This thesis examines the world of enslaved men in the antebellum southern United States. Using oral interviews conducted with formerly enslaved people, full-length slave autobiographies, as well as enslaved folklore, plantation records, trial papers, and petitions, it underscores that the lives of enslaved men were intertwined with one another, and that male interdependence was a fact of enslaved life. It examines how pursuits such as drinking, gambling, wrestling, hunting, and evading the patrol gangs brought enslaved men together in an all-male subculture through which they constructed their own independent notions of masculinity, friendship, solidarity and resistance. The thesis argues that homosocial company was integral to the gendered identity and self-esteem of enslaved men. The emotional landscape they created with other men offered them a vital mutual support network through which to resist the dehumanising features of enslaved life. Through each other, they forged an oppositional masculine culture that defied and subverted the authority of the slaveholder that structured their everyday lives. Despite the controls designed to locate the enslaved in plantation space, enslaved men illicitly left plantations at night, evaded patrol gangs, engaged in theft, and spread news, gossip and rumours from plantation to plantation across the South. Evidence indicates that this distinct male world proved the foundation for conspiracy, rebellion and running away.

This thesis is an analysis of the life and work of Arthur Caswell Parker, 1881-1955. It investigates the complex and problematic nature of the position and status of a mixed-blood, acculturated Indian in the early twentieth century through study of the ways in which Parker attempted to create or re-create an identity. Close attention to Parker's texts and speeches will highlight and isolate the self-representation and self-invention that shaped his career. I will discuss how Parker attempted to achieve full integration within American society whilst retaining an Indian identity. He began life with the example in his great-uncle Ely S. Parker, of one who had successfully crossed the boundaries between white and Indian cultures and achieved respect and acclaim among both. The associated figure of Lewis Henry Morgan, the renowned pioneer anthropologist and friend of the Indian, provided Parker with a further example of how "Indianness" and Indian culture could have a positive and enabling role within the dominant culture. Parker found within Morgan's ideas on social evolution a way in which the "assimilated" Indian could be seen in a positive and progressive light, as someone in advance of his unassimilated contemporaries on the scale of evolutionary development. His choice of a museum career allowed him to re-present the Indian within a dislocated sense of time and therefore interpret Indian history within a social evolutionary framework that complemented the triumphant optimism of early twentieth century modernity. His "Indianness" enabled his ethnographic fieldwork and the professional niche he carved as "museologist" facilitated his integration within the dominant culture as Indian authority, intellectual and professional. His prominence as spokesman and leader within the Society of American Indians provided a base from which he could mediate between white and Indian cultures and allowed him to contribute to a specifically Indian construction of Indian identity in relation to the dominant culture. Parker's speeches and texts on the issue of Indian assimilation questioned the authority of American representation of Indian identity and his shifting self-identification within them reflected the discontinuity between being American, being Americanized and being Indian. His contributions to the Iroquois Indian New Deal involved the re-production of an "authentic", "primitive" past, furthered his museum career and allowed him to engage with the legacy of Morgan. As a highranking Freemason, Parker was able to engage in the wider construction of the "proper" role of the Indian within twentieth century American society.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) used a wide range of strategies for securing racial equality. These included some perhaps surprising tactics: it encouraged black writers and artists, published poems and plays, organised an art exhibition, picketed cinemas and dined with Hollywood moguls. This thesis explores the NAACP''s involvement with and use of the arts and popular culture between 1910 and 1955. It asks why the NAACP developed a culturalf strategy, what this strategy was and how it was implemented, and what it reveals about the NAACP as an organisation during the first half of the twentieth century. The NAACP believed that racial inequality was caused by racial prejudice. In other words, African Americans suffered political, social and economic discrimination because of the attitudes of white Americans toward the race. These attitudes were formed in large part by the depiction of blacks in American culture. Therefore, the NAACP hoped that if it could change the representation of the race then it could alter white prejudices and achieve racial equality. The NAACP challenged what it considered to be negative cultural representations of African Americans and sought to replace them with positive images. It saw the creation of ''high'' culture as a signifier of a group''s status and believed the production of fine art and literature could be used to prove that African Americans ''deserved'' equal rights. Furthermore, it used culture to instil racial pride and to forge a sense of a collective black identity. The arts were also utilised to change attitudes on specific issues, most notably to encourage anti-lynching sentiment amongst whites. The NAACP believed that culture could be used as a weapon in the fight for racial equality.

