Militias played a fundamental role in Spanish American Colonial society. In Central America, the influence of the militias over colonial society increased after 1755 thanks to the changes proposed in the Bourbon Reforms, where most of the taxation revenues and new earnings of the monopolies were used to finance the armament, uniforms, and militia payroll. The creation of new militias also allowed great numbers of people to enjoy privileges and honors, two things that were extremely important for the Spaniards. In similar ways, the exemptions attracted popular participation in the defense of the Crowns holdings. Through their participation, Mestizos and castes enjoyed military honors and the use of uniforms, elements that increased public recognition and social mobility. Finally, the militias defended the Crowns territories against both foreign and native enemies, therefore becoming the most important institution in the day-to-day life of Central America. Their importance in the defense of the territories justified unlimited monetary subsidies.

Beyond Outpost: Fort Worth, 1880-1918 argues that historians have neglected the importance of the period between 1915 and 1918 for Fort Worths development into a metropolitan area. The focus is on economics but attention is also given to Hells Half Acre, Fort Worths legendary vice district, and the associated municipal infrastructure, particularly the waterworks, which constituted a reoccurring problem. The study concludes that Fort Worth reached an apogee in 1919 when its manufacturing output surpassed all other Texas cities. Fort Worths history was one of struggle, a struggle that the city came very close to losing. During the Civil War the area suffered a declining population and a stagnate economy before cattle drives in the late 1860s sparked commercial activity. After 1870 the herds declined, sending Fort Worth into another crisis before the arrival of a railroad in 1876 rejuvenated the economy. In the 1880s an impressive railroad expansion fostered the beginnings of a municipal infrastructure with paved streets, streetcars, and the first waterworks. In the second half of the decade many citizens realized that railroads did not provide sufficient commercial stimulation, that great cities needed factories. The Panic of 1893 devastated Fort Worth so thoroughly that less industrial output was recorded in 1900 than in 1890. The arrival of the Swift and Armour packinghouses in 1903 offered yet another rescue from economic insignificance, doing so to the degree that Fort Worth spent years savoring its good fortune. After 1914 Fort Worth began to recover its zeal for industrial expansion. in part, because of a happy confluence of spiraling demands for meat and grains as supplies increased at the same time that oil was discovered at Ranger, Texas and that civic boosterism revived to play an important role in attracting four major World War I military bases. The synergisms of those forces made Fort Worth Texas largest industrial producer in 1919.

This dissertation describes and analyses the major amphibious operations of the early American Republic and assesses their role in building naval and military traditions within the United States.

This paper traces in detail the lives, investments, expenses, and debts of two related Texas families between 1880 and 1930. During this period, as the rural population moved into the cities, agriculture and land ownership transitioned from the basis of American wealth to be replaced by urban professionals and manufacturing investments. The records of these families record how middle-class farmers lived and adapted and how they managed their small town businesses. These details provide an important and necessary framework upon which the more general conclusions of macro-economic trends depend. The Caufield-Cavitt and Young-Foote families transitioned from cattle and sheep ranching on the frontier into cotton and grain crops. They moved into the neighboring small towns and invested in agricultural related industries, using their cotton income to finance their debts. When the prices for agricultural products became depressed, they faltered and failed. The Young/Foote family remained on their ranches and only cautiously invested in other ventures. They maintained control of their land and fortunes.

