This study emphasizes the role the United States factory system played in Indian affairs during the Early National period. The first two chapters discuss national policy relating to the factories. These trading posts existed from 1796 until 1822. Washington initiated the policy as a means to help bring about a peaceful frontier. Thomas Jefferson desired to use the factory system to civilize the Indians and obtain their land. The War of 1812 disrupted the factory system. Following the war, John C. Calhoun and Thomas L. McKenney attempted to continue with their predecessor's policies, but pressure from Congress and the American Fur Company eventually forced the factory system to close. The third chapter focuses on Sulphur Fork factory and shows the disconnection between national policies and their implementation. Disorganization and ineptitude on the part of the factor caused him to utterly fail at instituting any national policy objective.

This thesis explores questions of national identity in American and British fiction in the 20th- and early 21st-century. To allow for a project focused on reading a vast array of texts, I implemented a non-traditional thesis format that focused on taking exams. My final product contains an introduction that details the parameters for the project and offers conclusions on my findings and corrections of my essays, the exam essays themselves including a revision, a detailed annotated bibliography of each primary and secondary work studied, as well as an appendix with the reading lists and the original request to try a non-traditional thesis. My readings in the American Literature list point to an opening up of our definition of "American Literature" to include historically silenced voices and contemporary minority voices. At the intersections of culture that happen all over the country, literature dealing with identity and journeys into acceptance abound. My British Literature list leads to a similar yet historically more complicated solution. Writers have expressed the increasingly divided British society (in the United Kingdom and all over the globe) by employing new aesthetic modes that both respond to the past and point to the future. By engaging both American and British perspectives, this project also serves as an example of transatlantic scholarship, not simply looking at one through the eyes of the other, but recognizing the interrelatedness historically and culturally of the two identities. The boundaries between the two identities, as well as shifting aesthetic and literary traditions, provide the context for this project.

This thesis examines the naturalization of Mexican immigrants from 1910 through 1930 using immigrant opinions of American citizenship and the broad presence of Mexican consuls in the United States to explain why many immigrants were reluctant to naturalize. Additionally, it explains the reasons for the near-doubling of naturalization rates during this period, as Mexican American activist groups such as the Order Sons of America and the League of Latin American Citizens managed to increase the benefits of American citizenship for ethnic Mexicans despite increasing anti-Mexican nativism across the United States. It argues that the years from 1910 through 1930 proved crucial in setting patterns for how Anglo Americans, Mexican Americans, and Mexican immigrants understood the role of ethnic Mexicans in the United States, and how they consequently utilized American citizenship to guide the ethnic Mexican population into the specific roles that they envisioned.

This work illustrates the popular 1986 graphic novel Pedro Prestán: Bajo el furor de las tormentas to understand the cultural and political context of Panama's military period (1968-1969). The narrative focuses on Pedro Prestán, whose contemporaries falsely condemned him for burning Colón, Panama, in 1885. A hundred years after Prestán's death, Panama's military regime, to redefine its image, devised an agenda to appropriate plebeian nationalism. In 1986, the comic's creators saw an opportunity to cast Prestán as a freedom fighter for the state in exchange for his vindication. The novel served as a space for Panama's military regime to refashion its pantheon of revolutionary leaders and for subalterns to absolve a plebeian hero in history. Since officials tacitly approved the comic's publication and recognized Prestán, the book helped the state maintain power. The study demonstrates the give-and-take nature of shaping national identity.

During the first year of the Korean War, United States Marine Corps aircraft employed effective Close Air Support (CAS) for infantry near the frontlines. This thesis examines the Marine air-ground team, a vital communication element between the striking aircraft and forward controllers on the ground. The air-ground teams improved their CAS system with each major battle of 1950, culminating during the Chosin Reservoir campaign. Despite the Air Forces focus on strategic bombing, thus hindering Navy CAS sorties, Marine air-ground teams continued to provide the critical and effective link between aircraft and infantry units. Before detailing the Korean War, this thesis describes the development of the Marine air-ground teams in World War II, and the subsequent training of aviators between the two conflicts. From inter-war training, both Marine air and infantry units gained a mutual respect for each other, as aviators became riflemen, or grunts, first. This camaraderie between air and ground elements carried into the Korean War and helped to solidify the effectiveness of Marine CAS in 1950.

Seriality and Domesticity examines how domestic serials and family literary magazines both reinforced and reshaped domesticity. As a commodity that circulated within the home, family literary magazines had to engage and to appease whole families of readers, men and women, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and children. Domestic serials were a key component of these magazines appeal to the family. As a space for intellectual debate and education, however, family literary magazines were able to subtly re-view and revise domesticity. I argue that these magazines complicate domestic ideology by espousing a professional, urban sensibility in their shaping of womens and mens roles. Consequently, these magazines and the serials within them grapple with the social changes of the latter half of the nineteenth century, advocating for a domesticity radically different from the myth of separate spheres ideology that informed analysis of the Victorian period so long. Crucially, these texts define masculine and feminine roles within the home, a shaping of domesticity often overlooked in periodical scholarship. Specifically, my project looks at how four domestic serialsElizabeth Gaskells Wives and Daughters, serialized in the Cornhill from August 1864 to January 1866 with illustrations by George Du Maurier; Margaret Oliphants The Story of Valentine and His Brother, serialized in Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine from January 1874 to February 1875; Thomas Hardys The Woodlanders, serialized in Macmillans Monthly Magazine from May 1886 to April 1887; and Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in one installment in the July 1890 issue of Lippincotts Monthly Magazineengage in or disrupt domestic discourse in the family literary magazine. I situate each of these domestic serials as part of a larger, on-going conversation about class and gender identity that occurs within and between periodicals. I also focus on these four texts and these four magazines as a means of charting the evolution of the family literary magazine and the domestic serial from the 1860s through the 1890s.