This thesis aims to understand the frequent use of metaphors of madness, in particular paranoia and schizophrenia, in American culture and thought from the Cold War to the ‘war on terror’ across a variety of discourses, from historiography to critical theory, from literature to film. Unlike existing analyses that focus on paranoia to the exclusion of schizophrenia, this study for the first time considers the historical evolution of a popular psychopathology as part of a wider struggle over the understanding of political agency and subjectivity. Part one establishes dominant conceptions of paranoia and schizophrenia in reading two representative thinkers of post-war America. The first chapter examines the historiography of Richard Hofstadter and his diagnosis of a paranoid style as a deliberate pathologisation of dissent and the failure of liberal hegemony. Next, I consider Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism as the culmination of a widespread tropology of madness in cultural criticism and contend that Jameson’s thought revolves around the perceived absence of a revolutionary class, and the paradoxical attempt to think radical politics after the loss of such collective agency. Part two analyses the development of popular metaphors of madness from the counterculture to the present day. First, I focus on science-fiction author Philip K. Dick as arguably the most important writer of psychosis of the 1960s and 1970s. A lifelong dialogue with psychiatry, Dick’s work allows unparalleled insight into cultural uses of psychopathology. Chapter four intervenes in debates around conspiracy theories by re-reading America’s culture of paranoia, from 1970s conspiracy films to Don DeLillo’s Libra and Underworld. My critique of conspiracy studies’ continued pathologisation of dissent leads to a rethinking of paranoia based on Lacan’s late writings on psychosis: not as paranoia outside reason, but the paranoia of reason. The final chapter turns to the recent work of Jameson and DeLillo to assess the afterlife of popular psychopathology after its integration into US culture and assesses the use of metaphors of madness in thinking the attacks of 9/11 and its consequences. While Jameson’s concern with schizophrenic postmodernism has been dialectically transformed into a consideration of collective subjectivity, I read DeLillo’s novels Cosmopolis, Falling Man, and Point Omega as testament to a final exhaustion of political alterity in his work and a consequent renewal of psychopathological characterisations of contemporary America.

Memory is central to the way that cultures produce, negotiate and contest ideas of nationhood. This work examines how, as an aesthetic mode of nostalgia, the black and white image was used in the 1990s to establish and legitimate particular kinds of memory within American cultural life. It locates the production of visual (monochrome) memory in different forms of cultural media and explores how attempts were made in the nineties to authorize a consensual past, a core memory - what might be called an archival essence - for a stable and unified concept of "America." The 1990s were a period when liberal ideologies of nationhood and mythologies of Americanness came under particular, and intensified, pressure. In a time when national identity was being undermined by transnational political and economic restructuring, when ideas of national commonality were being challenged by an emergent politics of difference, and when the metanarratives of memory were straining for legitimacy against the multiple pasts of the marginalized, the desire to stabilize the configuration and perceived transmission of American cultural identity became a defining aspect of hegemonic memory politics. By considering monochrome memory in nineties mass media, I look at the way that a particular "nostalgia mode" was used stylistically within visual culture and was taken up within a discourse of stable nationhood. By examining the production and visuality of aestheticized nostalgia, I make a cultural but also a conceptual argument. Much of the contemporary work on nostalgia is bound in critiques of its reactionary politics, its sanitization of history, or its symptomatic contribution to the amnesiac tendencies of postmodern culture. I explore the subject from the vantage point of cultural studies, mediating between theories that understand nostalgia in terms of cultural longing and/or postmodern forgetting. I account for the manner in which nostalgia has become divorced from any necessary concept of loss, but, also, how particular modes of nostalgia have been used affectively in the mass media to perform specific cultural and memory work. Critically, I examine nostalgia as a cultural style, anchoring a set of questions that can be asked of its signifying and political functionality in the visual narratives of the dominant media.

