The Jay-Grenville Treaty, signed between Great Britain and the United States in 1795, resolved numerous outstanding diplomatic disputes and diffused a potential second Anglo-American war. It provided ten years of peace, and through new commercial opportunities materially aided a decade of remarkable American economic growth. Yet the treaty caused considerable political controversy in the United States. The compromise it involved on liberal principles of maritime law proved politically unpopular with instinctively Anglophobic Jeffersonian Republicans. Bitter memory of defeat in the treaty ratification later led President Thomas Jefferson to reject a second Anglo-American treaty in 1806, after the first had expired. Though not solely responsible, this decision led directly to the War of 1812. Chapter one employs British records to show how far the Jay-Grenville Treaty improved the fortunes of American merchants in admiralty court proceedings. Chapter two uses personal papers of American merchants to examine their collective view of the treaty. Chapter three analyzes the importance of the treaty to Alexander Hamilton's theory of political economy, focusing particularly on finance and social mobility. Chapter four shows the very different theory of political held by Thomas Jefferson, explaining why the treaty proved so controversial despite its successful operation. Chapter five uses newspapers to describe popular engagement with the political issues outlined in chapters three and four, emphasizing the treaty's role in the emergence of American democracy.

Gwen Bristow's best sellers had all but disappeared from bookshelves, libraries, and the memories of American readers until recently when several of her more popular historical novels were reissued. Although some of Bristow's novels are available, her most important work, a three-part series that would eventually be called The Plantation Trilogy, has been largely ignored by scholars. Yet, of particular import are the ways in which Bristow uses the genre of the historical novel to further an agenda that gives insight into several important issues of her own time, the 1930s. Bristow sets her narratives in previous time periods to address the needs of the Great Depression era from a safe distance. She is specifically concerned with how people can and do cope with the Depression, how the South is defining itself culturally and regionally, and how the changing roles of women are informed by the ideology of Progressivism.

Scholars often oversimplify Southern Baptist reactions to the civil rights movement. This study recovers the nuances of Southern Baptist responses by interweaving church records, Atlanta Baptist Association minutes, church member interviews, and primary documents on neighborhood racial transition to articulate the story of six Atlanta-area churches from 1954 to 1975. Capitol Avenue Baptist, Bellwood, and Kirkwood, all located in racially transitioning areas, faced the decision of whether to stay and minister, close, or follow white members to the suburbs. At First Baptist Atlanta, months of demonstrations revealed a membership divided on desegregation. On the affluent northside, Second-Ponce Baptist directly experienced little of the civil rights movement, highlighting differences in Southern Baptists' attitudes based on class and experience. Dogwood Hills Baptist members contested the fate of their racially progressive pastor. This study contributes to the growing scholarship concerning southern whites occupying the broad middle ground between hardliner segregationists and racial activists.

This paper examines the relationship between Union soldiers from states along the Ohio River and Copperheads, members of the Peace faction of the Democratic Party during the American Civil War. The unique process of the Union Army's politicization was in large part driven by these Copperhead agitators. It encompasses soldiers' experiences both on the home front, as described in letters from family and friends, and in the field, marching through territory with residents who resented their presence. Throughout the war, soldiers and society grappled with questions of loyalty and what constituted a loyal citizenry. This region was a hotbed of Copperhead activity during the war, and to many soldiers Copperheads represented a tangible threat to their homes and families along with the war effort. Many soldiers struggled with the concept that such men could have a say in politics, while they, far from home, could not. An important facet of this relationship is the way in which these accounts of Copperhead agitation clashed with the political leanings many soldiers may have had towards the Democratic Party. Although some positions, such as pro-slavery and anti-emancipation, had sympathetic ears amongst the army, the consistent drumbeat of anti-war sentiment from these Copperheads drove soldiers towards the Republican Party. This most notably shows during elections, especially in the key elections for Ohio Governor in 1863 and U.S. President in 1864. By voting from the field in 1863 and 1864, soldiers remained active participants in the growing American democracy.

