<p> This dissertation reviews the deliberate and evolutionary development of cultural nationalism through food and cuisine, specifically the methods and manners in which Americans during the early Republic conceptualized and produced a distinct national culinary culture. Through multiple forms of evidence including published cookbooks, travelogues, etchings and paintings, nutritional studies, newspaper articles, and essays, Americans and Europeans employed food as a symbolic tool to redefine their definitions of national culture. The production and consumption of certain foodstuffs was indeed an essential component in the process of interpreting the burgeoning American postcolonial national consciousness, often at the expense however of an open and inclusive society. While the current scholarship contends that Americans remained anchored to their colonial British food systems in the early national period, this research reveals a more complicated narrative of identity construction that ultimately highlights a complex ideological and cultural transformation. In short, this work analyzes how intellectual descriptions of American cuisine affected attitudes and perceptions of national character formation in the early American Republic.</p><p>

<p> Before the United States entered World War I, President Wilson and Congress established the Council of National Defense, August 29, 1916. Each state formed a State Council that oversaw the structure and organization of smaller county councils, community councils, women's committee, and black auxiliary councils. Scholarship focused on Arkansas State Council of Defense (ASCD) is scarce, but scholarship on Colored Auxiliary Council of Defense (CACD) for Arkansas is virtually nonexistent. </p><p> This digital history project, titled <i>The Arkansas Colored Auxiliary Council: Black Activism during World War I, 1917-1918</i>, explores the history of CACD, its formation, individuals involved, and some of its accomplishments. The goal of this project is to bring awareness to the CACD&rsquo;s mission, work, and members. Official reports submitted by Arkansas to the federal government omitted work accomplished by the Colored Auxiliary Council. This project highlights the contributions of black civilians and CACD in Arkansas during World War I.</p><p>

<p> The end of the Revolutionary War proved to be a significant moment in United States history. Not only did it signal the birth of a new nation, but it also affected the institution of slavery. Wartime rhetoric such as "All men are created equal," left the future of American slavery in doubt. Northern and mid-Atlantic states began to implement emancipation plans, and the question of what to do with free blacks became a pressing one. It soon became apparent that free blacks would not be given the same rights as white Americans, and the desire to have blacks removed from society began to increase. One proposed solution to this problem was the idea of sending free and manumitted slaves to Africa. A man by the name of John Brown Russwurm (1799&ndash;1851) would play a prominent role in the colonization movement, and his life and legacy reflect the controversy surrounding the idea of colonization.</p>

<p> Isaiah Lukens of Horsham, Pennsylvania was a renowned mechanic of his age. Having apprenticed to his father Seneca Lukens, he set out from his provincial residence in 1811 to establish himself as clock- and watchmaker in Philadelphia, where he developed a greater understanding of the mechanical arts. In addition to his tall case clocks, Lukens&rsquo; various creations included tower clocks, most notably in the Pennsylvania State House in 1828; odometers; a model of Charles Redheffer&rsquo;s perpetual motion machine; and air rifles. During his travels to Europe, Lukens aided in the improvement of other medical instruments like the lithotripter. These inventions demonstrated his mechanical ingenuity, catapulting him to fame in Philadelphia&rsquo;s literary and scientific organizations, namely as Vice President of The Franklin Institute. </p><p> The graduate thesis explores the working life, craftsmanship, and scientific legacy of Isaiah Lukens in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia. It describes the tools, methods, and designs Lukens utilized in his clock commissions and how they encouraged him to partake in other scientific pursuits, thereby influencing the development of his mechanical inventions. The thesis also presents Lukens&rsquo; relationships with inventors and clockmakers like Joseph Saxton of Philadelphia, signifying Lukens&rsquo; prominence within Philadelphia&rsquo;s intellectual circles. Through the diversification of his clockmaking trade, Isaiah Lukens distinguishes himself from other Philadelphian artisans as a versatile machinist whose scientific contributions impacted America&rsquo;s preindustrial trades.</p><p>

