This dissertation concentrates on both the Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890 and on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West from 1890 through to 1892, exploring the nature, the significance and the consequence of their interaction at this particularly crucial time in American Indian history. The association of William F. Cody’s Wild West with the Lakota Ghost Dance has produced evidence that offers a new insight into the religion in South Dakota. Further, it questions the traditional portrayal of the Lakota Ghost Dance, which maintains that the leaders ‘perverted’ Wovoka’s doctrine of peace into one of war. It is clear that his traditional interpretation has been based upon primary source material derived from the testimony of those who had actively worked to suppress the religion. In contrast sources narrated by Short Bull, a prominent Lakota Ghost Dancer, demonstrate that it has been a peaceful religion combining white religion and culture with traditional Lakota ones, and as such was an example of Lakota accommodation. At the same time as the Ghost Dance was sweeping across the western Indian reservations, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West faced a crisis over its continued success. When William F. Cody and his Wild West’s Indian performers were forced to return from their tour of Continental Europe to refute charges of mistreatment and neglect, they became involved in the suppression of the Lakota ghost Dance. In consequence those Ghost Dancers removed and confined to fort Sheridan, Illinois were then released into Cody’s custody. Ironically, the closest these Ghost Dancers got to armed rebellion was when they played the role of ‘Hostiles’ in the Wile West’s arena. This research reveals some of the different forms of accommodation employed by the Lakota to deal with the demands of the dominant society at the close of the nineteenth century. The Ghost Dance and the Wild West shows presented the Lakota with various alternatives to the dependency that the government’s Indian policy had brought about, while also enabling them to retain their Indian identity. As such Indian policymakers viewed both the Ghost Dance and the Wild West shows to be a threat to their programmes of assimilation, which they perceived to be the Indians only route towards independence.

This dissertation investigates the validity of three commonly held beliefs regarding British emigration to the United States after 1781. First, that Highlanders were predominantly loyalists and abandoned their homes in the United States after the American Revolution. Second, that Highland emigration must be defined in terms of landlord action and that it most affected the West Highland and islands. Third, that nineteenth-century British emigrants did not form ethnic or cultural communities in the United States. The first theme was examined primarily through secondary sources and modern loyalist studies. The next two themes have centred on Scotch Settlement, located in Columbiana County, Ohio. These Highlanders, who emigrated between 1801 and 1840, were predominantly from Strathdearn and Strathnairn near Inverness. They, and their descendents, left a rich resource of letters and local and family histories, which, together with other materials, have directed the research. This dissertation firmly suggests that these beliefs regarding British emigration in the nineteenth century are inaccurate. Not only did many Highlanders remain in the United States after the Revolution, but they continued to emigrate there. Emigration significantly affected all regions of the Highlands, especially the parishes near Inverness. Highlanders from this region were not forced from their homes. They, like their landlords, lived in an economically depressed region and all classes used emigration as a coping mechanism. Finally, the Scotch Settlement Highlanders created and maintained a distinct cultural community for at lest 50 years, indicating that it was possible for British immigrants to do so.

This thesis examines the role of public capital, in particular, "core infrastructure", in private sector production in the United States. The underlying theme is the importance of the individual infrastructure stocks, in particular highways and streets, water and sewer systems and "other structures". Two different empirical approaches are used to shed light on a number of issues. In the first study in Chapter 3, two cost function models are estimated using data for the total private business sector, one using aggregate infrastructure data and the other using disaggregated infrastructure. The parameter estimates are used to calculate optimal infrastructure stocks (the optimal total infrastructure stock and the optimal individual stocks). The results reveal that, despite the fall in infrastructure investment from 1968-82, none of the infrastructure stocks was undersupplied over the sample period. The estimated output elasticities of the different infrastructure stocks are significantly lower than those obtained in previous research. In the second study in Chapter 4, use is made of recent development sin the productivity literature to construct a measure of manufacturing total factor productivity (TFP) that takes account of varying returns to scale and variable labour and capital utilisation over the cycle. The adjusted TFP measure is used to shed light on the causal relationship between infrastructure (total, core and disaggregated core) and productivity using a selection of autoregressive model-building techniques and causality testing procedures. Contrary to the stated view of many infrastructure researchers there is no evidence of "reverse causality", i.e. productivity causing infrastructure investment. There is, however, evidence that infrastructure has a small but statistically significant positive effect on TCP. Highways and other roads are the most productive types of infrastructure, followed by "other structures". When the TFP data is disaggregated, the findings is that core infrastructure affects some industries more than others, especially those that are capital intensive and have the largest motor vehicle shares.

