This thesis seeks to show how heroes are created, the role hero-making plays in the creation of national identity and how the mythology constructed around heroes affects historical memory, by examining the heroic narrative constructed around Commodore Stephen Decatur, United States Navy. Stephen Decatur became a hero during the first Barbary War in 1805, his abrupt rise to heroism was occasioned by a mix of luck, drama, partisan politics and nationalism. After his death, Decatur received very complimentary attention from nineteenth century biographers anxious to present Americans with national heroes. In the twentieth and twenty-first century Decatur remained popular, especially with American reengagement in the Middle East and the "War on Terror." Recent biographies of Decatur are of interest as they reveal the continuities and changes in the American heroic ideal over time, and how the momentum of a narrative can deeply shape our understanding of the past.

This dissertation argues that Protestant Christianity provided the language through which individuals and communities created the political, social, and cultural future of the post-emancipation South. Christian arguments and organizations gave newly emancipated African Americans strong strategies for claiming political and civil rights as citizens and for denouncing racialized violence. Yet simultaneously, white southerners’ Christian claims, based in proslavery theology, created justifications for white supremacist political power and eventually for segregation. This project presents a new history of the creation of segregation from the hopes and uncertainties of emancipation through a close analysis of the Mississippi River Valley region of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and West Tennessee. Religious arguments furnished foundations for the work of building a new South, whether in newly formed African American churches and schools, local political debates, or white supremacist organizing. Studying both African American and white Christians during the years when churches quickly became racially separated allows this work to explain how groups across lines of race and denomination responded to each other’s religious, cultural, and political strategies. This dissertation centers these communities’ theological ideas and religious narratives within a critical analysis of race, gender, and political power. Analyzing theology as the intellectual domain of non-elites as well as those in power allows me to demonstrate the ways that religious ideas helped to construct categories of race and gender and to determine who was worthy of civil and political rights. This work draws upon a wide range of archival sources, including previously unexamined material. This dissertation advances several scholarly conversations. It offers the first sustained examination of the life of proslavery theology after emancipation. Rather than presuming that white southern Christians abandoned such arguments after emancipation, this project shows that white Christians reconfigured these claims to create religious justifications for segregation. Within these renegotiated religious claims about social order, African American and white Christians made religious arguments about racial violence, ranging from justifying the violence to arguing that it was antithetical to Christian identity. During the same years, African Americans argued that they deserved civil and political rights both because they were citizens and because they were Christians. This linking of identities as citizens and as Christians provided a vital political strategy in the midst of post-emancipation violence and the uncertain future of African Americans’ rights. Through its five chronologically-structured chapters, this project demonstrates Protestant Christianity’s central role in African American and white southerners’ political lives from the Civil War to the turn of the twentieth century. / Religion, Committee on the Study of

This dissertation examines the development of graduate training in zoology at Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges under E. L. Mark between 1873 and 1934. It focuses on the changing spatial, institutional, and intellectual relationship between the Museum of Comparative Zoology and the Department of Zoology as a result of university-wide educational reforms that introduced teaching and research in the biological sciences to the curriculum in the nineteenth century. Part I examines the Museum of Comparative Zoology’s relationship to the growth of elective instruction in natural history. Debates between the museum’s director, Alexander Agassiz, Harvard’s President Charles W. Eliot, and E. L. Mark hinged on the uncertain role that the museum was prepared to play as a site for undergraduate teaching. The creation of the department as an administrative unit in 1890, and the subsequent organization of the Department of Zoology, changed the balance of power between Agassiz and Mark and sparked demarcation conflicts over what counted as a teachable form of zoology. Part II explores the scientific cultures of the Harvard and Radcliffe Zoological Laboratories. It addresses the laboratory as a physical site, a disciplinary space, a pedagogical tool, and a gendered social and scientific community. I reconstruct how Mark’s students experienced his idiosyncratic pedagogical system as part of their daily lives. A significant contribution of this dissertation is the examination of the Radcliffe Zoological Laboratory, a small room in the museum that Radcliffe College converted into a space for women pursuing zoological studies. Issues related to gender and debates about coeducation on campus reconfigured access to the practice of zoology, especially for Radcliffe graduate students. Part III follows Mark’s laboratory to the field where he co-founded the Bermuda Biological Station for Research in 1903. Mark adapted his pedagogical systems to a new political and scientific environment in colonial British Bermuda. There, graduate training was understood through overlapping discourses of amateur natural history and middle-class leisure. Establishing a biological field station in an unpredictable colonial climate took priority over resistance to coeducation. This inadvertently turned the Bermuda station into an important destination for women seeking fieldwork experience in the twentieth century. / History of Science

This dissertation focuses on migrants mostly left out of scholarship on American refugee policy and resettlement programs and disrupts the scholarly dichotomy that analyzes the restrictionist handling of immigrants and the welcome accorded refugees. It does so by providing a history of political exiles, war widows and orphans, sailors, and students, who came to the United States and asked, with the help of advocates, to be accorded refuge. It is a history that shows how concepts of persecution and protection underlying our contemporary asylum system, which was created in 1980, have a long genealogy; they developed in campaigns on behalf of these “pre” asylum seekers and were strengthened by appeals to American ideals (of freedom and opportunity) and rights (such as due process and equal protection). Coalitions of asylum advocates were diverse, comprising organizations focused on newcomers—like the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born—while also drawing support from organizations focused on international cultural exchange, labor, and civil liberties and human rights. Because asylum-seekers were noncitizens, legal advocacy on their behalf was exhortatory and aspirational; that asylum-seekers were sometimes political radicals or in illegal status led to conflicts and hesitations among advocates who were professionals (lawyers, social workers, educators) and co-ethnics with their own priorities and commitments. Before World War II, many asylum seekers gained refuge, though their persecution claims were not officially recognized. After World War II, persecution claims were recognized selectively. Throughout the period covered in this dissertation, the claims of these exceptional pre-asylum seekers and their handling helped define the concept of refugee and its distinction from other migrants. By focusing on contestation by advocates and the discretion of officials, my dissertation explores a fundamental tension at the heart of American asylum: the myth of refuge and commonplace exclusion. / American Studies

This dissertation explores the attempts of Africans, both enslaved and free, to create and maintain families in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England. It makes sense of a remarkable array of historical actors: men like Thomas Bedunah, who plotted a surprising course for his descendants when he chose a spouse of English descent; women like Cuba Vassall, who let her husband secure her firmly in bondage at the very moment the region’s blacks were being freed en masse; and a pair like Mark and Phoebe, who fed their master porridge laced with “Potter’s Lead” in hopes that his death would enable them to find owners closer to their distant families. Pulling together thousands of fragments of evidence, this dissertation contextualizes the everyday lives and beleaguered intimacies of these Africans and many others, revealing patterns in their living situations, gendered relationships, and kin communities that historians have never before recognized. At the same time, the project advances historical arguments related to a range of issues, from the relationship between family and freedom in early New England to the influence of patriarchy on enslaved kin groups in Anglo-America. The project sets forth methodological arguments as well. Contending that historical method has an important bearing on the ability of scholars to understand and portray slaves as fully human, with complete life spans and complicated contexts, “Endearing Ties” makes a case for the importance of reconstructing the lives and trajectories of enslaved individuals in great depth, despite the archival challenges that such an undertaking inevitably entails. / History

Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.