Black communities located in cities across the country became sites of explosive political unrest during the mid-1960s. These uprisings coincided with a period of intensified political activity among African Americans nationally, and played a decisive role in expanding national concern with black political struggle from a singular focus on the Civil Rights movement led by black southerners to consider the "race problem" clearly present in the cities of the North and West. Moreover, unrest within urban black communities emerged at a time when alternate political analyses of the relationship between black people and the American state that challenged the goal of integration and presented different visions of black freedom and identity were gaining considerable traction. The most receptive audience for these radical and nationalist critiques was found among black students and cadres of militant, young black people living in cities who insisted on the right to self determination for black people, and advocated liberation through revolution and the application of black power to secure control over their communities as the most appropriate goal of black political struggle. The following study examines grassroots political organizations formed by black people in Cleveland, Ohio during the early 1960s in order to analyze the development of the tactics, strategies, and ideologies that became hallmarks of Black Power by the end of the decade. These developments are understood within the context of ongoing political struggle, and particular attention is paid to the machinations of the multifaceted system of racial oppression that shaped the conditions against which black Clevelanders fought. This struggle, initially aimed at securing unrestricted employment, housing, and educational opportunities for black people, and curtailing episodes of police brutality against them, culminated in five days of unrest during July 1966. The actions of city officials, especially the Mayor and members of the Cleveland Police Department, during the Hough uprising clarified the nature of black oppression in Cleveland, thereby illuminating the need for and uses of both the formal political power of the ballot, as well as the power of the bullet to defend black people and communities through the force of arms.

<p> In December 1865 the South Carolina State Legislature ratified a series of laws designed to control the social and economic futures of the freedpeople. Informally known as the Black Code, South Carolina&rsquo;s white leadership claimed these laws protected blacks from their own naivet&eacute; in their newfound freedom. Rather, the Black Code relegated African Americans to inferiority and perpetuated the long-standing belief in white supremacy that permeated the South. </p><p> The South Carolina Black Code limited the freedmen&rsquo;s civil rights, regulated their employment opportunities, and attacked the details of their most intimate personal relationships. Despite the challenges they faced, African American&rsquo;s did not quietly accept their new quasi-slave status. In South Carolina, the freedmen voiced their concerns regarding the new laws and became active in state politics. African Americans embraced their opportunity to create positive political change, which along with other factors ultimately led to the demise of the Black Code. With support both locally and nationally, black South Carolinians soon gained rights previously denied to them. In less than a year&rsquo;s time, the South Carolina Black Code ceased to exist as a result of state and federal legislation. </p><p> The significance of the South Carolina Black Code was not as much in the letter of the laws themselves, but rather in the message the creation of the code sent to both the freedpeople and their supporters. To South Carolina&rsquo;s white leadership, though free, African Americans were not their equals. Moreover, the Black Code established precedent for future laws designed to discriminate against African Americans. The Black Code created a foundation for antebellum-like hostilities against former slaves in the post-bellum South. Segregation and violence ensued and fostered a legacy that lasted for almost a century.</p>

<p> Saint Frances Orphan Asylum and Saint Elizabeth Home were institutions in post-bellum Baltimore for African American orphans. Saint Frances Orphan Asylum was founded and managed by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first community of women religious of African origin. The Franciscan Sisters, whose order originated in England, directed Saint Elizabeth&rsquo;s Home. As Catholic institutions, the orphanages received support, albeit in differing levels, from the Archdiocese of Baltimore. This study investigated the two institutions and their place in the Catholic Church. Primary source documents from the Oblate Sisters of Providence Archive and the Franciscan Sisters of Baltimore Archive form the basis for this dissertation. An analysis of those documents, and others, reveals that race and gender were critical factors in Catholic support of the two institutions. Saint Elizabeth Home, run by a white order of nuns, received a great deal more backing, both financial and political, than did Saint Frances Orphan Asylum. Support for the Oblates and their institution varied depending upon the leadership of the church at a particular time and the personal beliefs.</p>

