When exploring the histories of male slaves in the antebellum South, there remains a tendency for them to feature as a singular entity; the failures and successes of male slaves are often discussed as all encompassing and identical. However, in defining male slaves as a monolithic entity seeking to affirm manhood in the face of oppression and attempted emasculation by white society, there is a danger that we remain wedded to a “white/black” dichotomy that neglects the complexity of interactions among enslaved people and issues of intersectionality. It is vital that we do not ignore the plurality of gender as a social and cultural construct and the manner in which enslaved people conceptualised and created gender identities from a variety of different attributes and ideals. Scholars have increasingly made it clear that socially becoming “male” or “female” was not biological destiny in the antebellum South, but there remains comparatively less attention to the multiplicity of masculinities among enslaved men. Yet enslaved men were not a homogenous body and nor was there a single understanding of what being a man meant in slave communities. Multiple understandings of, and a variety of ideals, were invoked as evidence of “manhood” by contemporaries, white and black, that went beyond any simplistic, singular, or naturalised model. Enslaved people formulated and articulated multiple models of masculinity, drawing upon a variety of different and potentially conflicting contemporary ideals to create masculine identities and a sense of selfhood. Furthermore, this sense of a gendered self could come through comparison with, and refusal of other “masculine” behaviours in their communities: enslaved men could rank themselves as men in direct comparison to others in their communities.

In early July, 1835, rumours of a slave insurrection swept central Mississippi. Deviant white men, with bad characters and dishonourable motives, were—or so the residents of the small towns along the Big Black River in Madison County believed—plotting to incite the slaves to rebellion so that during the resulting panic they could rob the banks and plunder the cities. These rumours were entirely unfounded, but within a few weeks, groups of white citizens calling themselves ‘committees of safety’ had examined and tortured an unknown number of men (both white and black) whom they thought to be involved in the conspiracy, and by the end of July about a dozen white men and around twenty or thirty slaves had been put to death in Mississippi. As a moment during which white men not only articulated their notion of what it meant to be a ‘man,’ but also demonstrated and violently enforced it, the insurrection scare is an opening, a window, into the lives of men in the antebellum South. Through this window, we can see how Southern white men conceived of their identity as white men and constructed a notion of manhood—one of honour—to which all white men, regardless of class, could aspire. While Northerners emphasised restraint, and inner feelings of honour, Southern manhood was defined almost entirely by public display. Honour had to be performed. Further, because all white men could attempt to give a performance of honour, there existed in the South a sense of equality amongst all white men—a herrenvolk democracy—despite the vast differences in wealth and status that existed. African Americans, on the other hand, could make no claims to honour in the eyes of white men because to have honour was to have power.

The project is an inter-disciplinary intervention into a field that may be largely called New York Studies or, more explicitly, the uses of urban, human and cultural geography for a cultural-materialist history of New York between the fiscal crisis years of the mid-1970s through to the Market Crash of October 1987. My concern is to offer a critique of urban regime transformation in New York, the kind of private-public coalitions taking shape in response to the advent and consolidation of the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) industries and their socio-spatial implications, through the lenses of cultural production. I am interested in the ways in which representation - the literary, the cinematic (more sparsely and tangentially), the documented and the archival in an analytically productive conjunction - encodes and arbitrates the changes in the production of urban space in New York City. Thus, the project underlines the heightened significance of literary economies for understanding the experiential structures of urban transformation in 1970s and 1980s New York. Driven by the belief that written culture, just like visual art, may prefigure and telescope urban change, a handful of New York writers dared to tread (both literally and symbolically) where the sociologist, the urban geographer or the documenter does so by professional default, and thus engaged head-on with the hard city of socio-economic networks. This kind of ‘urbanisation of [literary] consciousness’ calls for refreshed modes of enquiry, proposed in Chapter 1, at which point fetishist and aestheticist constructions of the city in the postmodernist key become inadequate, insufficient and politically ineffectual interpretative strategies. The following three-fold case study analysis of counterculture and the underground economy, of homesteading and ‘low rent’ fiction, of the finance industry, publishing and ‘financial writing’ may offer radical opportunities for revisiting both the space of representation and the represented space of urban decline and growth through a geocultural reading for the unevenness of urban space.

