This thesis is concerned with the history of folk music collecting in America and seeks to demonstrate the overriding importance of the political, socio – cultural, intellectual, and technological contexts on this work of folk music collecting. It does so via an examination the work of five of the principal folk music collectors in America in the 19th and 20th centuries: Francis Child, Cecil Sharp, John Lomax, Alan Lomax, and Harry Smith, arguing that the work of each of them was impacted by various contexts which were central to their theories of folk music, their collecting methodologies, and what they did with the material they collected. Each of these collectors, whose work was governed by the context in which they were working, introduced transformations in the theory, practice, and output of folk music collecting. These transformations are held to represent the American collecting tradition, and are in fact what define the American collecting tradition and allow it to continue developing as a discipline from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Focusing where possible on folk and early popular music as historical documents, this thesis investigates how successive waves of culturally alien Irish immigrants were able to overcome hostility and eventually integrate into the population of New York City. It establishes that legacies of Protestant reformation, British domination and Catholic deprivation carried from Ireland and Great Britain combined in New York City with economic and political competition to invigorate latent anti-Catholic and anti-Irish hostility. This process was greatly aggravated by the huge and incessant scope of immigration; and the unsuitability of a poorly-educated, rural people for settlement in an increasingly urbanised commercial industrial environment. Irish Catholics refused assimilation because it required the rejection of their heritage. Instead, they opted to integrate en masse through the acquisition of political power, a far longer process marked by ebbs and flows of fortune and opposition. Employing lyrics and the wider culture of folk and popular song, as well as period newspaper reportage and modern scholarship, the thesis traces the chronology of Catholic Irish integration beginning with the establishment of state and national sovereignty in late 1783. The Introduction provides broader thesis overview and definitions. Chapter One establishes that by 1700 official British colonial policy purposefully discouraged Catholic settlement in New York. Chapter Two shows conservative Federalist opposition to providing equal religious and political rights. Chapter Three examines the dual impact of Ireland's Great Hunger and America's Second Great Awakening. Chapter Four investigates the opportunity and challenge presented by the American Civil War, and the catastrophic Draft Riots of 1863. Chapter Five sees the Catholic Irish banish Orangeism, gain control of Tammany Hall and then the mayor's office. Throughout, songs illuminate the Catholic Irish path towards integration.

This thesis argues that, catalysed by technological and architectural developments, as well as by altering moral codes of conduct, by the early twentieth century, Manhattan had become a nexus of spectacle, its culturally distinct districts and numerous heterotopic spaces providing quasi stage-sets for impromptu and everyday performance. The theatre extended its embrace across the modern metropolis and conceptual stages could be found almost anywhere and everywhere: the subway, the elevated railway, fire-escapes, roof-gardens, shop windows and skyscrapers. These unofficial stages took their place alongside the busy lives of city dwellers. Using examples from literature, as well as elements of magazine culture, cinema, theatre, visual art, photography and music, this interdisciplinary thesis demonstrates the ways in which everyday theatre came to be played out day-to-day in the districts of Greenwich Village, Harlem and the Lower East Side. I explore how performative language and themes infiltrated mass culture, as literary and artistic representations of the city intermingled reality with the theatrical, often providing a smoke-screen for harsher truths. I incorporate works from a cross-section of writers including Djuna Barnes, Floyd Dell, Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Langston Hughes, Mike Gold and Anzia Yezierska, as well as artists such as John Sloan, Aaron Douglas and Jerome Myers.

This thesis emerges out of a study of Thomas Pynchon’s work, from certain qualities and attributes that recur in his writing, notably the forces and hauntings of technology; the project is, further, alert to these phenomena as it is to Pynchon’s prose technique which exemplifies these aspects in its proliferative connections and modes of association. The study, whose title similarly derives from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, offers readings of literary, historical and visual texts, and examines the radioactive substance, as well as the cultural implications and material manifestations, of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and of its support mechanisms. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, the thesis focuses on the interface between geography and technology, and identifies how missile technology is expressed, developed and linked to already existing narratives of particular US states. It uses methods and interpretations drawn from the creative mythologies of Alexis de Tocqueville and Thomas Jefferson, the fields of cultural and military studies, theories of technology formulated by Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, Laurence Rickels and Paul N. Edwards, architectural and spatial theories developed by Henri Lefebvre and Anthony Vidler, and Cold War horror and science fiction movies, all of which frame the wider issues involved. The premise for the project is the representation of American power, or of the ‘American spirit’, in D.H Lawrence’s words, as a monster, a vampire which feeds on the subjects of the nation; this notion of vampirism is latent in the project’s four chapters, on Colorado, Kansas, Cape Canaveral and New York, which seek to address different aspects of the country’s flights into (nuclear) enclosures. The first chapter, ‘Excavation’, focuses on the state of Colorado and uranium mining, and examines the missile’s substance, its nuclear core, through close readings of Stephen King’s The Shining. The second chapter, ‘Preservation’, is concerned with the state of Kansas and the missile silo, and employs the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Allen Ginsberg, Thomas Pynchon, Frank Baum and a range of political and military studies to arrive at a consideration of the form of the missile silo as the epitome of an architecture of storage. The third chapter, ‘Evacuation’, homes in on Cape Canaveral, guided by J.G. Ballard’s Space Age short stories and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and utilises archival material from James E. Webb, NASA administrator from 1961–1967, to argue that narratives of progress and possibilities of movement are bound to the need to seek refuge in static enclosures. The fourth chapter, ‘Transmission’, zeroes in on New York, and is concerned with missile defence; it deploys analysis of the works of H.G Wells, Jonathan Schell, Nikola Tesla, Ronald Reagan and Elaine Scarry to discuss the transmission of rays, and of rumours.