From 1815 to 1848, Richard M. Johnson was involved in some way in the great political and social issues addressed by the nineteenth century United States. A Representative and Senator from Kentucky, Johnson embodied the democratic spirit of the western frontier in his lifestyle, relationships, and most notably his politics. He remained an unrepentant slaveholder who nonetheless engaged in open relationships with enslaved women. He acknowledged his children from his relationship with his enslaved mistress Julia Chinn and sought to introduce his daughters into white society. Although elite southerners along the Atlantic Coast balked over his mixed-race relationships, Johnson was controversially elected to the Vice Presidency in 1836. Most historians attributed Johnson's electoral difficulties to his mixed-race relationships, Johnson in fact angered elite Tidewater southerners from the beginning of his political career. He championed a more authentic democracy than contemporary Jeffersonians or Jacksonians, often taking positions at odds with the planter elite that comprised the leadership of the Jefferson and Jackson influenced Democratic Party. Johnson embraced the tenants of democratic nationalism--congressional compensation, abolishment of imprisonment for debt, worker's rights, the rights of immigrants, government sponsored exploration of the west, and large-scale electoral democratization--well before southern slaveholding Democrats and before many northern Democrats as well. He refused to be tied to ideology, occasionally affirming banks and internal improvements if he believed the cause democracy and the West might be furthered. He courted urban workers, a constituency largely ignored by southern party bosses. In the process he made enemies, angering at times Andrew Jackson, James Polk, and others committed to the wholesale maintenance of the plantation system. Although his legacy has been vastly underappreciated by historians, Johnson, not Jefferson or Jackson, laid the groundwork for the Democratic Party's transformation from a party committed to state rights agrarianism into one that embraced populist nationalism.

This work examines James Monroe's attempt to craft his historical legacy. The American founders believed that they had created a new form of government dedicated to the protection of liberty. They dedicated their political lives to the promotion of this new kind of liberal republicanism. Thomas Jefferson taught James Monroe that his personal legacy would be inexorably tied to the American experiment. Monroe dedicated his life to championing the republican cause. Monroe believed that his particular part in the promotion of the cause would be to help spread republican ideas around the globe. As a young minister to France during that nation's Revolution in the 1790s, Monroe's first attempt to spread republicanism nearly destroyed his career. For the rest of his life Monroe believed that the United States had not done enough to support the republican cause in France. During the next two decades as Monroe made his way up the political ladder he came to understand that only by first achieving high political office could he acquire the power to cement his legacy as a republican champion. Monroe finally tried to make up for his and the country's failure in Revolutionary France and secure his legacy with the Monroe Doctrine. Monroe saw the Doctrine as his last, best chance to cement his legacy as a champion of the republican cause. He hoped to use it as a signal to the world that the United States would support any people who hoped to throw off the shackles of monarchy and follow in the footsteps of the United States by embracing the republican experiment. He hoped that championing the republican experiment in the west would be his legacy to the world. It would allow him to stand beside men like his mentor Jefferson and be remembered as the Revolution's greatest diplomat helping to spread republicanism around the globe.

My dissertation offers a re-vision and melding of critical pedagogies and epideictic rhetoric in an attempt to show the critical educative function of epideictic and how a critical pedagogy operates rhetorically. I define epideictic as any rhetoric that helps shape or critique cultural beliefs, values, and practices, and I show how the common understanding of epideictic in educative settings as a means for upholding orthodoxies limits epideictic's educative potential. Specifically, I look at how the Christian genesis for Paulo Freire's writings has been largely ignored in the field of Composition and how understanding religious rhetoric as epideictic rhetoric enables compositionists to more readily adapt and use Freire's theories in our classrooms. Not only does translating the religious rhetoric found in Freire into epideictic rhetoric allow the religious aspects of Freire's pedagogy to be applicable to any educative setting, it also opens up a conversation about how to use rhetoric to help teachers and students understand the purposes of critical pedagogies. By focusing on epideictic, I add a substantive and tangible focus on writing and rhetoric to critical pedagogy.

