In the late nineteenth century the lives of many white middle- and upper-class women were transformed by the woman's club movement. The club movement became the crucible in which the ideology of "true womanhood" was infused with new content, relevance, and meaningfulness for non-wage-earning women in modern America. As a significant, but largely unchronicled, aspect of both the turn-of-the-century "woman's movement" and the early-twentieth-century Progressive movement, the work and the experience of club women constitute an important aspect of the history of American women, the history of Progressive Era reform, and the cultural history of the United States. White middle- and upper-class women in Texas were enthusiastic participants in this movement beginning with the creation of self-culture clubs in the 1880s and 1890s and continuing into the twentieth century with a dynamic, elaborately organized, and reform-oriented union of clubs, the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs. Texas club women energetically committed themselves to the reclamation of their communities convinced that womanly values were crucial for enlightened progress. At the municipal, state, and national level, white Texas club women were among the most ardent of Progressive Era reformers. Texas club women maximized their resources of leisure time and class status to compensate for their political disabilities. These resources enabled club women to initiate projects that they would later become public responsibilities. The prodigious activity of the state federation emerged from an unarticulated quartet of political strategies: the Politics of Righteousness, the Politics of Enthusiasm, the Politics of Harmony, and the Politics of Influence. In their study clubs Texas women found a space for reflection upon the essential and instrumental aspects of womanhood. In their club work they created new opportunities for their talents and gained new recognition for their accomplishments. Most important, as white club women altered the geography of woman's sphere, they rehearsed a significantly modified model of womanhood. They created a new norm--that of professional volunteer--for subsequent generations of non-wage-earning women.

Questioning why some white women in the South identified with Progressive reform movements, or became suffragists, provides the impetus for this case study based on women's organizations in Galveston, Texas. By employing the technology devised by urban historians to complement the already well-established methodologies of women 5 historians, this study explores two aspects of women's history--the roots of southern women's reform and the evolution of a Progressive era women's community stemming out of women's culture. Unlike previous studies, which argue that women from evangelical churches and the Women's Christian Temperance Union fueled the movement toward woman suffrage in the South, evidence from Galveston shows that suffrage leaders did not stem from evangelical churches but from elitist Episcopal and Presbyterian churches. Women from these churches had gained their experience in church-based associations whose focus was community-wide and addressed the dislocations caused by urbanization. In nearly every case, class and privilege determined civic leadership among white women rather than evangelical zeal, and from the start their interest was in societal betterment rather than in winning converts. The concept of women's culture and its evolution--the movement of women and their values, attitudes, and actions from home to church, to benevolent institutions, to clubs, to civic reform groups--and the resulting transformations provides the framework for this study. Women's culture remained a great underlying foundation, upon which activist women stood when entering the public realm. By the Progressive Era women had formed an informal community of civic activists whose focus on improvement grew out of their own cultural and domestic world, out of the disastrous storm of 1900, out of their previous experience as community builders, and, most important for the development of woman suffrage, out of the state's increasing urbanization. The study of the development of this women's community, equivalent to cultural studies of black or European ethnic communities, is essential to understanding the animus behind southern women's reforming activities.

Historians of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries deprive themselves of rich resources by limiting their research to textual materials. Since the invention of photography in 1839, an immense body of images has been produced, and many of these pictures rest in commercial photography archives--businesses that over the years recorded major and minor events, important individuals, working class laborers, weddings, funerals, and even the geography of cities, towns and countrysides. The visual record comprised by these archives offers a new way to recover people's history and to understand better the evolution of occupational, ethnic, political, or cultural communities. This work uses the photographic archive of the Verkin Studio of Galveston, Texas, and selected images from the Achille Simon collection of New Orleans, Louisiana, to recover and reconstruct the maritime community of Galveston, Texas, during the approximate period 1900 to 1940. Employing the images to investigate four particular areas--the Galveston Wharf Company, the waterfront's workers, the ships calling in the port, and the Galveston grade raising effort--this monograph treats the images as both information and material culture, gathering from them specifics about ships, people, companies, and activities as well as examining their circumstances of production and usage--who took them? Why? Which ones were used and how were they used? A final chapter details the creation of an exhibition using these images and explains the design and production choices made to convey the multiplicity of interpretations suggested by the materials. Studied through this two-fold method, commercial photography archives may yield especially rich interpretive material and also offer insights into areas of art history and the history of photography as well. This particular effort draws from existing work in the history of photography, social history, community studies, Texas history, and maritime studies and contributes--as an applicable case study--to all of those fields.