This thesis studies the debates surrounding the grand strategy of United States in the decade after the Cold War. 'Bookended' by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, it assesses the strategic ideas that were advanced to conceptualise American foreign policy, grouping these thematically under the headings of primacy, neoisolationism and liberal multilateralism. To this end the thesis introduces a neoclassical realist model of grand strategy formation, in which ideas are considered in conjunction with considerations of power in the international system. The thesis makes the case that the ideas of each strategic school-of-thought reflect both a distinctive theoretical understanding of international relations and a particular tradition in United States foreign policy. Furthermore, it makes the more general structural claim that under conditions of limited threat such as the apparent unipolarity of the post-Cold War years, great power strategies are less determined by the imperatives of international structure and more by the ideas at the domestic level influencing the foreign policy executive. As a result, grand strategy formation becomes highly ideologically contested, and the geopolitical science of strategic assessment and response becomes unpredictable. The thesis argues that after the Cold War the strategic debate is best understood in conjunction with the contemporaneous idea that the United States held a functionally imperial position in the international system. In the absence of agreed threats, competition between strategic ideas resulted in the United States pursuing a foreign policy that selectively incorporated elements of each strategic alternative. Although this 'uni-multilateralism' had as its aim the management of the international system, its diverse sources of ideas and support meant that in security matters in particular American foreign policy was inconsistent and unpredictable. It was therefore not until the events of 9-11 provided a unified threat around which to coordinate strategy that America adopted a more coherent imperial grand strategy.

This study locates late-twentieth-century roadlogues (nonfiction, prose accounts of American road trips) by British writers within the tradition of the postwar American highway narrative in travel writing, novels, and film. It exposes the discursive structures and textual constraints underlying seven case studies published in the 1990s by comparing them to texts from various genres in diachronic and synchronic contexts. It contributes to scholarship on the American highway narrative, which largely overlooks British texts. It complements research on British travel writing, which tends to be biased towards pre-twentieth-century texts by travellers whose culture is in a dominant relation to that of travellees. It adds to postcolonial studies through analysis of representations of the other where otherness is reduced and complicated by a history of cultural exchange. The methodology combines several approaches including discourse theory, discourse analysis, narrative theory, feminist criticism, and theories of tourism. Three main areas are considered: identity, in relation to nationality and gender; the road writer's gaze, with regard to vehicles and roads; and intertextuality, on the margins (in maps) and inside roadlogues (in direct and indirect allusions). The study concludes that contemporary British roadlogues are in what is almost a subordinate relation to American highway narratives, evidenced by extensive influence of American texts. However, this subordination is qualified by joint ownership of western and New World myths, vestiges of imperial superiority, and selective deference by British writers. The latter is demonstrated through a consumer approach to American culture afforded by the episodic structure of the road trip and encouraged by the niche-oriented nature of the current market for travel writing. While American writers regard roadscapes with imperial eyes and experience the road trip as a rite of passage, contemporary Britons generally engage in superficial role play and remain untransformed by American highways.

Recent revisionist studies have argued that much of what is known about music known as the blues’ has been 'invented' by the writing of enthusiasts far removed from the African American culture that created the music. Elijah Wald and Marybeth Hamilton in particular have attempted to sift through the clouds of romanticism, and tried to unveil more empirical histories that were previously obscured by the fallacious genre distinctions conjured up during the 1960s blues revival. While this revisionist scholarship has shed light on some previously ignored historical facts, writers have tended to concentrate on the romanticism of blues writing strictly from an American perspective, failing to acknowledge the genesis and influence of transatlantic scholarship, and therefore ignoring the work of the most prolific and influential blues scholar of the twentieth century, British writer Paul Oliver. By examining the core of Oliver’s research and writing during the 1950s and 1960s, this study aims to place Oliver in his rightful place at the centre of blues historiography. His scholarship allows a more detailed appreciation of the manner in which the blues was studied, through lyrics, recordings, oral histories, photography and African American literature. These historical sources were interpreted in accordance with the author’s attitudes to the commercial popular music, which allowed the ‘reconstruction’ of an African American ‘folk’ culture in which the blues became the antithesis of pop. Importantly, this study seeks to transcend dominant discourses of national cultural ownership or ethnocentrism, and demonstrate that representations of African American music and culture were constructed within a transatlantic context. The blues is music with roots in the African American experience within the United States; however, as Paul Oliver’s writing shows, its reception and representation were not limited by the same national, cultural or racial boundaries.

