ABSTRACT Charles W. Chesnutt captures the essence of the Post Civil War period and gives examples of the assimilation process for African Americans into dominant white culture. In doing so, he shows the resistance of the dominant culture as well as the resilience of the African American culture. It is his belief that through literature he could encourage moral reform and eliminate racial discrimination. As an African American author who could pass for white, he is able to share his own experiences and to develop black characters who are ambitious and intelligent. As a result, he leaves behind a legacy of great works that are both informative and entertaining.

Antebellum political historians have long studied the era between Andrew Jackson’s election and the secession crisis through the colored knowledge of the Civil War. This project is an effort to reverse that trend. It explores northeast Tennessee’s political culture from the late 1830s through the start of the Civil War. It reveals that the Second American Party System, a wave of new enfranchised voters, and the area’s demographics mixed together to lay a foundation for the aggressive and populist political style that permeated the region from the 1830s through the 1850s. At the heart of these issues was the transition of power from East Tennessee to Middle Tennessee. As a way to analyze the region’s political culture, I look specifically at Democrats Andrew Johnson and Landon Carter Haynes and Whigs William Brownlow and Thomas Nelson.

With Christine Elliot and Linda Brent, we have two types of the supposed ungendering of women: in Christine, public lecturing and the self-propulsion of one young woman into the public, male sphere, and the ungendering through objectification and dehumanization of Linda Brent in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861. We’ll see both young women reject the accusations that they are being de-femininized by engaging in the work or survival modes that they are utilizing. We’ll see both characters assert that femininity can encompass their transgressions, that femininity is more resilient, and that women’s rightful place is in reality, in both spheres of the public and the private, both the virgin and the mother. In pairing two different narratives that revolutionize different aspects of femininity, in a way they never have before, we can see common threads of sisterhood and emphasis on the bonds between women. While Christine deals with the social and ethical difficulties that are placed upon her for moving between the public and private sphere in an urban and rural setting, Linda deals more with internalized anguish based on the notions of purity as virginity that have been instilled in her. This is a place of divergence for the two texts –enslavement, othering, virginity, and motherhood are at the center of Jacobs’ text, whereas Christine uses virginity as a legitimizing authority for its protagonist and focuses more on how publicity is thought to threaten ideal femininity. Christine, by succeeding as a women’s rights lecturer and actually ending up in a heavenly marriage after years of strife, proves that a woman can enter the public sphere and affect the lives of her fellow citizen, while maintain a sense of virtue, even outside the public sphere. Linda, by choosing the loss of her virginity as a safeguard against her licentious master, shows women that one can find virtue and essential goodness in being a mother, and that the valorization as virginity as the highest standard for femininity is not sustainable, and therefore should be replaced with a respect for mothers. Both of these inversions of the previous feminine ideal rework the entire realm of possibility for women’s potential by reimagining who fits under the title good woman.

An exploration of self-deception in proslavery arguments in the antebellum South. This work explores how proslavery theorists were able to support slavery despite overwhelming evidence that slavery was immoral. By using non-intentional self-deception, slavery supporters tested their hypothesis that slavery was good in a motivationally biased manner that aligned with their interests and desires.

This paper identifies America's first Great Moderation, a period from 1841-1856 of unbroken economic expansion and low volatility comparable to the Great Moderation of the 1980s-2000s. This moderation occurred despite a lack of central banks, low governmental spending, and barriers to interstate commerce during the antebellum period. I demonstrate this moderation in industrial production and stock market indexes and compare the first Great Moderation with the second in these economic factors. These results also call into question the conventional wisdom of the National Bureau of Economic Research business cycle chronology that the antebellum period was volatile and fraught with recessions. I then identify several possible causes of this stable growth in the effects of cotton prices, technological revolutions such as railroads, and wage and interest rate integration during the period, among other factors. Understanding these factors helps develop our understanding of the American antebellum economy and the causes of economic growth and stability, especially during these Great Moderations.

