Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of History, 2006. / "Title from dissertation home page (viewed July 5, 2007)." Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-08, Section: A, page: 3126. Adviser: Michael Grossberg.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: A, page: 2724. Adviser: Robert W. Johannsen. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 293-311) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

This dissertation tracks how urban police tactics against homosexuality participated in the construction, ratification, and dissemination of authoritative public knowledge about gay men in the United States in the twentieth century. Focusing on three prominent sites of anti-homosexual policing—the enforcement of state liquor regulations, plainclothes decoy campaigns to make solicitation arrests, and clandestine surveillance of public bathrooms—it examines how municipal police availed themselves of competing bodies of social scientific information about homosexuality in order to bolster their enforcement efforts, taking into account such variable factors as the statutes authorizing their arrests, the humors of the courts, and their need to maintain public legitimacy. Lending the authority of the state to their preferred paradigms for understanding sexual deviance, and attaching direct legal penalties to anyone who tried to disagree, the police influenced whether—and when—new scientific research about homosexual men reached the mainstream public and was embraced as authoritative. Even as vice squads’ anti-homosexual campaigns allowed them to amass increasingly sophisticated and rarefied insights into the urban gay world, however, police officers consistently denied their reliance on any “expert” knowledge about homosexuality in court, legitimating their tactics on the basis of public’s ostensibly shared knowledge about gay men. Tracking the history of urban vice policing alongside the shifting landscape of popular knowledge about homosexuality, this project examines both the ambivalent place of “expertise” in public debates about sexual deviance in the United States, and the multifaceted origins and repercussions of the lay public’s evolving knowledge about gay communities in the twentieth century. / American Studies

My dissertation follows the lives and struggles of the workers of Samoa from the last decade of the nineteenth century until the end of the Great War. Drawing on a wide range of sources—from travel reports and court depositions to photographs and maps—my dissertation reconstructs the experiences of Samoans as well as migrants from Melanesia, Micronesia, and China. This diverse group of peoples living in Samoa harnessed their own energy and that of their natural environment to create a colonial world often beyond their own control. At the same time, they succeeded in re-creating their own lifeworlds in ways that often defied the limits of this colonial world. I argue that community, conflict, and resistance among workers in colonial Samoa can best be understood by delving deeply into the particular dynamics of particular workscapes. Five workscapes—the subsistence economy, the plantation, the ethnographic show, the building of infrastructure, and the colonial service—became crucibles of lived sociality and, over time, political solidarity for the people living and laboring in colonial Samoa. As much as German, American, and New Zealand colonial officials tried to keep workers apart from one another, they succeeded in overcoming racial and colonial boundaries and formed new kinds of community. / American Studies

“Tin Lizzie Dreams: Henry Ford and Antimodern American Culture, 1919-1942” is an interdisciplinary cultural history combining close analyses of print and broadcast media, music and dance, technology, and built environments to argue that Henry Ford, one of the most popular modernizers in American history, actually espoused and popularized a personal philosophy that was distinctly antimodern. “Tin Lizzie Dreams” shows how Henry Ford’s cultural projects, most often discussed as a side item or supplement to his career as an automaker and industrialist, were in fact indicative of an essential antipathy and even resistance toward the modernity he was helping to create through the rise of the Ford Motor Company and Model T. With projects such as the renovation of the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and the practice of holding weekly “old fashioned dances” in Dearborn, Ford created a working antimodern philosophy related to that which T.J. Jackson Lears first traced among East Coast elites at the turn of the twentieth century. Ford then brought his anti-intellectual slant on antimodernism to a mass audience with the creation of the popular Edison Institute museum and Greenfield Village, opened in 1929, and the Ford Sunday Evening Hour radio show, which reached 10 million listeners a week at the height of its 1934-1942 broadcast run. The wider argument of “Tin Lizzie Dreams” is that antimodernism, as an American cultural phenomenon, was not only the purview of Gilded Age elites but also enjoyed broad popular appeal until the outbreak of World War II. / American Studies