This is an account of the social and work experience of successive generations of immigrants in a mushrooming industrial city, Paterson, New Jersey, 1880-1915. In the late nineteenth century the city became the centre of the American silk industry. It's economy flourished, dominated by the production of this one product. Its mills and machinery were technologically the most advanced of any in the world. Paterson quickly became a Mecca for immigrant silk hands. Their adaption to the new work routines in the city's mills forms the focal point of this study. Immigrant workers brought with them work and collective traditions coloured by their experience in the silk industries of their homelands. They were ill-suited to the advanced form of production in Paterson mills and constantly disrupted the plans of local factory owners. The resultant tension became an ingrained feature of industrial life in the city as a continuous stream of immigrants re-enforced the disruptive tendencies of their predecessors in the mills. Paterson millowners were so hidebound by their wayward workers that by the end of the century they formed concerted plans to assume a new dominance over the economic fortunes of the city. Their campaign was directed primarily against Paterson's newest immigrant group, Italian millhands. It assumed a distinctive flavour from that fact. In 1913 the new stance of millowners culminated in the notorious "War in Paterson". Although the 1913 strike is commonly attributed to the inflammatory presence of the Industrial Workers of the World, it was rooted in tensions wholly independent of that organization. The failure of the strike confirmed the new social and political status of Paterson's factory owners, and the eclipse of a long tradition of collective disruption by the city's immigrant millworkers.

President Obama’s tenure in the White House had a significant effect on political comic deliberation and performance within stand-up comedy, particularly in reference to discussions of race and racial politics. This thesis examines the subversive and conservative qualities of political stand-up comedy under his presidency, exploring how the cultural form reacted and responded to the ideological, performative, cultural and political tones and pressures of this era. These chapters range from an analysis of Obama’s own presidential stand-up addresses, to African American, left-wing and right-wing political comic reaction within stand-up comedy, and finishes with an examination of Donald Trump’s effect on political stand-up (and the broader areas of political comic production) in the final year of the Obama era. The thesis’ nine case studies explore narratives and issues of Obama-era power and various political, social and cultural items of the period. The primary methodology consists of textual and discourse analyses of the nine case studies. These are reinforced using a broad data collection of relevant journalistic, political, theoretical, comic, and cultural analysis. The main findings of this thesis are that political stand-up comedy was largely a timid cultural agent in the Obama era due to a range of ideological, racial, cultural and socio-political qualities. Subversive elements can, however, still be found throughout the nine case studies, particularly in the area of right-wing political stand-up comedy, a subversion which is magnified by the field’s deficit in cultural and social insurance in comparison to African American and left-wing political comic ruminations.

This is a study of local black leadership in Alabama and Virginia in the 1880s. It is both an Intellectual and Social History - comparing the thinking and social setting of the local black elite in these two states using both a biographical and thematic approach. It explores how a protest tradition among local leaders remained strong in the South beyond the end of Reconstruction - a result of the relative ‘flexibility’ in southern race relations in the 1880s. Through a series of case studies, issues such as civil rights and the participation in party politics will be explored along with those of education and emigration. All of these subjects were significant to the local elite studied here; however, civil rights and education dominated discussion throughout the 1880s. Moreover, a comparative approach will provide a means of studying change and continuity in the thinking of the local black elite over the course of the 1880s; highlighting, for example, how one issue could be more prominent in one state over another, and how this might change over time. As well as exploring the local context, a comparison will also be made with the national black elite - in particular, with Frederick Douglass. How the thinking of Douglass influenced, and was influenced by, local black leaders, will form part of this study. In addition, this study will determine how representative Booker T. Washington was as a local black leader, arguing that his relationship with other southern leaders in the 1880s was much closer than has been assumed. Above all, this thesis will assess how the local black elite treaded the fine, often difficult, line between whites on the one hand, and the southern blacks they represented on the other, in the years following Reconstruction.