<p><italic>Narrating Infanticide: Constructing the Modern Gendered State in Nineteenth-Century America</italic> traces how modern ideas about gender and race became embedded in the institutions of law and government between the Revolution and the end of Reconstruction. Contemporary understandings of gender and race actually consolidated only in the aftermath of the Civil War, as communities embraced beliefs that women and African Americans constituted distinctive groups with shared, innate characteristics related solely to the fact that they were female or racially different. People then applied these ideas about gender and race to all arenas of life, including the law. </p> <p>Yet understanding the roles of women and African Americans through universalizing legal conceptions of gender and/or race--conceptions that crystallized in law only in the wake of the Civil War--elides the complexity of the ways in which antebellum communities responded to the interactions of women, the enslaved, and free blacks with the legal system. My study's focus on infanticide, a crime that could only be perpetrated by females, reveals how women--and men--of all races involved themselves in the day-to-day legal processes that shaped the daily lives of Americans during the early republic and antebellum periods. Communities responded to cases of infant death informed by understandings of motherhood and child mortality specific to that particular case and individual, rather than shaping outcomes--as they began to do so after the Civil War--based on broad assumptions about the race or gender of the offender. My conclusions are drawn from almost one hundred cases of infanticide and infant death between 1789 and 1877 gleaned primarily from court records and newspapers in Connecticut, Illinois, and North Carolina. In addition, the study draws on reports of other instances from around the nation, as narrated in sources such as diaries, periodicals, newspapers, crime pamphlets, and medical journals.</p> / Dissertation

In antebellum Upcounty Georgia, the Southern yeomanry developed a society independent of the planter class. Many of the studies of the pre-Civil War Southern yeomanry describe a class that is living within the cracks of a planter-dominated society, using, and subject to those institutions that served the planter class. Yet in Forsyth County, a yeomanry-dominated society created and nurtured institutions that met their class needs, not parasitically using those developed by the planter class for their own needs.

While the Shakers are associated in North American with simplicity and communalism, an examination of Shaker history reveals a dynamic and complex society. Shaker life was structured by a powerful metanarrative: the Shakers were the ‘Chosen People of God,’ who lived in ‘His Promised Land.’ This narrative, which is profoundly geographical due to its intertwining of people with place, was not static in its interpretation. Nevertheless, it served as the basis for the discourses concerning the most appropriate means to live in the World, but not be of it. Few geographers have examined religiosity and spirituality systematically. This research highlights the interaction between religiosity, identity, place, and narrative as an essential element of the human condition. Religiosity is expressed through narratives and rituals and buttresses a sense of identity and belonging in place. Particular expressions of the Shaker covenantal narrative were shaped by the places in which the Shakers existed. This work examines the Shaker experience at New Lebanon Shaker Village (New York) focusing on the antebellum period. It examines the context in which the Shakers existed, the shifts in the interpretations of the Shaker covenantal narratives, and the means by which the Shaker leadership disseminated their ideas. / Thesis (Ph.D, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2009-05-21 09:32:07.477

This work examines what constituted 19th century American military science, why it was framed within government policy and taught within the United States Military Academy, and how it became the early American way of war. The work uses as evidence a wide array of documents including biographical records of 2046 West Point graduates. It tracks the evolution of military science from Enlightenment Europe to the United States during the American Revolution and its relative obscurity until after the War of 1812. It then explains why a deliberate decision was made to transplant a French Napoleonic version of military science to serve as the curriculum of the military academy and to support the formulation of a national defense policy that called for militarized coastal frontiers and an “expansible army.” The work then follows how and why military science was modified during the period 1820-1860 in response to changes to the threats to the United States, changes related to state and federal plans for “internal improvements,” Indian wars, westward expansion, war with Mexico, and advances in military technology. Specifically it tracks how the doctrine of military science evolved from the teaching of specific Napoleonic applications to embrace subjects needed for war in North America. Inculcation in this American military science eventually came to provide the army with an officer corps that shared a common all-arms doctrine and common skill in using mathematics for military problem-solving. The majority of long-service graduates went on to spend years of their career fulfilling general staff, engineering, or academy instructor functions. The proliferation of military science through their work, and through published texts available to state volunteers, ensured that on the eve of the Civil War there existed a distinctly American, and scientific, way of war. This work challenges two late 20th century liberal arts revisionist schools, championed by Samuel Huntington and Russell Weigley, that have unfairly reduced military science to near oblivion. / Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2012-05-28 10:47:55.375

This dissertation is a comparative analysis of the yeomanry of Forsyth and Hancock counties in Georgia during the ten years prior to the Civil War. The premise argues that definitive characteristics of yeoman culture can only be found in counties that are dominated the yeomanry. Studies that find yeomen in planter dominated counties are defined those yeomen by the institutions that are created by and serve the planter society.