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in Scottish contributions to the intellectual development in the early America. There has been a significant amount of work focused on Scottish luminaries such as Hutcheson, Hume and Smith and their influence on the eighteenth century American founding fathers. However, little attention has been directed at what we might call the later reception of the Scottish Enlightenment in the first half of the nineteenth century. This thesis presents an in-depth account of the intellectual and literary contributions of two relatively obscure philosophers of the nineteenth century: George Jardine and Sir William Hamilton. This study is framed by biographies of their lives as academics and then focuses on a detailed account of their work as represented in American books and periodicals. In addition, some attention will be given to their respected legacies, in regards to their students who immigrated to America. This thesis is comprised of two sections. The first contains five chapters that lay out the details of the lives and legacies of Jardine and Hamilton. Chapter 1 looks at the literary and historical context of Scotland’s contributions to early American academic development. Chapter 2 is a focused biography of the academic life of George Jardine. Though this biography centres on Jardine’s life as an educator, it constitutes the most complete account of his life to date. Chapter 3 looks in depth at Jardine’s academic and literary reception in America. This chapter chronicles the dissemination of Jardine’s pedagogical strategies by former students who immigrated to America as well as how his ideas were presented in American books and journals. Chapter 4 returns to a biographical format focused on one of Jardine’s most famous students – Sir William Hamilton. Like the biography on Jardine the emphasis of this chapter is on Hamilton’s role as an educator. Chapter 5 looks at Sir William Hamilton’s academic and literary reception in the United States. This chapter also presents material on Hamilton’s personal connections to Americans that have been overlooked in transatlantic intellectual history. Section two presents annotated catalogs of books and journals that exemplify the literary reception of Jardine and Hamilton in America. In the case of Jardine I include catalogs of two of his students who immigrated to America as a means to highlight Jardine’s indirect impact on the American religious and educational literature. Whereas many have argued that the 19th century witnessed a decline in Scottish education and Philosophy this study shows that these ideas thrived in America and it is evident Scotland was still exporting useful knowledge to the United States well past the civil war.

This thesis studies a group of Poles embroiled in the American Civil War. They span three generations and share culture, nationality and devotion to their ideals. The common thread running through their lives is that they came from a country that had basically disintegrated at the end of the previous century, yet they carried the concepts of freedom that they inherited from their forefathers with them to America. Their ancestral Poland had been openly democratic and deemed dangerous to the autocratic imperial neighbours that partitioned it. These men came to a new country, then exercised their “Polishness” as they became embroiled in the great American upheaval, the Civil War. Of the nine of them examined, four sided with the North and four with the South. Another began in the Confederate cavalry and finished with the Union. In a war commonly categorized as a struggle between two American regions, there has not been significant attention devoted to Poles and foreigners in general. These men carried their belief in democratic liberalism with them from Europe in to the American War. Whether fighting to keep a Union together or to establish the new Confederacy, they held to their ideals and made a significant contribution.

This thesis provides a specific insight into the previously unexplored subject of the black fair in Macon, Georgia from 1906 to 1930. It draws on archives, government papers, newspaper reports, and the correspondence of black leaders in order to create a localised study documenting the attempts of Georgia‘s African Americans to further themselves and to improve race relations within their community. Subsequently, the fair creates a microcosm of wider efforts of black uplift and racial politics in the South during this period. The fair reveals the work of Richard Wright, a figure who demonstrated how local African American leaders often straddled the doctrines of W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, and adapted their philosophies within everyday life. The fair is also illustrative of how leaders such as Washington also cultivated relationships with black community leaders and fellow educators, while also connecting to the black masses. Similarly the celebration and appearance of national black political figures, such as James Napier, encouraged black pride and determination. Furthermore, such exhibits created powerful symbols which connected black political success with economic wealth. The thesis thereby situates the black fair and its organisers within a significant period of black political development, one which contributed to the later Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Institutions such as the African American fair were vital spaces which fostered a sense of black community, economics and autonomy. This thesis helps draw attention to the importance of such recreational spaces, repositioning them within the political and social studies of black southerners during the early twentieth century.

This thesis explores the significance of courtship and love in the lives of the enslaved men and women in antebellum North Carolina. It underlines how the current historiography concerning the enslaved has largely neglected the emotional terrain and dynamics of enslaved life and argues that the existing historiography of courtship and love has similarly marginalized the experiences of the enslaved. Whilst more recent research has focussed upon enslaved familial and personal relationships, there still remains the need for a more in-depth and sustained consideration of the meaning and importance of courtship and love in the lives of the enslaved. This thesis will attend to these gaps in historical scholarship by considering how the enslaved established and managed their courting relationships. It considers the practicalities of courtship for the enslaved as they mediated their own emotional needs and desires with the demands of the slave system and the slave-owner. it also examines the factors defining the shape of these relationships, including the opportunites available for the enslaved to establish courtships and the geographical and temporal spaces in which this could occur. It situates courtship within a narrative of resistance, illustrating the fact that courtship represented a significant social space for the enslaved through which they were able to resist and renegotiate the mechanisms of control and regulation embedded in the system of slavery. The majority of source material for this research derives from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) narratives. These narratives of formerly enslaved men and women reveal much to the historian interested in slavery and the psychology of the enslaved in the American South. As well as the WPA narratives this thesis draws attention to the folklore tale as an aspect of enslaved culture that can reveal much regarding the norms, values and ideals that structured the private and personal world of the enslaved.