My thesis shows how J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy uses nineteenth-century gender norms discussed in children's periodicals but undercuts these norms through the interjections of his conflicted narrator. My first chapter demonstrates how two widely known nineteenth-century boys' magazines, the Boys of England and the Boy's Own Paper, portray manly boyhood through the lens of the feminine. These periodicals present conflicting views of boyhood, but both suggest that boys need girls. In the second chapter, I argue that J. M. Barrie expresses these norms, absorbed during his own youth, in his novel, Peter and Wendy. This novel also suggests that boys need girls, employing the ideals of boyhood and girlhood expressed in the nineteenth-century boys' periodicals. The narrator's frequent and disruptive comments, however, undermine these gender norms, drawing attention to the fractures in late Victorian models of ideal boyhood and girlhood.

My dissertation explores the imperialist rhetorics of nineteenth-century journalist Frances Power Cobbe. The project intersects feminist rhetorical theories with periodical studies and Irish studies in order to more fully examine how Cobbe, a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry, negotiates her classed and gendered positions within the English periodical press. Using seven essays about Ireland that Cobbe wrote for various periodicals as case studies, I show that Cobbe was able to negotiate each periodical as a rhetorical space: her ability to shape what was essentially the same argument--that England should remain in control of Ireland--for the different audiences of each publication proves her ability to function successfully as a rhetor within Victorian culture, a culture that circumscribed the voices of women and colonial "others." Cobbe used the genre conventions of the periodical essay to address a mostly English audience from the considerably disadvantaged position of an Irish woman, adopting the "default masculinity" of the editorial voice of the middle-class periodical in order to construct an objective, and thus, persuasive, persona. Cobbe was a writer who performed a number of identities, a writer through which we can follow several lines of inquiry: we can look to her writing as evidence of women's agency within a culture that sought to repress women's expression; or we can look to her writing as evidence of the perspective of a loyalist Anglo-Irish woman writing about the ongoing conflicts between Ireland and England. My project does both. Cobbe's most persuasive strategy hinges on her ability to fashion an identity that uses her experiential knowledge as an Anglo-Irish woman in order to persuade. My central thesis is that Cobbe used the periodical press to rearticulate the position of cultural "other" as a location of rhetorical power by constructing an identity that would speak from an authoritative position in between or even outside of paradigmatic and often opposite positions. By shifting the power to a space outside the location usually invested with power in Victorian culture--read: white, male, middle-class or above, straight Englishman--Cobbe could speak persuasively in multiple and shifting contexts.

This study examines the life, career, and evolving reputations of William Hull (1753-1825) up to his appointment as first governor of Michigan Territory in 1805. Usually remembered for his surrender of Fort Detroit and the U.S. Northwestern Army in 1812, Hull earlier had been known to contemporaries as an intrepid Revolutionary officer, a determined pro-Constitution Federalist, and then, perhaps surprisingly, a leading Republican of Massachusetts. Historians have hitherto paid little attention to Hulls early career, nor have they made extensive use of his widely scattered papers. Yet his Revolutionary and postwar contributions were significant, remarkably varied, and frequently controversial. His diverse roles and reputations well illustrate the dynamic and often-divided character of American society in an early republican period that evoked a range of political, economic, and social reorientations. Born in western Connecticut, Hull gained distinction as a Yale graduate, long-serving Continental officer, founder of the Society of the Cincinnati, lawyer, opponent of Shayss Rebellion, advocate of the Constitution, officer lobbyist to Congress, federal envoy to Canada, commercial entrepreneur, speculator in western (including Yazoo) lands, militia general, county magistrate, Masonic lodge master, state senator, trustee and agent of the New England Mississippi Land Company, and influential Jeffersonian Republican in Federalist-dominated Massachusetts. Over many years he participated in, and commented on, many of the critical events, activities, and debates that shaped the young American republic and his adopted state. Hulls military and civilian roles not only provide necessary background for his later, more famous actions, but also highlight important aspects of American military, economic, and political culture of the Revolutionary and early national years. He represented a variety of interests, broad and narrow, and espoused views that competed for dominance in this extraordinarily contentious era. Among his chief concerns throughout was to protect the legacy of the Revolution as he understood it, whether as a veteran against civilian leaders, a Federalist against Antifederalists, or a New England Republican against High Federalists. Admired by some and resented by others, Hull reflected the swirling ideological forces of his day, and, like the new nation itself, embodied both idealism and opportunism.