The American Panorama Company's cyclorama, The Battle of Atlanta, portrays an important battle during the Civil War. Representations of this engagement in photographs, illustrations, and history paintings presented isolated episodes, while cycloramas exhibited a sweeping narrative of the actual combat. These popular art attractions had a circular design that enabled artists to render a comprehensive view and exhibit characteristics of traditional history paintings. To ensure profits from its exhibition, the painters contemplated their potential spectators, avoiding antagonistic symbols. They considered contemporary attitudes concerning the war and created a composition that would foster the country's desire for reconciliation. The result was a portrayal of the battle that instructed its audiences on the heroic actions of both Union and Confederate soldiers amid the terrible circumstances of battle. Therefore, The Battle of Atlanta manifests a didactic narrative of the crucial engagement indicative of burgeoning public sentiment toward the Civil War during the 1880s.

From November 1864 to April 1865, the Confederacy conducted an open, often-heated debate concerning the introduction of slaves into the Confederate Army. Southerners in all sections of the Confederacy-Upper South, Deep South, and Trans-Mississippi West-seriously considered the introduction of black men into the gray ranks. This debate forced southerners to ask again why they were fighting. Focusing upon the news items, editorials, and letters to editors appearing in local newspapers, this work examines the evolving views of common men and women in Virginia, Georgia and Texas. Despite the desperate situation, these southerners explored the proposal to arm the slaves and its long-term implications fully. As the debate unfolded, individual men and women struggled with each other and within themselves to decide what it meant to be a southerner. In this final crisis, many discovered that slavery could be sacrificed much more easily than southern independence. By comparing the depth, sincerity, and significance of the debate concerning arming the slaves in Virginia, Georgia, and Texas, a clearer picture of the importance of slavery in white southern society and of the strength of Confederate nationalism emerges.

The evidentiary base for this study is the compilation of almost 7,000 individuals connected by kinship to George Keesee, who immigrated to Virginia about 1700. The major focus is Thomas Keesee Sr. (the great grandson of George Keesee) and his descendants, who were mostly of the planter class. This family migrated across the southern cotton frontier, from Virginia, to Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. Studies of various family members and groups demonstrate kinship's significance as an analytical tool in studying migration, settlement patterns, religion, communication, and political and economic power. Kinship was the most potent factor in the organization of everyday life for antebellum southerners. Historians have long recognized the importance of family but have failed to articulate an interpretive framework for the systematic study of kinship in southern society. Moreover, they have allowed disdain for genealogy to obscure the effectiveness of genealogical methodology in such studies. First this work mines anthropological kinship theory to construct a workable theory of kinship for historians of the South. Although families and kinship are often discussed, the disciple of history has yet to define and articulate the definition and meaning of kinship or to explicitly recognize kinship ties as broader and more intense than is generally the case in the United States today. Secondly, I argue for the incorporation of genealogical methodology into standard methods of historical inquiry. This involves using sources generally deemed genealogical in nature to focus on links of kinship within groups of antebellum southerners, in contrast to the method often used by historians-using surname matching to ascertain kinship links, a method that not only leaves the majority of kinship links hidden, but is also gender-biased. And third, I argue for the establishment of the study of kinship as a category of analysis on a par with race, class, and gender in the antebellum South. We can lay yet another patina of understanding over topics including migration, settlement patterns, religion, class, politics, and economics by analyzing them vis-a-vis their relationship to kinship. Kinship relationships were a causative factor in virtually all elements of antebellum southern society.

Nineteenth-century American ideologies and cultural prescriptions dictated that women leave the public sphere responsibilities of business, law, and politics to men. However, statutes throughout the United States allowed and even required women at times to enter the public sphere. This dissertation examines women's actions in the public sphere in one rural southern county in Texas from its frontier era through Reconstruction. A thorough examination of District and County Court, marriage, probate, bond, deed, brand, and Confederate Widows' Pension records, as well as a few extant Justice of the Peace record books, scattered issues of local newspapers, and letters and diaries, sheds light on the breadth of women's activity in public and private life. Cotton-producing Colorado County, Texas, on the frontier of southern society offers a portrait of the effect that cultural prescriptions, laws, and circumstances had on southern women's decisions to enter and their activities within the public sphere. This study concentrates on four major areas where women often participated in public life: work, married women's property protection, widowhood, and divorce. Frontier conditions both forced and allowed women to take a greater role in financial and legal transactions due to the breakdown of traditional role expectations and the lack of extended male kin to take on the roles when husbands died or deserted. As the county settled into a more typically antebellum and stable society, women withdrew from entering the public sphere, choosing to allow other men to transact their business. During the Civil War as role expectations again broke down, women increasingly performed the male duties on the farms and in the legal sphere. At the close of the war, women withdrew once again from active participation in public activities allowing men to resume their roles as much as the upheaval of Reconstruction would allow. While frontier and war conditions played the greatest role in determining women's activity in the public sphere, race, class, and ethnicity also affected women's willingness to assert their rights in legal and public matters.

