This dissertation offers a revisionist account of American regionalist fiction. In particular, it contests prevailing diagnoses of the genre as bourgeois nostalgia by locating within its content and form a radical utopian impulse. By drawing out their engagement with socialist, feminist, anti-racist, and environmental protection movements, this project shows how regionalist texts perform both the utopian work of envisioning progressive futures and the necessarily regionalist work of orienting and charting a path toward those futures on a localized scale. Although our historical understanding of social movements during the Long Gilded Age is largely framed in the Nationalist and (proto-)Progressive politics of much overtly utopian fiction, comparative readings of William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Kate Chopin reveal within regionalist fiction a more radically democratic model for social change. This suggests, in part, that regionalist writers of the 1870s through the 1910s imagined the local rather than the national as the scale on which social change could and should be carried out.

This work will explore the interconnections between political power and the various forms of corruption endemic in Denver in the late 19th century placing municipal corruption and election fraud into the larger political, economic, social and cultural framework. Municipal political corruption in Denver operated through a series of relationships tying together, the city police, political factions, utility and industrial leaders, con men, gamblers, protection rackets and the election of U.S. Senators. This work will explore not only the operational ties, but also how these ties served all parties, and the discourse used to rationalize the behavior and distribute blame. The dates for this study are bracketed by two significant events: a mayoral election and trial in 1889-1890, and the City Hall War in the spring of 1894. Each of these events represents a point when a rupture in the tight net of political control sparked a battle for hegemony with a concomitant turn to corruption and election fraud on the part of competing political factions. The level of municipal corruption in Denver was not necessarily unusual; however, the extent of the documentation enables a detailed analysis. Denver newspapers blamed the corruption on an unspecified "gang" and a shadowy "machine." The editors railed against the scourge of con men, and simultaneously used the ubiquitous fraud as a metaphor for trickery and corruption of all kinds. This detailed analysis reveals a more complex series of events through which a cabal of business and industry leaders seized control of both the city and the state government, giving them the political power to wage what has been called a war against labor.

An environmental and cultural history of cities between 1870 and 1930s, "Winters in America" explores the changing material and cultural relationship that Americans formed with winter in the urban spaces of the country. During this period of immense demographic, social, and technological change most Americans encountered winter nature in the industrial city, and subsequently formed their environmental experiences and knowledge of the season through city life. Using case studies of five cities - Boston, Chicago, St. Paul, Tucson and Phoenix - this study shows how winter labor, leisure, and culture in the Gilded Age city not only informed built environments but was also marshaled by Americans to interpret the appearance of the season, resulting in an emerging urban environmental and seasonal culture. Indeed, the growth of cities in combination with social and technological changes played a significant role in reorienting how many residents experienced and understood winter in their lives. Access to and control over winter narratives were not inclusive, however, and the evolving culture of winter typically favored particular classes of citizens. Winter celebrations, employment aid, work, and winter health resorts, for example, shifted the experiences and social values injected into the season. Ultimately, an examination of winter in the city during this period demonstrates the continued environmental power of season in the lives of urban Americans, while exposing the cultural power many Americans ascribed to the coldest season.

