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This research explores the meaning, construction, representation, and function of Delaware ethnic identity during the 1820s. In 1821, nearly 2,000 Delawares (self-referentially called Lenape) crossed the Mississippi River and settled in Southwest Missouri as a condition of the Treaty of St. Marys. This dissertation argues that effects of this emigration sparked a vigorous reconsideration of ethnic identity and cultural representation. Traditionally, other Eastern Algonquian groups recognized Delawares by the metaphoric kinship status of "grandfather." Both European and Colonial governments also established Delawares as preferential clients and trading partners. Yet, as the Delawares immigrated into a new "western" Superintendency of Indian Affairs in 1821, neither status was acknowledged. as a result, Delaware representations transitioned from a taken-for-granted state into an actively negotiated field of discourse. This dissertation utilizes numerous unpublished primary source documents and archaeological data recovered during the Delaware Town Archaeological Project (2003-2005) to demonstrate the social, political, and material consequences of Delaware ethnic identity revitalization. Utilizing Silliman's (2001) practical politics model of practice theory, the archival and archaeological data sets of Delaware Town reveal the reinforcement of conspicuous ethnic boundaries, coalition-building that emphasized Delaware status as both "grandfathers" and as warriors, and also reestablishing preferred client status in trade and treaty-making. This study illuminates this poorly-known decade as a time where Delawares negotiated and exerted their ethnic identity and cultural representations to affect political, economic, and social outcomes of their choosing in the rapidly-vanishing "middle ground" of early-19th century Missouri.

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This dissertation explores the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF), a Chicano/a arts collective that produced numerous murals in Sacramento, CA, for over forty years. Grounded in Mexican and US aesthetic traditions, their murals reflect cultural hybridity and re-imagine US history through a Chicano/a perspective. Many of their works were and are located in Sacramento's Chicano/a barrios, while others occupy interethnic, public space in the vicinity of the State Capitol. By encoding hidden Chicano/a iconographies within each mural, the RCAF offers what scholar Alicia Gaspar de Alba calls "alter-Native" narratives of American history because they posit "Other" views of local history, which trouble larger frameworks of US history.;The exposition begins by exploring the RCAF's origin's-story---or, how the group emerged in the 1960s and '70s Civil Rights Movement, and also in relation to events of the early twentieth century. Both the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the 1942 Bracero Program in the US impacted Mexican Americans in meaningful ways that resonate in the memories and biographies of the RCAF. After locating the group's historical antecedents, Chapter Two examines the rise of public art in the wake of the 1960s and '70s civil rights era, which reflected ethno-political activism as well as ethnic self-actualization.;Chapter Three explores issues of gender in the RCAF, since most of the artists that comprise the group are male. Chapter Four provides a historical overview of their murals, all of which convey messages and themes of historical inclusion and intervention. Chapter Five proposes a theoretical framework on the notion of 'remapping' and how it's been used in American Studies, Literary Studies and related intellectual fields.;Finally, Chapter Six enacts a remapping by rethinking Sacramento's history according to the murals and historic spaces of the RCAF. as a conclusion, this chapter also charts the RCAF and Chicano/a art's movement into institutional space, both literally---through museum and library collections---and figuratively---in perceptions and paradigms of US art history.

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The Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and Virginia stood as a remote landscape in the heart of the Tidewater throughout the historical period. Between ca. 1630 and 1860, thousands of Diasporans took advantage of the remoteness of the swamp in various ways and formed a variety of communities. Within these Diasporic communities were Native Americans, maroons, and enslaved canal company workers who joined or formed communities based on individual and specific reasons for choosing to permanently inhabit the swamp. Diasporic communities emerged on islands in the swamp and the relative locations of these landforms had significant impacts on what kinds of communities would form and persist on each landform. as a result of the florescence of these Diasporic communities, a dynamic political-economic world developed and was sustained in the swamp. This Diasporic world is very poorly understood and recognized in traditional historical discussions and narratives. This exposition utilizes a political-economic landscape perspective that emphasizes community structuration, exile, and alienation in order to interpret the archaeological and historical record at several sites that were explored and partially excavated by the author through the Great Dismal Swamp Landscape Study (2003-2006). Using research models developed for this project, it will be demonstrated that communities maintained differing levels or degrees of connectedness to the world outside the swamp throughout the ca. 230 years prior to the Civil War. Each type of community left behind unique archaeological signatures that provide much insight into community structuration, exchange systems, subsistence systems, and daily life. It will also be shown that archaeological materials and information can provide knowledge about how exile and alienation were a dialectical aspect of the pre-Civil War political economy of the swamp. Through this comparative historical archaeological study and its political-economic landscape perspective, we will gain new and unique insights into the Diasporic world of the Great Dismal Swamp.

