This dissertation uses the histories and doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) as case studies to consider how nineteenth-century Americans turned to religion to solve the early American republic’s “race problem.” I begin by approaching Mormonism’s foundational text, the Book of Mormon, as the earliest Latter-day Saints did: as a radical new lens to view the racialized populations—Americans of European, African and Native American descent (“white,” “black,” “red”)—that dominated the antebellum American cultural landscape in which the church was founded in 1830. Early Mormons believed themselves called to end all schisms, including racial ones, within the Body of Christ as well as the political body of the American republic. However, early Mormon leaders were not racial egalitarians. Their vision consisted not of racial pluralism, but of the redemptive “whitening” of all peoples. Whiteness—both as a signifier and even phenotype—became an aspirational racial identity that non-whites could achieve through conversion to Mormonism. As the church failed to become the prophesied panacea for American racial and religious divisions, its theology evolved to view race as fixed. Black and Mormon became mutually exclusive identities. And though based on Book of Mormon theology, the Mormons held out hope for mass Indian redemption, it was forestalled as the church focused on shaping white converts into respectable Mormons. However, this history is not simply one of declension. Instead, the church’s evolving view on race arose out of the persistent dialectal tension between the two central, and seemingly paradoxical, elements of the Mormon people’s identity: a missionary people divinely called to teach the gospel to everyone everywhere, and a racially particularistic people who believe that God has, at times, favored certain racial groups over others. As Mormon identity became more racially particularistic, white Mormons began to marginalize non-whites in the “Mormon archive”— which I conceptualize as the written and oral texts that compose the Mormon people’s collective memory. However, a handful of black and Native Americans wrote themselves into this archive, claiming their place among the prophets and pioneers that mark membership in Mormon history. They understood that literacy signified authority, and thus with their own narratives, they wrote against what they believed was the marginalization of their historical subjectivity. / Religion, Committee on the Study of

“Riding Bareback” uses rodeo as a site of analysis to investigate the continual expansion and contraction of the supposedly authentic West in the twentieth century. For over a century, rodeo has been a vibrant and multifaceted stage on which diverse groups of people, both within and beyond the geographical West, have embodied the plethora of cultural meanings attached to westernness. Rodeo is an epistemology of the West, meaning it is a way of knowing and expressing what it means to people to be western. Rather than offering a history of gender in rodeo, this is a history of gender through rodeo, showing how the West was written onto individual bodies with national and international ramifications. “Riding Bareback” critically investigates marginalized rodeo communities across the twentieth century, specifically professional rodeo cowgirls from the 1900s until the 1930s, the Texas State Prison Rodeo from the 1930s until the 1980s, and the International Gay Rodeo Association in the 1980s and 1990s. These rodeoers have performed westernness in order to claim legitimacy as Americans, even as they often marginalized themselves and others even further. / American Studies

Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.

This thesis engages with two prominent themes in eighteenth-century British historiography, examining Anglo-American relations after the American Revolution and the influence of economic theory on policy during this period. It considers traditional ideas, often labelled 'mercantilist,' about the nature of economy and the manner in which free trade theories were related to those beliefs. It argues that free trade was fundamentally influenced by 'mercantile' thought even while rejecting it. The influence of both 'mercantile' and liberal economic thought on policy is evaluated by examining the commercial negotiations associated with the 1783 Treaty of Paris and Parliamentary investigations into West Indian-United States trade relations in the mid-1780s. It concludes that policymakers subscribed to a mixture of 'mercantile' and liberal economic thought; moreover, although their decisions were responses to particular economic circumstances, their frames of reference were coloured both by economic theory and by aspirations for a post-revolutionary British Empire.