This dissertation examines the construction of the act of reading sacred Christian texts in sixteenth-century England. The advent of print and the legalization of vernacular religious texts in England created new rhetorical spaces which both defined and were defined by a changing religious climate and by the interactions of oral, written, and print cultures. Theologians, translators, editors and printers worked to define what it meant to engage sacred texts as they worked to stabilize their visions of the Church of England or increase book sales. <br><br> Though scholars have reconstructed the reading practices of highly educated members of early modern English society by examining their book collections, marginalia, and other writings, significantly less has been done to understand the reading practices of the lower orders. Printing records reveal that the most popular books of the period were editions of English Psalters, complete Bibles, and Testaments of the Bible. John Foxe&rsquo;s <italic>Actes & Monuments</italic> did not sell at the rate of Bibles and Psalms, but it nevertheless entered into popular consciousness when it was ordered placed in all parish churches in 1571. My study considers the ways these popular books constructed relationships among readers and sacred texts. The paratexts of these widely circulated editions of sacred texts and the first four editions of Foxe&rsquo;s <italic>Actes & Monuments</italic> reveal multiple, often competing, conceptions of the act of reading. And yet, despite the different ends imagined for reading in these books, reading sacred texts is regularly constructed within a communal context. The final chapter of this study considers the theory of reading put forth in the Sidney Psalter. In this rather private text which circulated exclusively in manuscript form, the notion that reading sacred texts is a communal activity recurs and is put in the service of legitimating the poet&rsquo;s craft for devotional use.

Humans required local ecological knowledge of the Red River basin when making community decisions. Many cultures ignored that knowledge causing serious social, political, and economic repercussions. The introductory chapter places the narrative within a historiographical and theoretical framework. Chapter two explores natural history, archeological records, Amerindian resources, and colonial Spanish and French written records to prove that humans have been agents of change in the upper Red River basin for millennia. Chapter three illustrates the nation state's attempts from 1803 to 1860 to make the environment and cultures of the Red River basin more "legible." Chapter four details the contest for the plains of the upper Red River. Comancheros, buffalo skinners, traders, cattlemen, and Plains Indians all shared in that attempted conquest of nature and empire building. Chapter five focuses on vernacular architecture and human communities of the Red River. A review of the settlers' actions allows for a ground level assessment of the interaction between society and environment. Chapter six, "Making Indians Follow The White Man's Road," looks at the contest for Amerindian resources from the reservation period through allotment (1867-2005). The underlying conflict between American Indians and Anglo Americans stemmed from the conflict over resources on the Red Rolling Plains, especially the Wichita Mountains. The seventh chapter entitled "The Irrigated Valley" moves to the Texas side of the river and details development of the Big Wichita River, a major tributary of the upper Red River, during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (1880-1930). The chapter underscores the relationship between local elites and political ecology, the intersection at which history, politics, and ecology meet. Chapter eight, "An Incomplete Conquest," explores the real ecological limitations "upbuilders" faced when trying to attain an agrarian vision for development of the Big and Little Wichita rivers (1930-2001).

When Alexander Campbell migrated from his native Northern Ireland to Pennsylvania in 1809, he found himself immediately immersed in the Jacksonian Era's market revolution, a phenomena that altered every aspect of America society. In the context of cultural change, Campbell and his contemporaries struggled to define the American identity, one that necessitated merging of the Deism and rational thought of the founding fathers with the older and powerful strain of Calvinistic contract theology grounded in the Puritan strains of colonial New England. This legacy and the assertions of the American Revolution deeply influenced American intellectual development producing a distinctive worldview and engendering an American identity which allowed the citizenry instinctively to claim an unparalleled position in the world, inculcating them with a profound belief in a Millennial Republic. Millennialist thought, both worldly and sacred, comfortably accommodated the emerging American psyche linking religion and national identity. This ideology -- Republican Millennialism -- formed the core of the American animus and the basis of a national secular and religious mission. Alexander Campbell was uniquely positioned to internalize, participate in and help shape the developing American character. A successful businessman, revered evangelist, educator, publisher and speaker who issued pronouncements on both religious and social issues to his adherents, as well as a larger American audience, Campbell epitomized the possibilities of the American dream, a belief in the unique God-given destiny of the United States, and a deep abiding love of God and country. His assimilation into American society reflected the larger issues of American character as he wrestled with pressing social issues and struggled to synthesize sacred and secular elements into a holistic and viable personal and national identity. As with Americans in general, however, Campbell's blending of the profane and the divine fell tragically short as the crucible of slavery and the resulting conflict ultimately destroyed Campbell's millennial optimism. The Civil War fractured the country and cast deep doubt on both Campbell's and America's vision of itself as the harbinger of the new millennium.

