As delegates gathered in Philadelphia in May 1775 for the start of the Second Continental Congress, many of the gentlemen present understood that independence was one possible solution to the growing problems with Parliament and King George III. Congressmen in the summer of 1775 created new revolutionary institutions to address the political crisis and they turned to the eighteenth-century culture of honor to provide guidelines for their conduct and decision-making during those turbulent times. The legislative structure of the Continental Congress and the hierarchy of the Continental Army were shaped by the honor code. The eighteenth-century culture of honor constituted a system of defining cultural assumptions and behavior that helped to create social identity, structure social interactions, and govern behavior in the political and military spheres. Although there was no consensus in the 1770s on the exact definition of honor and its role in American society, the idea of honor did provide the social glue that held the colonists together as they contemplated and fought for independence. I argue that personal constructions of honorable behavior caused many of the problems between Congress and the army because gentlemen in those two institutions operated under different interpretations of the honor code. When difficulties arose between Congress and the army over promotions, pensions, or congressional privilege, revolutionaries in both institutions turned to the guidelines of the honor code to resolve the disputes. The honor culture provided three options to address the tensions between the Continental Congress and the Continental army: meditation, resignation, or affairs of honor. Mediation was the most commonly used option and reveals the large friendship networks that developed between Congress and the army. A concern for honor helps to explain why disputes involving peoples intentions and reputations occupy a significant proportion of the official records of the Continental Congress. Moreover, the honor code and its application by soldiers and politicians had a profound influence on the course and ultimate success of the Revolution.

The Paris Opera House, or Palais Garnier, is known as the backdrop for the Broadway musical Phantom of the Opera, which has been seen by more than 100 million people worldwide since its debut a quarter-century ago. Outside of France, more people know about the fictional phantom Erik and his white mask than they do Charles Garnier, the buildings real life architect. Based on substantial archival research at Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Bibliothèque-Musée de lOpéra and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, this study presents a rare biographical portrait of Garnier, whose rags-to-riches tale was emblematic of a nineteenth-century Paris where opportunities abounded for men of talent and drive. Born the son of a blacksmith, Garnier was too sickly to follow in his fathers professional footsteps. He took advantage of new educational opportunities that taught him first how to read and write, then to draw, then to be an architect. The award of a Prix de Rome in 1848 granted him five years to study, sketch and travel throughout Italy, Greece and Turkey. Away from Paris, he stoked his ambitions, refined his sensibilities and gained an appreciation for classical buildings and art. Sifting through rubble with his bare hands at the Temple of Aegina, the power of ancients seized his imagination. On his return to Paris, his newly developed expertise enabled him to win the commission to build the new Opera house which Napoleon III wanted to be the crown jewel of his refurbished and modernized Paris. Garnier needed thirteen years to complete the work, but when it was done, it stood magnificent. Born in obscurity and poverty, Garnier was now wealthy and the most famous architect in Europe.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Americans feared commercially canned foods. From the Spanish American War until well into the 1920s, canned foods received a barrage of media attacks and accusations of unhealthiness, lack of cleanliness, and a lack of transparency and regulation in processing. Moreover, as gastrointestinal distress was quite prevalent among American society, many Americans feared that it was commercial foods that were making them sick. By the time Americans were coming home from World War II, the climate of opinion concerning commercially canned foods had changed, and this was in large part due to the unyielding fight from commercial canners to refashion their own image and create a lasting consumer market for their products. At the same time, the story of canned foods rise from menace to staple of American diets is also a story of how science became embedded in American culture and how Americans became more trusting of experts and professionals. More than a history of an industry, this study attempts to place canned foods in a much larger discussion of the legitimizing power of science, the authority of experts, and American societys attempts to deal with modernity and a rapidly changing world.

