Between 1907 and 1910, Progressive reformers' attacks on the convict lease system of the Texas Penitentiary brought sexual misconduct of guards with female prisoners into public view and prompted officials to transfer women convicts from farm to farm in an attempt to contain both the abuse and the publicity it generated. In spite of the moves, the efforts of reformers, and the hiring of the first penitentiary matron, little of substance changed for women prisoners. They remained on a penal farm, guarded and supervised by men, their work and housing strictly divided by race. Persistent patterns of labor assignment, punishment, and sexual abuse inherited from slavery, and the continuation of political patronage and widespread administrative perquisites undermined attempts to improve the women's care. Ironically, the testimony of women prisoners to a legislative investigating committee about sexual activity contributed to their continued isolation on a penal farm.

Several popular authors of antebellum urban fiction, particularly George Lippard, George Foster, Ned Buntline, and George Thompson, articulate in novels written in the 1840s and 1850s the argument that urban paupers and criminals are products of a corrupt society. The prostitute, pauper, and thief, rather than being depicted as depraved or lazy, are shown to be blameless laborers compelled into degradation on account of physical circumstances and economic exploitation. Having found the primary causes of poverty and crime to reside in society, these authors recommend solutions that entail changing society. The authors' secular conception of the causes of society's ills led them to recommend secular solutions, which several attempted to put into practice. The authors' "material environmentalism" differentiates them from the vast majority of antebellum reformers who were informed by Protestant, particularly evangelical, theology.

This joint biography of Elizabeth Gamble Wirt (1784-1857) and William Wirt (1772-1834) tells the story of a middle-class couple in the upper South from 1802 to 1834. The Wirts were members of the emerging urban professional class in the nineteenth-century United States. William Wirt was U.S. Attorney General from 1817 to 1829 and a literary figure who contributed to the legend of the Old South. Elizabeth Wirt was the first American to author a book on the "language of flowers." Although both Elizabeth and William Wirt wrote for publication, their most prolific writings were personal and family correspondence. William Wirt's law practice in Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Maryland separated the couple for many months each year. While apart, the Wirts wrote letters that covered every aspect of their lives: their desire for companionship in their marriage and family; their experiments in modern childrearing; their respective roles in their domestic economy; their supervision of slaves and servants in household production; and their gender roles as husband and wife, father and mother, and master and mistress. When Elizabeth and William Wirt married in 1802, they hoped to achieve equality and reciprocity in their marriage. As partners in both love and finances, they planned to make their union the nucleus of a family defined by affection, not by social prescriptions of masculinity and femininity. While the Wirts embraced the ideals of domesticity, they resisted the division of men's lives and women's lives into the separate spheres of home and work. This study documents the Wirts' repeated redefinition of gender roles throughout their marriage. Elizabeth and William Wirt never achieved the high standards they set for themselves, but their lives and letters deepen our understanding of men, women, and the family in nineteenth-century America. Using interdisciplinary insights from scholarship on religion, architecture, and literature as well as United States social history, women, and families, this study contributes to the fields of women's history, gender studies, the history of childhood education, nineteenth-century America, and the U.S. South.

During the Victorian era, Galveston Island, Texas, was a cosmopolitan port-city, the second wealthiest city in the nation based on per capita income. In 1900, its good fortune was dramatically reversed when a hurricane struck the Island, killing more than 6,000 people and leveling much of the city. Although Galveston never regained its prominence as a shipping and financial center, it did gain notoriety of a different sort--as a haven for prostitution, rum-running, and gambling. Vestiges of this mottled past are visible today, as the rich and poor live cheek by jowl, their respective Victorian mansions and shotgun houses abutting each other at more than the occasional turn. A resort island for much of its existence, Galveston has an old and indigenous discourse of the self (Islanders) and the other (Mainlanders, tourists, and non-native residents). And like many tourist towns and settings, it also has an internal discourse about itself as the cultural other. This discourse is about the islandness that constitutes Galveston's "authentic" cultural otherness, as distinct from the touristic islandness, by which it commodifies and markets itself to outsiders. In the mid 1980s, the Island experienced an identity crisis grounded in the political economy of tourism and ushered in by a period of self-representation that parlayed a denatured historical past into cultural and economic capital. Galveston Island, in the late 20th century, was a city in the throes of historic preservation. As a form of cultural and historical production, preservation requires the privileging of certain periods and images of the past, and the suppression, if not outright erasure of others. The Galveston Historical Foundation, has been remarkably successful in this regard. For nearly a decade its hegemony remained virtually uncontested. But in the mid 80s, a series of political referendums designed to reintroduce gambling to the Island (this time by legal means), pitted the Victorian era-past against an explicitly resort-island past and exposed the symbolic connections between the patronage of preservation by the Island's dynastic families, and their opposition to gambling as a threat to the preservation of their ancestral milieu.