Fantasies of Consent: Black Women’s Sexual Labor 19th Century New Orleans draws on Louisiana legal statutes and Louisiana State Supreme Court records, alongside French and Spanish Caribbean colonial law, slave narratives, and pro-slavery writing, to craft legal, affective, and economic history of sex and slavery in antebellum New Orleans. This is the first full-length project on the history of non-reproductive sexual labor in slavery: I historicize the lives of women of color who sold, or were sold for, sex to white men. I analyze those labors, together, to understand major elements of sexual labor in the history of slavery. I theorize the meaning of sexual labor and imagine the kinds of world(s) these arrangements brought into existence, and the ways that sex and its attendant affects articulated pleasure and violence within those worlds. This project offers the framework racialized sexual commerce to name the capacious intersection of sexual commerce and racial commerce, in order to imagine a singular, integrated sexual economy. This project also frames sexual labor outside of dominant scholarly approaches that seek out evidence of rape and consent. Building on these two foundational frameworks, this project argues that the antebellum sex market trafficked in affective objects, that is, affective experiences attached to labor (sex) and made into the primary commodities of this market. Fantasies of Consent asks what kinds of pleasures the bodies of women of color were called upon to produce for white men within the sex economy, what kinds of pleasures they themselves were able to inherit, and how both sets of pleasures emerged from and were therefore imbricated within the violence of the market. I argue that in the sex market, there was no pure consent—no pleasure, no freedom—that was not already shaped by the market through which it was articulated. Affective objects remade the violence of a sex trade that lived and breathed because of slavery as pleasure, revealing the impossibility of disentangling pleasure from violence within antebellum sexual commerce. / African and African American Studies

“Feeding Kansas” is an analysis of how food and its availability shaped the experiences of settlers and Native Americans in the two decades following the opening of Kansas Territory in 1854. From the outset, food was central to conceptions of the plains. White settlers arrived in Kansas expecting a verdant Eden; their expectations were quickly altered by the realities of farming and living in the semi-arid region. This dissertation argues that, in the face of these realities, there emerged a Kansas aid complex, an overlapping set of institutions and practices that provided settlers with options to receive various forms of aid when they needed it. This system was put to the test in 1860, when the territory was struck by a devastating drought that, over the course of the year, became a famine. I argue that hungry settlers and Natives had expectations that the federal government would intervene on their behalf to prevent outright starvation, but only the treaty claims of the latter proved strong enough an incentive for the Buchanan administration to take any action. White Kansans were ultimately saved by a private aid network, one orchestrated and operated by abolitionists who understood that to keep Kansas fed was to keep it free as well. In 1874, Kansans again looked outward for help, as a “Grasshopper Plague” occurred that summer, bringing many of the same issues to the fore. In 1874-75, I argue, changing demographics on the plains and a significantly more powerful post-Civil War federal government led to a different outcome. Kansans were once again fed, but it was primarily because of the efforts of a group of Army officers stationed throughout the plains. Using promotional literature, travel narratives, diaries, newspapers, and government records, this dissertation reconsiders the “Bleeding Kansas” period, arguing that the divisive politics at the local and national levels concerning Kansas had a critical, heretofore under-examined environmental component. / History