This dissertation examines the factors that led to the creation of the CBS rural comedy boom in the 1960s, as well as the reasons for its demise. For years, historians have dismissed the rural comedy craze as the networks catering to the growing number of southern viewers in the late 1950s. However, there were not enough to southern viewers to dictate a networks entire programming schedule for the better part of a decade. Also, rural comedy was the domain of a single network, CBS. Had it really been a major thematic trend, all networks would have at least attempted to follow suit. Therefore, other political, social, and economic factors besides the rising number of southern viewers made rural comedy a natural fit for CBS in the 1960s. In the late 1940s, during the Red Scare, CBS developed a reputation as the Communist Broadcast System. The network spent most of the 1950s attempting to dispel that nickname through a series of quiz shows and westerns. Both genres ultimately backfired and drew negative attention for the network. When rival ABC introduced rural-themed programming to cater to the burgeoning southern market, CBS quickly joined the fray. By the mid 1960s, it had not only stolen ABCs hold on the rural market, but also re-established itself as the Country Broadcasting System. CBS stable of rural comedies dominated the ratings throughout the 1960s, a phenomenon not entirely explained by southern viewers. Rural sitcoms brought in viewers from all over the country, indicating universality to the programs that superseded their regional appeal. This dissertation discusses the factors contributing to the appeal of rural comedy in the 1960s, and addresses the factors that led to the genres abrupt demise in the early 1970s. This study not only provides insight into the role that the southern image played in entertaining and reassuring Americans in the turbulent 1960s, it also demonstrates that television is not made in a vacuum. Television trends are the result of specific political, social, and economic stressors placed on the network and the larger population, and therefore provide a living time capsule into the era they were created.

My dissertation explores the multi-channeled dialogue between Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), the Polish poet and Nobel laureate, and his transnational audiences, over the half century following World War II. The principal methodological innovation of my project consists of thinking of intellectuals like Milosz as products of a give-and-take process in which their identity is gradually shaped and catalyzed in dialogical interaction with their audiences. This dissertation sheds light on the ways Miloszs audiences deployed Cold War politics and the cultural repertoire of Polish Romanticism in order to co-author the poets identity and written works according to their political, moral, and intellectual needs. Engaging literature in the fields of East-Central European History and Intellectual History, I explore Miloszs dialogue with his audiences, ranging from his flight from the Stalinized Poland of the 1950s to his subsequent involvement in debates over anti-communism in the West, from his resettlement as a poet and professor of literature in California to his 1981 return to Poland as a moral hero of the Solidarity dissident movement. My dissertation uses Milosz's case not only as a vantage point for reflection on the formative processes that influence the social role and cultural identity of intellectuals, but also provides a lens into the critical issues of the epoch: nationalism, communism, and globalism in the context of the remarkable realignments of power and society that took place during the Cold War and in the centurys final decade.

This dissertation examines political thought in the English colonies during the seventeenth century and investigates the role played by empire in the colonists' demands for political rights. Much of the existing scholarship on early North American politics has employed a reactionary paradigm, emphasizing the colonists' struggles to secure their English rights within an increasingly intrusive empire. This dissertation argues that this approach, which was first developed in studies of colonial politics during the eighteenth century, overlooks the dynamic relationship between center and periphery that existed in early decades of English settlements. During the seventeenth century, there was a wide-ranging colonial literature that advertised the New World to an English audience and tackled the many anxieties that accompanied a transatlantic migration. In their efforts to attract migrants in sufficient numbers, these promotional tracts catered to the aspirations of potential settlers and reflected the widespread hope of individual improvement among the migratory population. Within the broader context of this colonial literature, the political demands of the colonists become progressive, not conservative, as they sought to secure the promised political empowerment that had accompanied their decision to migrate. For many colonists, the empire was a possible pathway to new liberties, not a threat to rights previously possessed. By the end of the seventeenth century, this dissertation argues that a liberal and radically populist understanding of empire had fully emerged in the colonial literature, which would become the primary language of justification for the colonists in their pursuit of increased political power in America. By integrating the efforts of colonists to create a self-serving definition of empire, this dissertation offers a more complex and dynamic understanding of politics and empire in seventeenth century North America.

This study focuses on Charlemagnes conquest of Saxony in the late eighth and early ninth centuries and the policies of forced conversion he espoused in his attempts to bring the peoples of these territories to the Christian religion. Often remarked upon is the Carolingian kings prescription of the death penalty for failure to be baptized, but this development was a logical consequence of contemporary ideology with regard to missionizing. I employ the letters of contemporaries, historical annals, and hagiographical sources to examine how the use of force in missionizing was viewed in this period, and I argue that with regard to Carolingian expansion and evangelization, forced conversion was not a major theological stumbling block. The letters of Alcuin of York are of special concern here because he appears at times to contradict this, yet as I demonstrate he, along with various popes and other prominent contemporary theologians, viewed Charlemagnes armies as convenient and effective vehicles by which to spread the Christian faith. The efficiency of military might outweighed any negative considerations. These arguments are made against the backdrop of the Saxon Wars, a conflict lasting decades in which Charlemagnes frustrations with the obstinacy of the Saxons further reduced the likelihood that peaceful means of evangelization would be considered.

