Since the late 19th century, Florida's promoters and civic leaders have constructed the state as a tourist destination. The result was a Florida Dream that visitors and migrants could interpret according to their own expectations: as an hedonist escape from the routine of work and family; as a warm refuge from northern winters; as a rapidly expanding pool of economic opportunity. Florida's immense popularity as a tourist destination and migrant haven was then built on that Dream, as well as on abundant and escapist promotion, on transportation technology, on the development of its real estate industry and of its tourist accommodations, on rising disposable incomes since the 1940s. Florida's population grew rapidly, in great part because of its tourism. This thesis explains and analyzes the phenomenon of seasonal, long-term winter travel to Florida, travelers that South Floridians have called snowbirds. It demonstrates what pushed and pulled snowbirds to Florida, analyzes their journey south, their settlement patterns and housing choices, their tendency to congregate together, the forms of their sociability. It mostly defines snowbirds as migrants who, down South, build communities of kindred spirits. In the fragmented built landscape of 20th-century Florida, the congregation of snowbirds produced unique forms of socialization and, we argue, of community. These unique settlements have uniquely influenced Floridians' debates about their own community-building issues, while playing a part in Northerners' views about Florida, the South, the North, the United States and Canada. Snowbirds, from their standpoint on Florida and North America, were agents in the definition of peculiar yet deeply modern, North American forms of sociability and community, as well as agents in the ongoing collective conversation creating a (late) modern folklore of leisure, geography, mobility, topophilia and identity.

Though few people have heard of A.D. Smith, this nineteenth-century knight-errant made his mark in some of the key events of his times. On a Quixotic trail that began in upstate New York, wound westward to the Ohio and Wisconsin frontier, southward to the federally occupied Sea Islands of South Carolina and finally to a mysterious death aboard a northbound steamer, Smith personified the nineteenth-century impulse to move across the American landscape. In Ohio he became involved with a paramilitary group, the Hunters' Lodge, that elected Smith the "President of the Republic of Canada." In Wisconsin, he achieved fame as the judge who dared to declare the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 unconstitutional, lighting one of many fuses that sparked the Civil War. In South Carolina, he fought passionately for the property rights of freedmen. Not only did he move from state to state, but he also believed in a civic movement on behalf of a Jeffersonian democracy and republican ideals. Civic participation, he believed, was a fundamental part of being a good American. Hence Smith took on public roles as a justice of the peace, councilman, lawyer, judge and tax commissioner for the U.S. government. This civic impulse was also seen in his enthusiastic embrace of the reform movements of the day. The key to unlocking Smith's character, however, lies in his absolute dedication to radicalism. At the centre of this work is an examination of Smith's shifting position at the far left of the Democratic Party and how this affected Smith's actions, frequently putting him out of step with contemporaries and thwarting his ambitions. A detective story set against the backdrop of the volatile antebellum era, this socio-cultural biography pieces together methodological inquiry with a jigsaw puzzle composed of secret documents, probate records, court testimony, speeches, correspondence, newspaper coverage and genealogical research in order to tell the story of a man named Smith, of his vision for the United States, and, more generally, of the value of remembering secondary historical characters. In so doing, this biography also establishes that the viewing of the past through its own optics casts briefly into the limelight actors of transient importance who, while now forgotten, were nonetheless important in their own era.

This thesis explores the manner in which electric lighting was applied during the first decade after Edison's Menlo Park demonstration, and how these applications influenced American public perceptions of the technology, particularly in relation to imagined future uses and social meanings. Specifically, the thesis focuses on expectations and perceptions of electric lighting as applied or related to three important aspects of late nineteenth century American society: crime, warfare, and aesthetics and health. Using these three themes, this thesis illustrates how electric lighting was viewed during the 1880's and what hopes and images were attached to it.

The purposes of this thesis is to examine the key factors and events within the immediate political foreground which led to the acceptance of private prisons as a viable policy option on the American correctional agenda in the early to mid-1980s. There has been an evident failure in criminology to provide a proper historical account of the recent origins of private prisons, as the concentration on questions of pragmatism and philosophy left other important issues unexamined. The history of prison privatization is approached from a position that embraces multiplicity and complexity, where it is contextualized within the dynamics of the policy process and the cumulative pressures faced by individual policy-makers. To this end, the work is essentially a literature review, which analyzes the multitude of factors which interacted to produce the necessary conditions favourable to considering the privatization of prisons as a viable policy option, an approach which is critical to assessing the past, present and future developments in their proliferation. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

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