Bill introduction was controlled by committees throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. During that time, committees normally introduced bills when offering their reports on the floor during the House's regular order of business. At the end of that century, however, the process was thoroughly dominated by Representatives who were able to introduce bills off the floor by simply handing them to the Clerk for reference to committee. Movement from the limited opportunities committees had to report bills to the unrestricted ability members had to introduce them involved gradual changes in the rules and processes related to bill introduction. That transformation was a product of both institutional stress and individual desires. The House did not allow for a rapid change toward an introduction process oriented toward the individual member because it was initially organized to encourage every member to participate in each step of the legislative process. House rules and procedures were, therefore, more likely to promote bill introduction by committees, which were accepted as necessary subunits in the House's division of labor. Individual members were also slow to push for greater introduction opportunities as the benefits derived from bill introduction were neither consistent nor proven. Even when some found rewards from introducing bills, other members remained uncertain and unwilling to alter the rules to allow more time for members to introduce. The institution's inability to address the demands it received through the processes it had earlier employed and the membership's growing need to satisfy and provide for constituents led, after several rule alterations over nearly half a century, to the unlimited ability of members to introduce bills. That granting of freedom ultimately allowed committees to more thoroughly dominate the production of legislation than ever before, a result hardly anticipated by members who pushed for their own increased ability to introduce. Committee domination over the production of legislation, however, was a result of the explosion of member-introduced bills introduced off the floor, an occurrence that allowed committees to be highly selective of the member-introduced bills they chose to consider.

Most nineteenth-century northerners did not see legal control of the employment relation or the labor market as contradictory with the free labor ethic. Antebellum work discipline rested on statutory and common law rules, the most important of which regulated labor contracts and proscribed vagrancy. With regard to work discipline, labor contracts crystallized the relationship of workers to individual employers, while vagrancy statutes defined the meaning of work in the community at large. Equally important, these legal principles helped construct gender, class structure, and social theory. Before the Civil War, northern courts adapted labor contract rules to specific modes of production, and by 1860 jurists and law writers formulated two opposing conceptions of law's place in work discipline. Vagrancy laws in the antebellum North served many functions. While labor discipline was the ultimate effect, these statutes expressed ideas about class, gender, and republicanism. Antebellum southerners developed a separate legal tradition, especially in the area of contract law. During the transition from slavery to free labor, antebellum contract and vagrancy laws influenced both emerging systems of labor, such as the Union army's program in Louisiana, and the constitutional meaning of freedom in the Thirteenth Amendment. Similarly, prewar labor law configured actions of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. As the case of Alabama shows, labor law was manipulated at times to secure rights for African-American workers, but it faltered because of resistance by southern whites and because of its basis in class. The Freedmen's Bureau's labor program also failed because of the ways in which local agents interpreted and administered antebellum legal principles, as occurred in South Carolina. In places such as Texas, bureau officials used labor law to oppress African-American workers, but both black and white Southerners manipulated legal restraints to their own advantage. By 1880 free labor law left its antebellum roots. Courts removed remaining restraints on individual labor contracts, while state legislatures passed tramp acts that enhanced the law's power over the meaning of work, gender, and class.

This study is an interdisciplinary history the African American Pentecostal-Charismatic (AAPC) movement in the twentieth century. It aims to place the rise of African American Pentecostal-Charismaticism within the context of African American religious history in general and the greater Holiness-Pentecostal movement in particular. It examines the religious traditions (in both theology and practice) out of which the AAPC arose; the specific historical context out of which the AAPC developed; the role of leadership; the social appeal of the AAPC; and the role of gender, class, and race in shaping the growth and character of the movement. The general field of African American religious history is understudied, with the possible exception of slave Christianity. For the modern period, much of the scholarship has focused on the black church's relationship to the Civil Rights movement, and the emphasis has been on the mainline black denominations. The focus in the history of Pentecostalism has been on the early twentieth-century origins of the movement, showing its interracial nature, but little has been published on such splinter movements as the Latter Rain phenomenon and the African American Independent Pentecostal-Charismatic (AAIPC) movement. My study will be the first scholarly analysis of this movement and its latter-twentieth-century variations, and the first to place them in geo-cultural/historical/religious context. Among the major interpretive points elaborated are the following: (1) contrary to the expectations of early twentieth-century scholars, African American Pentecostalism was hardly a passing phase; (2) the advent of Pentecostalism marked an end to the hegemony of purported mainline denominations in the African American religious experience; (3) unlike mainline Protestantism and Catholicism, Pentecostalism welcomed the participation of women in its leadership; (4) a proliferation of electronic media (radio, television, and the internet) has facilitated a further dissolution of racial, geographical, and denominational barriers; and (5) independent ministers looking toward the twenty-first century have begun to reconsider their initial embrace of complete autonomy and to examine the spiritual and structural ramifications of interdependence and ecumenicalism. Perhaps this is part of the often observed path from sect to denomination that has characterized many earlier religious movements.