This thesis looks at American press coverage of the rise of authoritarian rule in South Korea between 1945 and 1954, during the period of the American occupation government and the first six years of the Syngman Rhee regime. Making use of government, military and press archives, it is the first scholarly analysis of how the American press wrote about the early political development of South Korea and explores the question of why political repression under both the occupation and the Rhee regime did not receive greater attention from American journalists. This thesis focuses primarily on the production process of press coverage. Specifically, it shows how coverage of the authoritarianism issue was shaped by U.S. and South Korean political and military authorities, the professional working culture of the journalism profession and the worldviews and activism of individual journalists and lobbyists. It argues that coverage was sharply limited by five major factors. Firstly, the dominance of anti-Korean and Cold War press narratives ensured that relatively little attention was paid to the repression of the South Korean population. Secondly, most journalists working in the Far East were highly deferential to American authorities. Thirdly, American military authorities greatly constrained reporting during the occupation period. Fourthly, the Syngman Rhee regime became increasingly effective in its public relations activities. Fifthly, the low level of U.S. political interest in the political situation in South Korea greatly reduced the importance of the topic for the American press.

The published work which forms the basis for consideration of my application is The Cornwallis Papers: The Campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in the Southern Theatre of the American Revolutionary War (Uckfield: The Naval & Military Press Ltd, 2010) ("the CP"). Consisting of six volumes, it comprises a corpus of work in which each volume deals with a distinct aspect of the southern campaigns. Volume I deals with the Charlestown campaign and the occupation of South Carolina and Georgia; volume II with the Battle of Camden and the autumn campaign; volume III with Cornwallis's refitment at Winnsborough; volume IV with the winter campaign in North Carolina and the march into Virginia; volume V with the Virginia campaign; and volume VI with the occupation, siege and capitulation of Yorktown and Gloucester. This essay describes the overall place of the CP in the historiography of the Revolutionary War. It goes on to discuss examples of the original contributions to history made, on the one hand, by my commentary in the introductory chapters of the CP and, on the other, by my voluminous footnotes forming part of it. The essay concludes by drawing on my commentary to re-evaluate the strategy and tactics pursued by the British in the southern campaigns.

This thesis investigates socialist ideas of race and ethnicity in the US during the Gilded Age. By charting the attempts of the Socialist Labor Party to defend the economic and social rights of racial minorities such as African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Native Americans, it explores the tension between the struggle for class emancipation on the one hand and the demand for racial equality on the other. Focusing on a group of little-investigated newspaper sources, in many cases involving new translations from German-language local socialist press, this thesis challenges the idea held by many historians of American radicalism that late-nineteenth century socialists were apparently uninterested in race. On the contrary, American socialists of the Gilded Age actively engaged with the specific interracial and inter-ethnic composition of the US working class. Applying both methods of institutional and intellectual history, this thesis argues that the Socialist Labor Party between 1876-1899 was divided into two main areas of opinion: the first, defined in this work as “colour-blind internationalist,” held that class solidarity – rather than race and ethnicity – should be used to unite workers and fight for their rights. The second, here termed “scientific racialist,” used a variety of intellectual approaches, which spanned from pseudo-scientific theories of race to Darwinism and anthropology, to demonstrate the existence of a hierarchy of human groups with different levels of physical, cultural, and social development. From the late 1870s to the end of the 1880s the scientific racialist position was prominent in the Socialist Labor Party, but was contested by colour-blind assertions. Indeed, when Daniel De Leon became the party’s leader in the 1890s, he imposed colour-blind socialism as the sole approach. This moved American socialism away from anti-egalitarian outlooks, but created a blind spot in which socialists stopped recognising race as a key element that shaped the social dynamics of the country – a situation that made it hard for them to successfully implement anti-racist policies. This, in turn, helps to explain the relative historic weakness of socialism in the US.