This dissertation examines Mexican and Anglo race relations in the Texas borderland during the decade of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920. The outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 led to hostilities between Anglos and Mexicans in the borderland. Working-class Mexican men became targets of racial violence, and, when suspected of criminal activity, were sought out by Anglo posses. This dissertation analyzes the lynching of ethnic Mexicans in Texas, and the injustices within the legal system that targeted ethnic Mexicans in Texas. I argue that a culture of hatred developed between Mexicans and Anglos during the 1910s that was a result of tension brought on by international event in Mexicothe Mexican Revolutionand was intensified by feelings of nativism, nationalism, and sovereignty. I credit the actions of Mexican-American activists and World War I for the decrease in anti-Mexican violence: the former argued that citizenship guaranteed them equal protection under the law, and the latter led Anglos to target suspected un-American activity by Germans in the borderland as a new threat. I contribute to the historiography of violence in the borderland by introducing how the lynching of ethnic Mexicans became a common practice during the decade, and I illustrates a grass-roots movement of ethnic Mexicans in Texas that fought for their rights as American citizens.

This thesis argues that the health-seekers quest for climatic cures persisted after the germ theory of disease began to alter medical approaches to tuberculosis after its announcement in 1882. Buoyed by anti-modern sentiments and a lack of effective medicinal interventions, physicians continued to recommend that tuberculosis patients travel to Denver to seek recovery in a healthier climate. In turn, Denvers polity and public health approaches were shaped by the influences of the migration of tuberculosis patients to the city. After 1882, new approaches focused on sanitation and isolation began to take hold among physicians and public health reformers who worked with tuberculosis patients. As researchers discovered more of the pathogens responsible for various diseases, they also started to develop more medicinal interventions. In the face of a medical field that started to revolve increasingly around laboratory research, the continued phenomenon of climate-based health seeking in Denver pushed physicians and residents in the city to grapple with the role of environment in health. Inadequate infrastructure also pushed Denver residents to debate whether their citys beneficial climate could and should be regulated and made available to all tuberculosis patients. Examining the arguments that the health-seeking phenomenon prompted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals that the way physicians and residents of Denver viewed health-seekers in their city paralleled broader social concern over the benefits and drawbacks of increasing modernity and urbanization, the place of racial and class-based scientific conclusions, and the role of the government in public health and well-being.

This dissertation is a transatlantic story of Caribbean post-emancipation centered on the experiences of approximately fifty Afro-Barbadian families (346 people) who emigrated to Liberia in 1865. At the outset, it explores the political and institutional processes that reshaped post-emancipation societies such as Barbados, particularly highlighting restrictions and barriers that conspired to sustain un-freedom, maintain landlessness, and disenfranchisement for Afro-Barbadians. To this end, the dissertation examines issues surrounding land acquisition, wage and labor negotiations, and the attainment of civil and political rights, all of which figured to varying degrees into Afro-Barbadians sense of place and prospects for a future in the Caribbean. Failure to realize post-slavery goals after thirty years of freedom in Barbados and inadequate means of making their voices heard fostered a sense of stagnation that factored in their gloomy view of a future in the Caribbean. The dissertation then follows the Barbadians across the Atlantic into Liberia. This changing socio-political environment and their collision with African re-captives, African Americans, and Native Liberians in the Liberian nation building project affected changes in the Barbadians' experience of post-emancipation in multiple ways. On this side of the Atlantic, there were opportunities for meaningful and mutually beneficial interactions between the various groups of blacks. However, tensions inevitably arose as different ideas about freedom, citizenship, and nationhood converged as well as blurred and transformed across space and time. While diasporic blacks had returned to the motherland with their African identities at the forefront, it was rather their diasporic identities that took preeminence in their lives. Whereas in the diaspora the migrants had sought to repair the rupture and fragmentation of slavery and exploitation by collectivizing the multiple nodes of diasporic experience and centering Africa as their motherland, their convergence in Liberia instead created a new milieu in which intra-racial and ethnic identity and difference would be nurtured. The notion of a collective black identity would further be destabilized in the era of the 'Scramble for Africa' where British intrusion in Liberia caused Americo-Liberians to be suspicious about the British backgrounds of the West Indians. This ultimately exposed the vicissitudes of what was previously believed to be a collective black identity. Bringing together Caribbean post-emancipation and Liberian colonization history into such as transatlantic and diasporic framework thus shows the changing and diverging nature of black experiences and reshapes conceptual and theoretical boundaries that continue to inform our understandings of Africans and diasporic blacks.