As host to the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, Tennessee has an obvious history of conflict over religion and education. By examining white Tennessee Baptists and Methodists in the half-century leading up to the showdown in Dayton, this dissertation argues that Tennessee's 1925 anti-evolution law and the resulting Scopes trial were less about the truth or falsehood of evolution and more about the important question of the place of parents, churches, and religious belief in New South public education. Furthermore, this investigation of religious attitudes about public schools---the laboratories in which many different forces hoped to shape the future of society---reveals a systematic southern evangelical interest in earthly social relations rarely recognized by previous scholars. From an early opposition to state funded public education as necessarily "godless," Tennessee evangelicals gradually acquiesced, assuming that the schools would reflect the values of their predominantly Protestant local communities. Further, they believed that the home, Sunday school, and denominational college would provide any additional moral leavening necessary for their vision of a religious New South. But as Progressive era school reforms increasingly removed control of education from the hands of parents, local school boards, and church communities---all of whom would presumably guarantee a role for religion---evangelicals feared they would lose the schools and the rising generation. Further trepidation over the supposed secularization of higher education---symbolized most poignantly for Tennessee evangelicals in the separation of Vanderbilt University from the southern Methodist church---led many evangelical leaders to advocate a more explicit respect for Christianity in the public schools. The logical extension of this changed attitude appears most clearly in the first decades of the twentieth century with the 1915 enactment of a state-wide law requiring the Bible to be read every morning in the schools and the more infamous Butler law of 1925 that criminalized the teaching of evolution. Symbolic conceptions of the South as a distinctively religious society led many Tennessee evangelicals to break taboos about mixing religion and politics and support the Butler anti-evolution bill.

Avant-garde artists are among the most broadly theorized sub-groups of cultural producers. Artistic vanguards been theorized in two opposing ways---either as uniquely able to change social conditions through artistic invention and intervention, or, alternatively, as destined to recuperation into mainstream artistic and social structures. Anthropological theories and methods can contribute to a deeper understanding of the relationship between self-proclaimed artistic experimentalists and broader social, economic and political trends. This dissertation illuminates these relationships by focusing on the cultural ideals, artistic traditions and economic and organizational structures that undergird the production of contemporary experimental choreography in the United States. While avant-garde dance is my primary case study, I also aim to capture some of the overall dynamism and mobility of cultural processes. I do so by means of this ethnography of relationships that tracks the movement of both cultural ideals and resources (including capital in the form of public and private funding) in the production of experimental dance. The sites I examine are the National Endowment for the Arts (both in 1991--92 at the height of the funding controversies and then during the 1995 funding cuts and restructuring), the New York City-based 'alternative spaces' that house and present experimental choreographers, and finally, and the networks of choreographers that perform in these spaces. This research revealed that funding patterns and trends have deeply affect avant-garde choreography in the United States, especially since the founding of the NEA. Not only have artists' career narratives and the organizations they build up around themselves become increasingly professionalized, but the aims and content of their art-works have also responded to the agendas of funding agencies. And yet, I argue, the lived experience of seeing and making experimental dances still offers the possibility of real social critique even (or perhaps especially) if that critique is only implied through the multi-vocal, ephemeral, and non-commodity quality of this contemporary art form.

The first essay, "Contested Languages of Order: Burke and Wollstonecraft in the Revolution Controversy," argues that Edmund Burke's and Mary Wollstonecraft's 1790 debate over the French Revolution brought into focus two competing visions of social order that were engaged in historically transformative conflict across Europe: the fixed and hierarchical versus the progressive and egalitarian. "Nietzsche, the Genealogy of Self, History" examines Friedrich Nietzsche's writings on history, "genealogy," and will to determine how he revises previous philosophical understandings of the self and what new understanding of the self he develops. "'Never Forget,' 'Never Again': The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Terms of Holocaust Memory in America" explores political and popular debate over the significance of the museum in its American context and the tensions within Holocaust memory revealed by the debate.