A theory formulated by Alice Walker, womanism focuses on the unification of men and women with Nature and Earth. This thesis explores womanism with regards to its specific concerns with African American women’s rights, identities, and self-actualisation, and points towards its more overarching concerns with human relations and sexual freedom, as expressed in each of Walker’s seven novels. The seven novels discussed in the thesis are The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), The Color Purple (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004). Although Walker introduces the term “womanism” in 1983, this thesis traces the development of the concept across her canon of fictional works. By analysing the novels written in the 1970s, I establish how the term came to be coined, and, by seeing through themes and issues addressed early on and how they can be mapped through analysis of her later works, I demonstrate how womanism went on to be further developed and complexly wrought. This thesis thus examines how Alice Walker’s own theory of womanism is reflected through the oeuvre of her fictional works, and considers where tensions arise in her application of what is intended to be a universalist, humanist, project. For, in many of her novels, it is women’s sexuality and sexual power that are the focus, often at the cost of developing the potential of male characters’ equivalent attributes. However, as will be argued, it is in Walker’s later, less appreciated, works that womanism is more fully developed in its universal claims. The integration of spiritual themes and concepts into her narratives reduce or remove the tensions that arise in the reconciliation between woman and man, as well as between humanity and nature.

National cultural heritage institutions are charged with representative preservation of their countries’ cultural materials and the ways their staff undertake preservation activities impact to whom and how these materials are representative. Music is hailed as an integral part of a nation’s cultural heritage, but while aspects of its preservation are individually understood, their combined treatment in cultural institutions — music curation — and its ability to alter concepts of national identity are not. Consequently, we must ask how does music curation influence notions of national identity? By answering this question, this thesis seeks to contribute to our understanding of the ways that national cultural heritage institutions shape and promote a sense of national community. Since its beginning in 1800, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. has adopted several roles: a congressional resource; a copyright repository; a research centre; a hub for and leader in the library community; and cultural heritage institution. These combine to make the Library of Congress the de facto national library of the United States. However, these roles are not inherently congruent and in some instances undermine each other. Additionally, music has not always been easily integrated into its mission and its collections. Functioning as a national library, the Library of Congress potentially performs significant roles in the preservation and presentation of music, activities that make it an appropriate case study for investigating how music curation affects notions of national identity. Therefore, this work is structured in the following way: first, it offers an historical overview of the Library of Congress’ three music related departments — the Music Division, the American Folklife Center and the Recorded Sound component of the Motion Picture, Broadcast and Recorded Sound Division — to illuminate political, cultural and aesthetic forces that shaped their developments and their approaches to music curation. Second, it presents Howard Becker’s art world as the analytical framework by which this thesis critically engages narrative and identity theories. Third, employing the Library of Congress as a case study, it then investigates eight music curation narratives and juxtaposes them against its image as a cultural heritage institution. Narratives, gathered during semi-structured interviews and presented as interpretive stories, provide a focused insight into the tensions between staff and institution as well as institution and projected notions of national identity. In the context of music curation, this thesis’ conclusions illustrate a gap between the Library of Congress’ iconic image and its actual image, one that is perpetuated by its focus on research.

The terrorist attacks in the United States of September 11, 2001, were unprecedented in the modern era, and they heralded a new era in politics as the Bush Administration pursued rigorous security policies at home and staged military operations in Afghanistan, and subsequently Iraq. Witness testimonies, and newspaper articles in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, revealed that many of those watching coverage of the attacks on television temporarily mistook the reporting for a Hollywood block-buster, an indication that there was some kind of relationship between 9/11 and Hollywood film-making. This thesis contends that films produced in 9/11’s wake were influenced by the attacks and the response that followed, particularly as they demonstrate either an endorsement or challenge to the Bush Administration, and thus can be interpreted politically. This thesis makes specific reference to a number of key issues that demonstrate how Hollywood dealt with 9/11. Firstly, the industry found itself unsure what films were suitable for release in the new context of victimhood; it co-operated with government officials to help in the post-9/11 effort, while many individuals responded to the emergency with fund-raising and other activities. The issue of how Hollywood narrativised the emotional and psychological consequences of the attacks is also addressed with particular focus on how film can act as a memorial. A key feature of both post-9/11 culture and cinema is a fresh apprehension of the real. In this thesis, the issue of ‘the real’ is studied in two distinct areas: realist aesthetics in fiction film, and how the choice of a particular realism has a particular ideological significance; and the growth of the documentary feature film. If Hollywood’s attention to realist aesthetics meets a certain need for facts and knowledge in a period of crisis, then the desire to ‘understand’ is also addressed by genre’s treatment of American myth. In the case of post-9/11, focus on the Western demonstrates how the issues of ‘strong’ masculinity and ‘Otherness’ of race, are dealt with by Hollywood. One of the prevailing myths surrounding the official 9/11 story is that the latent heroism of the ordinary American citizen was revealed. Here, post-9/11 heroism is analysed with reference to the numerous films based on comic-books, specifically those featuring superheroes that expose particular psychological phenomena peculiar to post-9/11 America. Finally, the concept of the global nature of 9/11 with reference to how Hollywood deals with American catastrophe in a global context, how an American event is represented by non-American film-makers, and how global events are represented by non-American film-makers but viewed through the paradigm of 9/11 is discussed. This thesis, then, studies the political and ideological functions and implications of American film after 9/11 through discourses of ‘the real’ and key issues of self-censorship, co-operation, victimhood, masculinity, race, repression, trauma, and heroism.