This study begins with the Treaty of Paris in 1763. The cession of French territories in North America redrew the geopolitical landscape. However, this dissertation argues that geopolitical change was not representative of, nor did it immediately alter, existing social and economic realities. The French Empire in North America had come to an end, but a sizable French-speaking population remained in both the St. Lawrence and Mississippi Valleys, and throughout the Great Lakes region. Over the next forty years, as the British, Spanish, and Americans carved up the former French territories, they were forced to confront the French-speaking population in the heart of North America. In the midst of regular geopolitical upheaval and instability, I posit that French socio-economic connections continued to tie French-speaking regions together to form a French river world. More specifically, this dissertation examines socio-economic continuity in the portion of the French river world between the St. Lawrence and middle Mississippi Valleys from 1763 to 1803. Early migration patterns saw Canadiens from the St. Lawrence Valley marry into established French-speaking families in the middle Mississippi Valley in the l740s. These migration and marriage patterns continued after 1763. They helped connect seemingly disparate French-speaking regions together and kept a broader geographical understanding of French North America at the forefront of living memory. Merchants like Gabriel Cerre traveled back and forth between the two regions, setting up extended networks of communication and exchange through strategic marriage alliances designed to facilitate trade. However, merchants did more than simply conduct trade, as they also helped people to handle their personal affairs over long distances. Nowhere was this more visible than in the frequent use of third party representation to handle family succession rights. Merchants and voyageurs became cultural conduits through which French-speaking families stayed connected. Thus, the French river world was both imagined and real, as a product of the lived experiences of merchants and voyageurs and the imaginings of those they represented. Both combined to form a socially constructed mental map, which was mutable and fluid. However, by the end of the eighteenth century, the socio-economic linkages that had helped maintain the French river world slowly began to degrade. Access to British markets and capital, which had initially helped reinforce the commercial networks of the French river world, ultimately undermined long-term social cohesion. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 ushered in a new era as waves of American migration radically changed the demographic composition of the middle Mississippi Valley. Yet, even as French bourgeois in places like St. Louis shifted their attention towards the construction of mid-America the networks of the French river world were slow to fade. The American Fur Company hired over one thousand Canadien voyageurs out of Montreal for voyages to St. Louis and the limits of Missouri fur trade, keeping elements of the French river world afloat until the 1830s.

No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation explores the U.S. encounter with Japanese goods in the 1970s and 1980s. It argues that this encounter transformed social and cultural life in the United States by ideologically and materially introducing Americans to their first intense, sustained engagement with the processes of contemporary globalization. The dissertation proceeds thematically, first outlining the ideological transformation of American life. While some groups in the United States interpreted Japan's ascendency to economic supremacy as a threat to U.S. national power, others imagined Japan as the harbinger of of globalized future of economic prosperity and cultural homogeneity. Popular cultural representations of Japan reflected such understandings but also addressed the postmodern nature of the Japanese future, framing it as a borderless future in which Japanese corporations limited American political and economic freedoms. The second half of the dissertation examines the material globalizing of America--the U.S. consumption of Japanese goods like automobiles, VCRs, and Japanese animation (anime). The author argues that the popular image of the U.S.-Japan trade conflict during the 1980s obscures the nuances in the relationship that developed at the local level, where Americans consumed goods that transformed their lives, introducing them to new ways of thinking about the world and interacting with other societies engaged in global economic and cultural exchange. / History

Master of Arts / Department of History / Bonnie Lynn-Sherow / Joseph LaFramboise’ life was the product of a rich milieu of ethnicities working, trading, and living together in the first half of the nineteenth century. His was a multi-cultural experience on the fur trade frontier. Born in 1805 and living through the first half of the nineteenth century, LaFramboise utilized multiple identities and strategies drawn from Odawa, Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota, and French Canadian cultures while integrating into the developing American identity. He maneuvered socially and economically during an unstable political period along the shifting margins between native and Euro-American cultures. His life-long vocation in the fur trade, and more specifically with the American Fur Company, was influenced by his family’s successful Michigan fur trade business, his friendships within the Company, and his experience as part of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota community. The fur trade afforded him both relational and economic ties to the Eastern Dakota bands of Minnesota and to the other trade families of the American Fur Company. The trade also placed him on the cusp of American exploration into the continent’s mid-section allowing his local knowledge, built up by years of traveling the interior, to inform the explorations and writings of people like George Catlin, Joseph Nicollet, and John C. Fremont. By mid-century, ironically, LaFramboise, who had spent a lifetime building multi-ethnic relationships, found himself increasingly bound by rigid ideas about race, brought on by expanding American settlement. His business decisions and his familial ones became driven more by the expectations of an advancing Euro-American society. Even so, those decisions carried the distinctive character of a man used to living in a culturally complex world.