This thesis examines literary and historical accounts of the Creole slave ship revolt (1841) by Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Lydia Maria Child and Pauline E. Hopkins. The introduction debates the generic status of government testimony and press reportage and identifies the fundamental theoretical issues of the dissertation which include those of intentionality, intertextuality and "signifyin(g)." Chapter I traces the traditions of black and white abolitionism which influenced Douglass's adaptations of the mutiny and researches his representations of the heroic slave figure, Madison Washington, in speeches which he gave in Britain and America during the 1840s. Chapter II analyses the major critical questions surrounding Douglass's. The Heroic Slave (1853) while exploring its previously neglected theatrical conventions. This chapter also compares this work with Douglass's recently discovered second version, The Heroic Slave: A Thrilling Narrative of the Adventures of Madison Washington in Pursuit of Liberty (1853/63? ). Chapter III contextualises Brown's (re)modelling of the black historical figure by examining the varying types of forum - including both periodical and historical volumes - within which he published "Madison Washington" (1861,1863) and "Slave Revolt at Sea" (1867). This chapter discusses Brown's experimentation with an antislavery panorama and interweaving of literary, biographical and historical techniques to revise existing formal conventions. The final chapter interprets Child's biography of "Madison Washington" published in The Freedmen's Book (1866), and Hopkins's short story, "A Dash for Liberty" (1901), in terms of their interventions into gendered representations of slave heroism. Child's text is considered alongside her earlier journalism on the Creole revolt and her short story on insurrection, "The Black Saxons" (1846), and contextualised by an analysis of its publication in an educational tract. This chapter also discusses Hopkins's "Famous Men and Women of the Negro Race" (1901-2), and her textual borrowings from Brown's "Slave Revolt at Sea" (1866) to demonstrate the political imperatives guiding her dramatisations of black history. Finally, the conclusion explores the mid-twentieth century version of this revolt, Madison (1956), a musical composed by the black playwright, Theodore Ward, to indicate the importance of this approach for re-evaluating intertextual relationships across black and white abolitionist authors, throughout the nineteenth century and after.

This thesis aims to investigate the role of the anti-communist John Birch Society within the greater American conservative field. More specifically, it focuses on the period from the Society's inception in 1958 to the beginning of its relative decline in significance, which can be situated after the first election of Richard M. Nixon as president in 1968. The main focus of the thesis lies on challenging more traditional classifications of the JBS as an extremist outcast divorced from the American political mainstream, and argues that through their innovative organizational methods, national presence, and capacity to link up a variety of domestic and international affairs to an overarching conspiratorial narrative, the Birchers were able to tap into a new and powerful force of largely white suburban conservatives and contribute significantly to the growth and development of the post-war New Right. For this purpose, the research interrogates the established scholarship and draws upon key primary source material, including official publications, internal communications and the private correspondence of founder and chairman Robert Welch as well as other prominent members.

This study examines the relationship of democracy promotion to national security in US strategy through an examination of the influence of geopolitical, bureaucratic and organisational considerations on the effort to create a coherent strategic approach fusing democracy promotion and national security under the Reagan administration. This process highlighted geopolitical and organisational tensions between democracy promotion and US national security. Groups within the administration, Congress and the private sphere disagreed over whether US geopolitical interests required the limited deployment of democracy promotion against Soviet Communism or a more expansive effort aimed at both Communist and pro-US dictatorships. These debates were linked to clashes over the credibility and effectiveness of competing state-centred or privately-implemented organisational frameworks. The organisational resolution was the National Endowment for Democracy, which intervened on a tactical basis in dictatorships, with US assistance, to safeguard US national security by supporting pro-US democratic groups. However the concept of privately-implemented democracy promotion blocked agreement on geopolitical objectives and the creation of a coherent strategy reconciling democracy promotion and US national security. Tensions between these two imperatives continue to recur and can be resolved only on a case-by-case basis rather than at the strategic level.

This study explores factors behind the development of a covert political warfare capability by the United States government from 1945-1950. Specifically, it examines the place of political warfare within U.S. policy and bureaucracy towards Europe and the Soviet Union. Political warfare was defined expansively to comprise psychological, political, economic and paramilitary actions. External factors are significant, above all the deterioration of relations between Washington and Moscow and the onset of the Cold War. But specific emphasis is given to internal aspects. In particular, strategic and bureaucratic factors are examined that shaped the inauguration of an unprecedented peacetime capability of subversive foreign intervention. The central hypothesis is that disorder prevailed over design as a political warfare programme was developed against the Soviet bloc. Institutional conflicts overshadowed a unified national approach, while coordination between departments and agencies hampered effective implementation. Furthermore, the position of political warfare within broader U.S. foreign policy remained ambiguous and problematic. Washington failed to formulate a workable, unified strategy towards the east integrating political warfare. This undermined the fundamental American objective in the early Cold War to retract Soviet power peacefully from Eastern Europe. A legacy of strategic incoherence beyond 1950 resulted.