Thesis advisor: Heather Cox Richardson / Throughout the nineteenth century, southern Democrats had one continual objective: to preserve racial hierarchy in their home region. Direct efforts in the 1870s, though, failed to eliminate the threat that Republicans might renew Reconstruction. So, in the 1880s, white southerners in Congress developed an array of softer, less direct approaches. Their goal was to foster reconciliation with white northerners, undercutting support for Reconstruction and securing white supremacy for the South. With one issue more than any other, they succeeded: expansion of the U.S. Navy. Recognizing that global developments and the decrepit state of the U.S. Navy were increasing concern about national defense, Congressman Hilary Abner Herbert (D-AL) positioned himself to become a champion of naval expansion. A former enslaver with no maritime experience, the Confederate colonel leveraged an appointment as chair of the House Committee on Naval Affairs in 1885. Over the next eight years, Herbert established bipartisan and cross-sectional support for naval legislation in the House and spearheaded the most drastic peacetime military buildup Americans had ever seen. The interests of this “Father of the New Navy,” though, were chiefly sectional. For Herbert, militarization was a means to advancing reconciliation and securing white supremacy for the South. He stated this purpose clearly both in private and public. In 1890, he put it into practice. When Republicans introduced legislation to address voting rights in the South, Herbert wielded his reputation for bipartisanship and reconciliation against it, threatening violence and an end to economic unity. On the national level, Herbert’s use of naval expansion to further reconciliation escalated militarization and paved the way for an overseas U.S. empire. In the South, the Alabamian’s efforts helped open the door for a new system of legalized white supremacy that he celebrated as “a final solution of the negro question.” / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Several literary historians have discussed how literary authorship became a profession in America. The act of imaginative writing evolved, by the middle of the nineteenth century, from an amateur pursuit into a big business. The rapid commercial growth of letters after the Civil War meant that American writers could realize themselves precisely as literary professionals who often performed no other sorts of work and who were publically respected for their “writerly” work. However, our historiography glosses over the widespread cultural confusion and skepticism in Gilded Age America over the legitimacy of literary work and the rightful status of literary authors as workers in the nineteenth century’s newly emergent social hierarchy of labor. Scholars have not accounted for one of the central tensions of late-nineteenth century American literature: as fiction writing evolved into a professional, commercial activity, and, thus, a potentially viable way to earn a living, many of America’s most successful and otherwise significant writers struggled against pervasive public assumptions that challenged the notion of writing as “real” work. My dissertation is essentially a study of ideas about the work of writing in America from the Civil War to World War I, when American authors were thinking about literary authorship increasingly in vocational terms. In particular, my study explores how professional writers understood the nature and meaning of their literary endeavors in a culture that often refused to recognize those endeavors as work. I demonstrate how Gilded Age authors, operating within a fully professionalized business of letters, conceived of the nature of their work and its relation to the work performed by others. My project responds to the gap outlined above by offering a new account of postbellum authorship, one that foregrounds the influence of what might be called “vocational anxieties” on the careers of three representative Gilded Age writers: William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and Jack London. The term “vocational anxieties” describes the acute sense of worry shared by countless American writers who faced the cultural assumption that writing was not work and, therefore, writers were not actual workers. My dissertation also looks at the inherent conflicts created for professional writers by the mass literary marketplace, the commercial conditions of which thrust literary artists into the new and, often times, uneasy role of literary businessmen and businesswomen. My project explores the nature of these problems and, in particular, the ways in which Howells, Chesnutt, and London responded to them. The heart of my argument is that cultural suspicions about the literary enterprise caused a transition of authorial consciousness, whereby an array of American authors tried to define themselves, foremost, as laborers, and the act of imaginative writing as an authentic form of work. Each chapter in my dissertation explores the respective attempts made by Howells, Chesnutt, and London to rhetorically reconstruct his own literary work by linking it to and, in some cases, mediating it through various modes of socially, ethically purposive work or, in other cases, often simultaneously, through physically strenuous labor, such as industrial work, artisanal work, craft production, factory work, and agricultural work. Ultimately, my account of Gilded Age authorship suggests that the story of American letters from the Civil War to the First World War amounts to a romance with literary labor. My project is both a work of literary history and a limited cultural history of ideas about authorship, as practiced by Howells, Chesnutt, and London. Much of my study features a sustained analysis of “non-literary” and some literary sources, many of which have previously gone unexamined, usually composed by the authors themselves. Combining historicist and new historicist insights, I make my case with the help of source materials, including private letters, public speeches, journal entries, newspaper and magazine articles, theoretical tracts, and travel accounts. Chapter One, “Introduction,” foregrounds the essential questions sketched above. I contextualize my dissertation within the existing field of authorship studies. Furthermore, I explain my methodologies before providing a brief history of ideas about work and the work ethic in American culture prior to the Civil War. Chapter Two, “’Merely a Working Man’: William Dean Howells and the Aesthetics of Vocational Anxiety,” redirects our attention to the ways in which Howells’s development as a novelist and critic was shaped by cultural and personal doubts about the work of writing. His longstanding image as a complaisant literary aristocrat ignores the fact that he was tormented throughout his life by deeply rooted vocational anxieties. The chapter argues that Howellsian Realism was a response to and an expression of these doubts. It traces the key strategies underlying Howells’s career-long campaign to revalorize the vocation of literary authorship, strategies which included recasting writers and literary texts along socially purposive lines. Redefining himself and other writers as laborers, and the writing process as strenuous work, was the other part of that campaign. In Chapter Three, “’I would gladly devote my life to the work’: Charles Waddell Chesnutt and the Limits of Literary Reform,” I argue that his artistic aspirations diverged from his political concerns shortly after the press deemed him one of America’s most promising black authors. Chesnutt desired recognition as a literary artist untethered from his reputation as a famous Race Man. As his authorial career advanced, he found it increasingly difficult to square his artistic ambitions with the social expectations placed on him as a public black intellectual. Chesnutt strove to release himself from the entrenched literary expectations and cultural designations imposed on fin de siècle black authors. Put another way, he fought to create an artistic identify--for he and other black writers--beyond the boundaries of the African American literary tradition he inherited. African American writers would take up his dilemma, which amounted to the question of whether to write “for his race” and for his own artistic ambitions, in every subsequent generation. Chapter Four, “’Not afraid to work, work, work’”: Labor, Craft, and the Literary Career of Jack London, reframes London as a disciple of Howells, insofar as he adopted the Howellsian writing as labor ideology, recasting postbellum writers at once as laborers and skilled artisans. But unlike Howells, whose genteel image and lifestyle separated him from the workaday world, London used his personal life to collapse the boundaries between the distinct worlds of art and labor. He created the model for the man of letters as a man of action. Throughout his literary career, London played up his “anti-literary” public persona, posing as an adventuresome man of the world who chanced to earn his living by his pen. The chapter highlights the unresolved tension between London’s evolving notions of literary artistry and craft and his vocational and masculine anxieties, which compelled him to publicly endorse the notion of writing as industrial labor long after he considered himself a careful literary craftsman. Chapter Five, “Epilogue: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the Problems of Modern Authorship” reiterates the study’s main claims and articulates it’s broader significance within the fields of literary and work studies. / English