From Johnsons Senatorial speech in 1957 to his Vice Presidential Memorial Day Address of 1963, we follow Johnsons delivering the message about the need for education for a democratic citizenry. We continue with his Presidential speeches. From the first speech he delivers to the last speech he delivers as an active president, we examine how he promotes his belief in education as a way out of marginalization. As Johnson maneuvers from the local arena to the national stage, we see the relative ease Johnson transforms what he says and how he says it to embrace new audiences. Additionally, in each of these speeches, Johnsons expansion of ethos, which grows along with the size of his audiences, becomes apparent. What was once only known to Johnson became an understanding of the complex interrelatedness of the events making up the 1960s. This sense permeated his being to solidify the eudaimonia which Johnson manifested in order to persuade not only his immediate, listening audience, but also his universal audience. I discovered traits of Johnsons make-up in early as childhood which served to be sharpened, distilled, and developed into the pivotal Johnson Treatment. This dissertation reveals Johnsons remarkable ability to empathize with disenfranchised groups showing how his perspective encompassed not only what needed change in the moment, but also what was needed over time to help build a Great Society. People look at dissertations to see how they contribute to societys knowledge. This dissertation shows how one man was able to transcend his Texas twang to use words in so forceful a way that he impacted a nation. Johnson was remarkable in that he had a persuasive styleor ethoswith which he was born as well as which he developed. We are the benefactors of Johnsons complex personality that used rhetoric to change a world.

This thesis focuses on the long poem <italic>The City of Dreadful Night</italic> by James "B.V." Thomson and examines the ways in which Thomson fosters community out of estrangement through the vehicle of poetry. Thomson's background, critical writings, and other poems are examined in addition to <italic>The City</italic> to obtain a sense of his personal (and poetic) philosophy. This examination is coupled with an exploration of Victorian representations of "the city" and the experience of the "modern" world to illustrate the ways in which Thomson's important poem is not altogether estranged from contemporary themes in poetic discourse. The culmination of the thesis is a close reading of the poem itself, which, though full of depictions of isolation and despair, offers a comfort: readers who share in the sentiments of the poem are united in their suffering; a community of the estranged, joined by poetry.

As we shift from an industry to an information-based economy, headlines proclaiming a skilled worker shortage abound. In response, workplace literacy programs are hastily sprouting up at community colleges and in the backrooms of corporations. In order to respond ethically to the literacy crisis at hand, however, this project argues that we must first understand the communities, the history of crises, and the contexts for which literate skills are to be applied. In that vein, this project looks back at history to see how people before responded to similar literacy crises and uses their responses to help us ethically proceed during this current climate of educational and economic crisis. Through ethnography, this project tells the stories of Italian immigrants who sought entry into the United States booming industrial economy and who were falsely told that English-language literacy was a necessity for employment and cultural acceptance. By exploring Italys history, educational structure, and the impact of WWII on the participants literacy practices, the first part of the dissertation focuses on the education these immigrants brought with them, showing that literacy sponsorship is not always economically determined nor sought for social mobility. Analyzing popular rhetoric regarding the arrival of Italian immigrants, the second section focuses on the creation and perpetuation of the literacy myth and its ethnocentric underpinnings. The third section compares the adult education programs created for immigrants within Cleveland, OH with the participants accounts of their development of literacy skills and strategies within the same city, revealing that most of the immigrants' learning took place within their own community, rather than in the schools. Further, it illustrates that the participants limited use of the English language did not exempt them from social mobility nor stem from ignorance or false consciousness, but was an act of cultural resistance. The final section uses the conclusions drawn in previous chapters to call for composition and rhetoric scholars to engage in working class issues through activist ethnographic research, rhetorical analyses of claims of literacy crises and portrayals of the working class as illiterate, and the development of ethical pedagogical strategies for adult learners.