Boston is a city steeped in history. Beyond the struggle for abolition, however, the historical experiences of the majority of black Bostonians, especially during the early twentieth-century, are lacking recognition. In this respect, the Jazz Age (represented here as circa 1919 – 1929) serves as a noteworthy case-in-point. For insofar as the impact of jazz music on social, political, and economic climates in cities such as New York, New Orleans, and even Kansas have been recorded, the music’s impact on and significance in Boston is yet to be addressed in any great detail. Simply put, the history of jazz in Boston, and with it an important period for black development in the city, exists in fragments such as discographies, newspaper listings, musical handbooks, potted witness accounts among others. Therefore, the principle aim of this thesis is to piece-together these fragments to form a mosaic history that reveals instances of black struggle, resistance, and progress during a period of heightened racial (Jim Crow segregation), political (the Red Scare), and economic tension. Essential to this process is not only the need to locate the voices of Boston’s black past, whether in text, testimony, sound and beyond, but also to create the conditions to hear them on their own terms. In order to achieve this, emphasis here is placed on tracing instances of voice, and as a by-product heritage, in musical form from the arrival of the first slaves to Boston in the first-half of the seventeenth century and analysing the ways in which these voices were perpetuated through methods of adaptation, appropriation, and evolution. This approach would ultimately assist in enriching the Jazz Age with a black art form that was not only unique but a distinct form of expression for a race lacking a significant voice in America at the time. In this respect, this thesis looks at the ways in which homegrown Boston musicians, such as Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney, and frequenting players, such as Duke Ellington, used jazz music as a way to oppose standard forms of white dominance, cultural elitism, and economic subjugation.

This thesis examines the live exhibition of Native American, Chinese, Japanese, Alaskan, Hawaiian, Samoan, and Filipino people on the midways of five West Coast world’s fairs (San Francisco, 1894; Portland, 1905; Seattle, 1909; San Francisco, 1915; San Diego, 1915-1916). I situate the world’s fairs as significant sites of racialisation at a time of intense westward expansion, and recognise the West Coast as a key location at which various processes of expansion occurred, and at which the human relationships associated with these processes were negotiated. Foregrounding conflicting and interrelated concerns about continental expansion, immigration, trade, empire, and international diplomacy, and featuring the voices and practices of anthropologists, politicians, foreign dignitaries, colonial elites, local non-white residents, fair visitors, and the performers themselves, I examine how various race-making agents framed the populations as inferior, non-white Others. Adapting various existing images of these disparate foreign and domestic populations, exposition exhibitors and mediators used a number of exhibitionary techniques and racialisation strategies to visualise America’s newly international and Pacifically-oriented racial hierarchy. Sharing modes of exhibition and racial narratives between the ‘ethnic villages’ on the midway, these exposition actors and race-making agents contributed to the emergence of an explicitly comparative form of racial ordering that situated the ‘red’, ‘yellow’, and ‘brown’ races within the imagined household of the American Pacific. This thesis demonstrates how exposition midways helped to solidify notions of racial difference by providing legible and comparative spectacles of non-whiteness, and by inculcating white visitors with skills of racial identification and hierarchisation. I argue that by operating within and contributing towards an overarching framework of white supremacy, the world’s fairs scripted a flexible form of superior whiteness that allowed visitors to negotiate the rapid changes in local, national, and international racial dynamics. Analysing the vast and under-utilised exposition archive, alongside photographs, souvenirs, newspapers, and concomitant racialising texts, and synthesising the methods and literatures of race and exhibition, this thesis contributes to the growing literature on the broad significance of racial formation on America’s West Coast, by building a critical and comparative examination of this racialisation site.