Scholars in the history and sociology of engineering in the United States have commented critically on the unwillingness of twentieth century engineers to participate actively in politics. Alfred Chandler, for example, has noted the absence of engineers in Progressive Era reform movements, while Edwin T. Layton Jr has criticized engineers in the 1920s for an excessive focus on sterile status seeking. This perceived lack of twentieth century engineering activism is especially puzzling given that nineteenth-century American engineers and engineering societies did not hesitate to lobby openly for clean water, smoke abatement, municipal reform, and numerous other issues. / Ph. D.

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In 1870, physicians in United States were not licensed by the state or federal governments, but by 1900 almost every state and territory passed some form of medical licensing. Regular physicians originally promoted licensing laws as way to marginalize competing Homeopathic and Eclectic physicians, but eventually, elite Regular physicians worked with organized, educated Homeopathic and Eclectic physicians to lobby for medical licensing laws. Physicians knew that medical licensing was not particularly appealing to state legislatures. Therefore, physicians successfully packaged licensing laws with broader public health reforms to convince state legislatures that they were necessary. By tying medical licensing laws with public health measures, physicians also provided a strong legal basis for courts to find these laws constitutional. While courts were somewhat skeptical of licensing, judges ultimately found that licensing laws were a constitutional use of state police powers. The quasi-governmental organizations created by licensing laws used their legal authority to expand the scope of the practice of medicine and slowly sought to force all medical specialists to obtain medical licenses. By expanding the scope of the practice of medicine, physicians successfully seized control of most aspects of healthcare. These organizations also sought to eliminate any unlicensed medical competition by requiring all medical specialists to attend medical schools approved by state licensing boards. Ultimately, licensing laws and a growing understanding of medical science gradually merged the three largest competing medical sects and unified the practice of medicine under physicians. This dissertation includes previously published material. / 2016-06-17

In 1881 an assassin's bullet changes the course of American history. Could it be that Julia Sand was the only one to foresee the destiny of the country? Familiar with now President Arthur's exclusionary politics, Julia writes and urges the President to reform his ways and unite the Republican Party. Great Emergencies is a stage play about the lavish dangers of The Gilded Age, but ultimately a cautionary tale about those of us whose voices are doomed to be forgotten because of the ephemeral and apathetic nature of human history.

This dissertation examines Mark Twain’s literary-critical reputation from the years 1865 to 1882, as he transformed from the regional “wild humorist of the Pacific Slope” to a national and international celebrity who William Dean Howells called “the most popular humorist who ever lived.” This dissertation considers “Mark Twain” not as the name of a literary author, but as a fictional creation who was narrator and implied author of both fictional and non-fiction texts, a performer who played his role on lecture platforms and other public venues, and a celebrity whose fame spread from the American west through America and the world. The key question of this dissertation is the historical position of the “humorist,” a hierarchical cultural category that included high culture literary figures, such as James Russell Lowell and Bret Harte; literary comedians, such as Artemus Ward and Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby; and clowns and minstrels, who were placed at the bottom of the hierarchy. I argue that Mark Twain muddied the hierarchical distinctions between class-appropriate leisure and burgeoning forms of mass entertainment, between uplifting humor and debased laughter, and between the canonical literature of high culture and the passing whim of the merely popular. Through the success of The Innocents Abroad (1869) and the promotion of William Dean Howells, Mark Twain was elevated into critical discussions of literary value, and in the 1870s he entered into venues of higher prestige: so-called “quality” magazines such as the Galaxy and the Atlantic Monthly, lecture stages on the lyceum circuit and in England, and the personal realm of friendship with other authors. While Twain was accepted into some literary cultures, other critics attempted to consign him to literary oblivion, or simply ignored him, while Twain himself betrayed keen anxiety about his role as “stripèd humorist” in respectable literary realms. This dissertation thus focuses on written works, critical interpretations, and performative instances in which “Mark Twain,” as both agent and subject, brought debates over “American Humor,” “American Literature,” and “American Culture” to the fore. / text