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This dissertation describes domestic painting in Atlanta, Georgia between 1995 and 2004 as a market defined by its intentional connection of the ideologies and spaces of art with those of bourgeois domesticity. The first half of the work seeks to contextualize the market's various objects and texts within public and academic discourses on culture that commonly posit an antithesis between the practices of bourgeois women (especially decoration) and "high" or avant-garde art, as suggested by the sentiment, "GOOD ART WON'T MATCH YOUR SOFA." Thus, Chapter 1 addresses the promises and pitfalls of sociological approaches to understanding art in general, Chapter 2 addresses two recent field studies of local markets as examples of how methodological decisions can mask ideological bias, and Chapter 3 discusses the historical context behind the divorce of art and the home as part of the gendering of aesthetic creativity as a predominantly masculine pursuit, each chapter examining the place of the literature itself in the creation of the categories of art. The second part of the dissertation provides an account of the way paintings produced in the market encode its social and spatial relations as a way of visualizing the private home and its interpersonal contents. In Chapter 4, the author proposes intuitive vision to name distinctive visual habits and bodily practices of bourgeois domesticity in contemporary Atlanta, especially the role of artworks in the phenomenological space of the home. Chapter 5 focuses on integration as domestic painting's central quality and goal: the market's various agents are integrated in a coherent social milieu not restricted to art-related roles, but that is, nevertheless, focused through aesthetic experience of the physical and stylistic features of artworks as they, themselves, are integrated into specific domestic settings. Chapters 6 and 7 chart the concrete terrain of 'home-like' spaces devoted to the production and distribution of paintings in the market, while developing the distinction between phenomenological and sight-based representations of domesticity. Finally, the Conclusion returns to the supposed antithesis between avant-garde aesthetics and the various practices known collectively as decoration as a way to address the question, "What is bourgeois art?"

From the 1730s through the 1770s Shadwell was home to Jane and Peter Jefferson, their eight children, over sixty slaves owned by them, and numerous hired workers. Archaeological and documentary evidence reveals much about Thomas Jefferson's boyhood home. Shadwell was a well-appointed gentry house at the center of a highly structured plantation landscape during a period of Piedmont settlement that scholars have traditionally classified as frontier. Yet the Jeffersons accommodated in their house, landscape, material goods, and behaviors the most up-to-date expectations of Virginia's elite tidewater culture. The material remnants of Shadwell raise questions about the character of this frontier and how the Jeffersons maintained a style of living that reflected their high social status.;The Jeffersons' wealth made it possible for them to enjoy the fashionable material goods they desired and also meant that they had the ability to influence the character and development of their community in profound ways. In providing their family with a home and consumer goods that served the familiar functions of elite society, they also fostered the growth of a local community of craftspeople whose skills the Jeffersons needed. The Jeffersons' slaves worked agricultural jobs but also were cooks, personal servants, and nurses to children and had a variety of skills to support the Jeffersons' material needs and heightened social position. The number of African Americans at Shadwell meant that slaves had opportunities to form effective families and communities. The Jeffersons' various agricultural investments required the building of infrastructure that small planters nearby could also use. Social connections and economic clout translated into political influence; the Jeffersons and their peers affected how their county grew and also how Virginia grew.;Archaeology at Shadwell gave new meaning to many of the historic documents as the material culture recovered there prompted fresh reading of much that seemed familiar. The results of the research offer new views of the Jefferson family and their role in settling Virginia, a rich description of the lives of both house and field slaves who worked for them, and a few new perspectives on Thomas Jefferson himself.