In the early 1990s, English Heritage conducted a series of pilot studies in Cornwall through the Cornwall Archaeological Unit, examining historic industrial mining complexes as a means to conserve and manage a growing number of individual historic sites and monuments. During these studies, a discrete methodology for conducting Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) modelling has been developed. Models such as these have been presented in an assortment of scholarly publications and have been applied in portions of Europe and New Zealand. With few exceptions, the English Heritage HLC model has not been applied in the United States. Rather, the United States’ National Park Service has provided guidance on the identification, evaluation, and documentation of historic mining sites and landscapes. The present study incorporates social history, archival evidence, and the physical setting of the San Francisco Mining District (SFMD) and associated boom towns in Beaver County, southwest Utah, into a Geographic Information System (GIS) in an effort to apply HLC modelling. Minor comparisons are drawn between the SFMD and mining districts in the United States, United Kingdom, and New Zealand. Several advantages of the HLC methodology for the SFMD include the creation of population, building and archaeological databases that may be applied to the GIS for better management of the resources on a broader scale.

The U.S. War on Drugs has been underway for several decades. Since it was declared by the Nixon Administration narcotics have been understood as a growing security threat to the American public, their health, economy and society. Illicit drugs have gradually become a securitised issue. From the Nixon Administration onward, the law enforcement and eventually military assets of the United States government were increasingly deployed in an effort to counter this drug threat. While initially regarded as a minor issue, as the potency and addictive qualities of illicit drugs increased during the 20th Century, so too did the concerns of influential actors from the political and public spheres. Nixon's actions did not represent the high-water mark of U.S. counter-narcotics. There was growing violence on American streets linked to the drug trafficking cartels out of Colombia, especially in Southern Florida where traffickers battled each other for lucrative drug markets. In response to this national security threat, the Reagan Administration – followed by the successor Bush and Clinton Administrations – gradually increased the involvement of the U.S. military in counter-narcotics policy. This occurred both at home in the form of greater militarisation of police forces, and abroad in support of several Latin American countries’ security forces. In 2000, drug-related instability in Colombia resulted in the launch of the Plan Colombia initiative, a dedicated package of American financial and security assistance, with counter-narcotics the primary purpose. In 2008, as drug-related violence in Mexico reached epidemic proportions and threatened to spillover across the American border, the U.S. launched the Merida Initiative in an attempt to aid Mexican counter-narcotics efforts. This thesis uses qualitative research methods to examine the militarisation of U.S. foreign counter-narcotics policy by analysing the case studies of Colombia and Mexico and their American-backed efforts. It also examines domestic policy, by considering the historical development of U.S. counter-narcotics, the progressive militarisation of law enforcement as a consequence of the drug war, and the security situation on the southern border with Mexico. This empirical research is facilitated by the development of a militarisation analytical framework, which builds upon the securitisation framework. Based on the findings of the case studies, the processes that drive militarisation are explored, and the framework itself is further developed and refined. The research possibilities for counter-narcotics policy and future direction for militarisation research are also explored in the Conclusion. Ultimately, this thesis offers a detailed analysis of militarisation in U.S. foreign and domestic counter-narcotics policy, the processes behind this, and develops a militarisation framework applicable to any security situation, contributing to the overall securitisation debate.

This project explores the nature and extent of the relationship between Blake and Whitman. I examine their works to find affinities in tone, style and themes and seek to understand the origin of these affinities. The resultant discoveries, however, lead to the conclusion that, because of Whitman’s lack of exposure to Blake’s work, these affinities must be accounted for through a coterie of indirect influences on Whitman. Over the course of the introductory chapter, I establish the critical proclivity of connecting William Blake and Walt Whitman, providing examples of such critical interpretation; in addition, I provide an introduction to the key figures, terms, and works with which this thesis engages. The work of the second chapter of this project is to uncover in Whitman’s work, before he could have read Blake, those elements that are read as points of contact between them. Through close readings, I show that those aspects of Whitman’s work which are read as points of contact between Blake and Whitman predate Whitman’s exposure to Blake’s work, and so necessitate an engagement with influences shared by Blake and Whitman. The third chapter articulates the notion that a variety of influences affected Whitman’s composition of Leaves of Grass, and these various influences serve as an explanation for those apparent similarities between Blake and Whitman discussed in chapter two. The final element this chapter engages with is that of nineteenth-century periodical culture; this aspect of the influences articulated in this chapter provides a secondary explanation for the similarities discussed in the second chapter. The fourth and fifth chapters focus on the 1860 and 1867 iterations of Leaves of Grass and the 1867 and 1871–72 versions of Leaves of Grass, respectively, both with special emphasis on the poem that would become “Song of Myself.” The changes seen throughout these iterations will be used to understand Whitman’s evolving prosody as well as his changing public persona. These chapters also engage with the work of Swinburne, in chapter five, and of Gilchrist, in chapter four, as integral elements of this mediated influence of Blake on Whitman. In the final chapter of this work, I summarize my findings, suggest possible avenues for further inquiry, and discuss the implications of this research. There is a trend in Anglo-American literary criticism to see the relationship between America and England as adversarial rather than generative. The concluding chapter of this work will explore the idea of the Anglo-American literary tradition as a continuum—a complex of acceptance, extension, transformation, and refusal—and place the relationship of Whitman to Blake accurately on this continuum.