This thesis attempts to provide a better understanding of the urban black experience in the first decade and a half following the war by focusing on the development of a single black neighborhood called Freedmantown in Houston's Fourth Ward. In the post-Civil War period, the black population in Houston increased dramatically. Through blacks' efforts to establish themselves as property owners, Freedmantown developed into a stable, black residential neighborhood quickly after the war's end. Black residents of Freedmantown, however, did not form their own separate social community, nor did Freedmantown become the focus for the rest of the ward's black community institutions. Instead, the residents of Freedmantown remained actively involved in the larger black community of the Fourth Ward. As a result, Freedmantown's residents formed only one part of a multi-neighborhood black community, indicating that individual neighborhoods could develop and prosper without threatening the cohesiveness of the city's larger black community.

The legal history of state antitrust enforcement and the oil industry in Texas illustrates how and why antitrust law contemplated complementary enforcement at the state and federal government level. Historians, economists, and lawyers have concentrated on federal antitrust law and enforcement, ignoring state efforts. Yet for most of the first twenty-five years following the enactment of the Sherman Antitrust Act, federal enforcement efforts were extremely limited, leaving the field to the states. Texas was one of several states that had strong antitrust laws, and whose attorneys general prosecuted antitrust violations with vigor. Political ambition was a factor in the decisions to investigate and prosecute cases against a highly visible target, the petroleum industry, but there was also a genuine belief in the goals of antitrust policy, and in the efficacy of enforcement of the laws. Enforcement efforts were also complicated by the fact that large oil companies provided vital commodities, articles of "prime necessity," to the citizens of Texas and following the discovery of large oil fields, played an increasingly important role in the economies of many Texas communities. The Texas Attorney General's antitrust enforcement efforts against the oil industry in this time of transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society provide insights into the litigation process, and reveal how well the rhetoric of trust-busting fit with the reality of antitrust enforcement. The antitrust crusade against the petroleum industry also highlights the changing roles of state government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly the Attorney General's Department. The experience of Texas undermines the view that federal action has always dominated antitrust enforcement efforts and that antitrust litigation against Standard Oil was ineffective and ineffectual. Rather, the Texas Attorney General's litigations and their results suggest that some states took their role in the dual enforcement scheme seriously and that the measure of success of antitrust enforcement goes beyond the amount of monetary penalties collected, and companies permanently ousted from a state.

In 1940, Houston was a town of less than 400,000 inhabitants reliant on trade and the petroleum industry. Today, it ranks as the nation's fourth largest city with a diverse economy. Key to this transformation was the five-year period of World War II. While the city's leaders had learned valuable lessons in dealing with the federal government during the Great Depression, it was not until the new era of federal spending occasioned by US involvement in a world war that their savvy truly flowered. Through the work of aggressive business leaders including George Brown, James Elkins, James Abercrombie, Houston landed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal wartime investment. With enormous federal investment in technologically complex facilities, Houston oil companies moved from being mere refiners of crude and became sophisticated producers of petrochemicals. Wartime needs, including synthetic rubber and high octane fuel, caused petroleum concerns to diversify and create products that would be enormously profitable after the war. Similarly, the conflict virtually created the natural gas industry. Long considered a waste product, gas gained acceptance during the war and when a Houston company purchased the federally-financed Inch pipelines the city became the new industry's hub. Other industries that were attracted to the city during the war included steel, munitions, and shipbuilding. Industry needed labor and to meet that demand thousands of new residents streamed into Houston in the war years, straining the city's housing supply and the local government's ability to deliver services. Among those who gained employment in war industries were a large number of women, African Americans and Mexicans, all of whom had been barred from many such high paying jobs in peacetime. The city's African American community, emboldened by their newfound prosperity, became a hotbed of civil rights agitation; the Smith v. Allwright decision was backed and funded by local blacks in this period. Industrially, economically, and socially, Houston emerged from World War II primed for postwar growth and has, indeed, been the quintessential boomtown ever since.