The Vicksburg campaign marked a key transitional phase of Union policy toward white Southern civilians. Initially, Northern military commanders had instituted a conciliatorily approach to Southern civilians and property, but by late 1862 the policy had evolved to a pragmatic form of warfare that allowed stricter measures but still attempted to limit the physical and monetary damage inflicted upon civilians. In the Mississippi River Valley in 1863, Major General Ulysses S. Grants Army of the Tennessee perfected a punitive policy concerning civilians known to historians as hard war, which authorized the destruction of all Confederate economic and transportation resources. This thesis examines the creation of hard war policy by the lower ranks of the Union army and concludes that the Army of the Tennessee developed hard war first in response to the distinct culture clash between Midwestern soldiers and the Secessionist residents of the Deep South.

Locating Place in Writing Studies: An Investigation of Professional and Pedagogical Place-Based Effects explores how place affects (1) doctoral candidates conducting a job search in Rhetoric and Composition (or Writing Studies) and (2) writing teachers who self-identify as interested in place-based pedagogies. Using the theory of individual terroira claim that place (as a location, a locale, and a sense of place) affects who academics are and what they doand quantitative and qualitative research methods (surveys and interviews), McCracken describes how the participants incorporated their varied and complex relationships with place into their professional lives in spite of lore which suggests that academics are placeless and rootless. The studys major findings include data which suggests that place is a determining factor for doctoral candidates when they apply for jobs and when they accept job offers, a finding which contradicts conventional wisdom and published advice for job seekers in English. The national survey of place-based pedagogues offers an overview of the perceived benefits of place-based pedagogy according to writing studies teachers. Using a case study method, McCracken profiles six writing teachers whose use of place in the classroom expands previous conceptions of a critical pedagogy of place. This study demonstrates that as much as places may be stereotyped and are often arranged hierarchically by social discourses, an awareness of place (as a category of difference) in academe by academics can push against perceptions about who academics are and what they value. McCracken encourages academics to use a matrix of difference when talking about cultural categories of difference (such as race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ability). This matrix of difference may encourage students and teachers to see difference as context-dependent. This increased awareness to individual terroir can also create opportunities for a critical pedagogy of place in writing studies, allowing writing teachers to assert that writing is a social activity dependent on local discourses and that textsmuch like placesare context-bound and context driven.

Invisible lines define our world. Geopolitically, these artificial divisions mark the boundaries of nations, states, counties, cities, and even private property. In North America, they define us as Canadians, Americans, or Mexicans. They united those within and separate those outside. More subtle invisible lines exist within the structure of society that categorize us by race, social and economic class, education, politics and religious beliefs. In the Americas, these divisions began during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. As the major European powers colonized the Americas, cartographers produced beautifully illustrated, brightly colored maps, demarcating the boundaries of each claimants territory in bold outlines. With seemingly scientific precision, they divided the largely unexplored and unsettled areas as if they controlled them as completely as they did their nation-states in the Old World. Yet these maps demarcated only an illusion of imperial control. Instead of borders that clearly separated North American empires from one another, the sparsely settled borderlands at the intersection of European claims became melting pots of social and economic cooperation among peoples of various races, nationalities and cultures. Within these pockets of settlement far removed from metropolitan centers of political and economic power, and social control, native peoples and Europeans often cooperated, intermarried, and developed their own unique and independent engines of self-determination to ensure their survival, safety and prosperity. This dissertation explores the Louisiana-Texas borderlands and the infamous Neutral Strip, integrating it into the larger diplomatic and political developments of the period between 1721 and 1838. It addresses questions of evolving national identities as Hispanic, French, Native American, African American, and mixed blood peoples cooperated in developing an economic and social system, only to see it destroyed as Anglo-American settlers became numerically dominant and imposed their rigid hierarchical social structure. In doing so, this study attempts to illuminate the true nature of this borderland region within a wider North American perspective.

In the 1840s, the United States and Great Britain stood at the edge of war concerning the Oregon Territory in North Americas Pacific Northwest. Edward Everett, the U.S. Minister in London from 1841 to 1845, worked in a complete effort to ease tensions between the nations by resolving the Oregon boundary question. Everetts unique blend of diplomatic tact, diligent work ethic, and personal aptitude enabled him to suggest and promote a compromise that suited both nations while gaining the trust of British political officials and social elites. Due largely to his ability to perceive mutually satisfying concessions and to form close relationships with key British politicians, Everett successfully laid the groundwork for the Oregon Treaty of 1846, which did much to improve Anglo-American relations.