U.S. settler colonialism helped construct Italian national identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and continues to inform Italian expressions of colonial desires.

This dissertation examines how birders in the mid-20th century created an institutional culture and national community autonomous from ornithology, working to define birding as an activity which blended practices and ideas from science and sport. The negotiations over the relative prominence of science and sport inform contemporary dialogues about citizen science and how to involve recreationists/amateurs in scientific work. While this story is often told from the perspective of scientists, the reality is that birders borrowed from science but also pursued their own goals and practices. Birding, which sits at the crossroads of science and sport, presents a unique case because as birders worked to define their activity and build an institutional culture they were beset by debates not merely about best practices, but about the fundamental nature of birding. Was it science, or sport? And if it was a mix of the two, what was the appropriate ratio and which element should be dominant? These were the questions that birders in the mid-20th century struggled to answer, and the debates about how to answer them defined birding culture and practice in ways that continue to reverberate through not just birding, but ornithology, bird conservation, and citizen science.

In this thesis, I analyze how The Brownies' Book projected the ideals of the New Negro Movement by positioning Black children as crucial to the period's creation of a new Negro identity. My analysis begins by exploring various examples of racist imagery of the period and how the periodical subverted those negative representations of Black children and Black life. In my examination of The Brownies' Book's representation of Blackness, I discuss the minstrel tradition and the racist popular cultural imagery of the 1920s. By analyzing the positive representations of Blackness within The Brownies' Book, my study shows how the editors of the periodical asserted the humanity of Black children and promoted racial pride. The second part of my study offers examination of how the periodical's authors utilized fairytales to appeal to a common trope in the construction of American childhood to further the mission of prominent race leaders. Lastly, part three offers analysis of the periodical as a cross-written text, meaning it addresses both child and adult readers. In each of these sections, my project presents The Brownies' Book as an influential work that supported the New Negro Movement's refashioning of the Black racial identity by celebrating Black children during the early twentieth century.

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