Through a study of Boston and federal social policy, this dissertation analyzes the rise of public-private partnerships between government and nonprofit organizations in the United States over the second half of the twentieth century. A mixture of community mobilization and an elite knowledge economy positioned Boston at the forefront of a growing nonprofit sector that repeatedly captured the attention of funders in government and philanthropy. A policy shift in the 1960s for the first time authorized federal agencies to issue grants to private, nonprofit organizations as a strategy of poverty reduction and urban governance. Outsourcing social welfare provision in this way positioned nonprofit organizations as responsible for the economic, physical, political, and social development of neighborhoods. Such public-private partnerships infused neighborhood-based nonprofits with resources and authority that increased community control over the distribution of public goods and services. This decentralized, privatized system of governance grew the size, reach, and activities of the American state, but did so in indirect and ultimately insufficient ways. The project pairs policy analysis with narratives of local implementation, attending as much to how programs operated and received funding, as to what they actually did. An approach combining urban, policy, and business histories is applied to the extant records of many Boston nonprofits—grant applications, government program manuals, nonprofit reports, legislation, financial data, and contract agreements—to follow the local careers of several federal programs, including the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime Commission, War on Poverty, Model Cities, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, Community Development Block Grants and Empowerment Zones. This emphasis on implementation in Boston neighborhoods reveals how liberalism and neoliberalism functioned as governing practices that transformed the shape of the American welfare state and the institutional landscape of cities. Delivering social welfare through private, local, and, increasingly, market-based mechanisms produced affordable housing, provided social services, and encouraged participation. At the same time, the rise of public-private partnerships did little to prevent the continued concentration of poverty and inequality that characterized American cities at the end of the twentieth century. / History

“Crisis Capital” offers a local history of global capitalism and a global history of local economic development, exploring how the global movements and political struggles of industry, labor, and capital created, destroyed, and repeatedly reconfigured the southeastern industrial core of Massachusetts. By dissecting the succeeding rise and fall of the whaling, textile, garment, electronics, and high-tech industries over the past one-hundred-fifty years, it challenges one of the master narratives of modern economic development: the oft-repeated story of how nineteenth-century industrialization, urbanization, and capitalist expansion collapsed into twentieth-century de-industrialization, globalization, and urban decay. Industrial Massachusetts, it argues, did not simply “rise” in the nineteenth century only to “fall” in the twentieth, but was made and un-made over and over again—besieged and begot by the swirling global movements of migrant labor and mobile capital. From migrating Azorean seamen, British weavers, and Quebecois farmers to globetrotting whalers, New York mobile manufacturers, and Asia-bound garment producers, “Crisis Capital” explores the industrial development of Massachusetts as a function of myriad actors’ attempts to navigate the tempests of economic globalization. In so doing, “Crisis Capital” highlights the seemingly paradoxical ways Massachusetts business, government, and labor leaders discovered they could use economic crisis to reorder the global geography of capitalism to their advantage. From the lure of low rents and free factory space to the appeal of cheap labor and abundant industrial financing, crisis became a crucial means for pulling and pushing both capital and workers across the continents. Moreover, “Crisis Capital” explores how these strategies of crisis exploitation have since been adopted by states and nations around the world. By analyzing the global history of industrial Massachusetts, “Crisis Capital” thus provides not only a new take on the classic “rise-and-fall” narrative of industrialization, but a sense of how global capitalism was historically pulled together: namely, through the meshing of myriad local economies, like Massachusetts, each seeking to use crisis itself to entice capital from competing locales. The so-called “race to the bottom,” it argues, is no contemporary bugaboo, but a structural facet of how industrial capitalism has expanded over the last two centuries. / History

Darkology: The Hidden History of Amateur Blackface Minstrelsy and the Making of Modern America, 1860-1970 develops a critical bibliography and uses material culture to uncover the pervasive world of amateur blackface minstrelsy that took hold in most cities in the United States North and West between 1860 and 1970. Previously lost to history, amateur minstrelsy was integral to domestic and international imperialism. This dissertation aims to understand the cultural origins and consequences of amateur blackface minstrelsy, to map its political geography, and recapture the significance of its print culture. Despite an abundant body of evidence, the print culture of amateur blackface had remained unstudied. Darkology discloses the relationship between racially exclusive fraternal orders and the U.S. Government, and the immense body of blackface print that they created for public use. Darkology reveals the lost history of amateur blackface by providing the first bibliographic study of amateur blackface print, extends the chronology of theatrical blackface minstrelsy by seventy years through 1970, expands the geography of blackface in amateur form to the West, and reveals legal campaigns waged by the NAACP to ban blackface during the Civil Rights Movement. / History