<p> This dissertation examines how Israel's establishment affected the relationship between Black Americans and American Jews in the United States. It traces the efforts of a group of leading American Jews, in the ranks of Jewish advocacy organizations, academia, show business, and the American Jewish press, who attempted to leverage their personal, political and professional connections with various prominent Black Americans, in order to elicit Black American support for Israel after World War II. It asks in turn, how the targeted Black Americans responded to the pressure they faced from these prominent American Jews. </p><p> Relying primarily on previously unexamined archival material, this narrative of the changing relationship between Black Americans, American Jews and Israel, addresses the historical conundrum of why American Jews got involved with Black American civil rights to the extent that they did. In contrast to previous studies, this dissertation argues that American Jewish involvement in Black American civil rights constituted a practical quid pro quo. It thus contradicts past conceptions of American Jewish civil rights contributions as primarily a philanthropic undertaking. When prominent American Jews threw their support behind Black Americans, politically and professionally, in the 1950s and 1960s, they made it clear that in return they both wanted and expected Black American support for their interests, including Israel. </p><p> Prominent American Jews including American Jewish Congress's Will Maslow, leading American Rabbi and Zionist Stephen Wise, impresario Sol Hurok, and legendary performer Eddie Cantor, among many others attempted to pressure Black American civil rights leaders, like Walter White and Martin Luther King, the United Nations diplomat Ralph Bunche, and famed performers Lionel Hampton, Marian Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Josephine Baker and many more, to support Israel. In the instances when prominent Black Americans agreed to these terms, their fame, success and influence in their respective fields made them some of the most beneficial Israel supporters in the United States. More often than not, however, American Jewish efforts to leverage their relationships to demand support for Israel resulted in tensions and resentment from prominent Black Americans. This dissertation therefore, demonstrates that the late 1960s clashes between Blacks and Jews, which scholars have heretofore identified as the "death-knell of Black-Jewish relations" in the United States, actually reflected tensions that mounted, often over Israel, during the course of the two preceding decades. Ultimately, this dissertation argues, Black Americans' perspectives on Israel, between 1947 and 1970, reflected the changing nature, tone, and significance of their relationships with the American Jews, who sought to influence them.</p><p>

This study is an interpretive cultural history of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), with a focus on its cultural policy goals during the "golden age" of U.S. public television, from the passage of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act until 1973, when the service was restructured and politically blunted by the Nixon Administration. Drawing from a poststructural approach to media historiography, and from cultural theory, the study focuses on the key cultural priorities ascribed to PBS: Quality, innovation, pluralism, enlightenment, democracy and problem-solving. While these prioritiese were presented in the terminology of the "public interest," the study argues that they are more productively understood as idealized rationalizations constrained by capitalist contradictions, and by hierarchies of culture, knowledge, and power. The study shows how the conception and implementation of a "second chance for television" was socially constituted, shaped by a nexus of social, economic and ideological forces, and expreseed within and across policy, institutional and cultural contexts. Revisiting institutional, policy and popular discourses as well as early PBS programming the study traces the multiple contradictions that positioned PBS as simultaneously superior, edifying, diverse and democratic, and traces its relationship with its core audience, the professional-managerial class (PMC). The main thesis is that the liberal idealiasm of the 1960s, the mythologies upholding the American class structure and the residual discourse of the mass culture debate intersected with the social and political uprisings of the late 1960, producing an inherently contradictory agenda for PBS. The push for television reform gained currency with assertions of cultural hierarchy and class superiority, as well as with calls for the reinvigoration of pluralism, citizenship and equality of opportunity. PBS was developed during a public service-oriented context and debuted nationally during an era of activism and civil disobedience. It was partially receptive to the social and political movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and partly concerned with serving minority and disadvantaged Americans, but it was also called upon to function as a "governmental apparatus" that could channel disobedience and dissent into official procedures and established power hierarchies. This contradictory potential was what rendered PBS threatening to certain regional constituencies, and to powerful conservatives like Nixon, who drew from political, geographical and class tensions to frame public television as a bastion of East Coast liberal elitism in an attempt to curb its political influence. By examining the early ideals and tensions that shaped the social construction of PBS, my study contributes to American television history, cultural studies, media studies and cultural policy studies.

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.