<p> This thesis is an historical archaeological study of how Chinookan peoples at three villages and employees of the later multicultural Village at Fort Vancouver negotiated the processes of contact and colonization. Placed in the theoretical framework of practice theory, everyday ordinary activities are studied to understand how cultural identities are created, reinforced, and changed (Lightfoot et al. 1998; Martindale 2009; Voss 2008). Additionally uneven power relationships are examined, in this case between the colonizer and the colonized, which could lead to subjugation but also resistance (Silliman 2001). In order to investigate these issues, this thesis studies how the new foreign material of vessel glass was and was not used during the everyday practice of tool production. </p><p> Archaeological studies have found that vessel glass, which has physical properties similar to obsidian, was used to create a variety of tool forms by cultures worldwide (Conte and Romero 2008). Modified glass studies (Harrison 2003; Martindale and Jurakic 2006) have demonstrated that they can contribute important new insights into how cultures negotiated colonization. In this study, modified glass tools from three contact period Chinookan sites: Cathlapotle, Meier, and Middle Village, and the later multiethnic Employee Village of Fort Vancouver were examined. Glass tool and debitage analysis based on lithic macroscopic analytical techniques was used to determine manufacturing techniques, tool types, and functions. Additionally, these data were compared to previous analyses of lithics and trade goods at the study sites. </p><p> This thesis demonstrates that Chinookans modified glass into tools, though there was variation in the degree to which glass was modified and the types of tools that were produced between sites. Some of these differences are probably related to availability, how glass was conceptualized by Native Peoples, or other unidentified causes. This study suggests that in some ways glass was just another raw material, similar to stone, that was used to create tools that mirrored the existing lithic technology. However at Cathlapotle at least, glass appears to have been relatively scarce and perhaps valued even as a status item. While at Middle Village, glass (as opposed to stone) was being used about a third of the time to produce tools. </p><p> Glass tool technology at Cathlapotle, Meier, and Middle Village was very similar to the existing stone tool technology dominated by expedient/low energy tools; however, novel new bottle abraders do appear at Middle Village. This multifaceted response reflects how some traditional lifeways continued, while at the same time new materials and technology was recontextualized in ways that made sense to Chinookan peoples. </p><p> Glass tools increase at the Fort Vancouver Employee Village rather than decrease through time. This response appears to be a type of resistance to the HBC's economic hegemony and rigid social structure. Though it is impossible to know if such resistance was consciously acted on or was just part of everyday activities that made sense in the economic climate of the time. </p><p> Overall, this thesis demonstrates how a mundane object such as vessel glass, can provide a wealth of information about how groups like the Chinookans dealt with a changing world, and how the multiethnic community at Fort Vancouver dealt with the hegemony of the HBC. Chinookan peoples and the later inhabitants of the Fort Vancouver Employee Village responded to colonization in ways that made sense to their larger cultural system. These responses led to both continuity and change across time. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)</p>

<p> Through the artifacts from the Jackson Appleton Middlesex Urban Revitalization and Devolvement Project (hereafter JAM) located in Lowell, MA, this research explores social class in nineteenth-century boardinghouses. This thesis is a two-part study. First, through statistical analysis, research recovers interpretable data from urban archaeological contexts subject to disturbance. Pinpointing intra-site similarities between artifacts recovered from intact and disturbed contexts, data show that artifacts recovered from disturbed and intact contexts in urban environments are not as dissimilar as previously believed. In the second phase using both intact and disturbed JAM contexts, the analysis of four boardinghouse features highlights two distinct patterns of ceramic assemblages suggesting 1) that the JAM site includes artifacts associated with Lowell's early boardinghouse period (1820-1860) in contrast to other late nineteenth century collections from Lowell like the Boott Mills and 2) that material goods amongst upper class mangers versus working class operative were more similar at Lowell's outset. Synthesizing this data with previous archaeology in Lowell, this research shows that over the course of the nineteenth century changes in the practice of corporate paternalism can be seen in the ceramic record. Furthermore, the data suggest that participation in the planned industrial project was a binding element of community interactions, blurring the lines of social class for Lowell's inhabitants in the early years of the Lowell experiment.</p>

<p> The Mount Gilead AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church, perched on a mountain in Buckingham, Pennsylvania, has been a focal point of African American heritage in the area for over a hundred and seventy-five years. Though the second church building, dated to 1852, is still standing with its cemetery beside it, very little about its history has been thoroughly explored. Oral histories link the church with the Underground Railroad, a highly clandestine operation&mdash;yet the church itself was built of stone and advertized its location during the height of the movement of self-emancipated people out of the South. While it is said that this rural church community was made up of a hundred families who settled across the hillside, the cemetery itself only has 243 currently marked graves. The antebellum church hosted hundreds of people, black and white, at events held within walking distance of the rumored hideouts of those on the run from slavery. In order to determine the extent of this seemingly paradoxical relationship between secrecy and prominence, and to achieve a fuller understanding of the community during the 19^th century, the church's history is approached from several angles simultaneously. The cemetery itself is identified as a critical location where much can be learned about the composition, achievements, and struggles of the community. Combining archival research (primarily in the US Census, newspapers, and farm account books) with geographic information systems (GIS) and ground-penetrating radar (GPR), a sense of the size, occupations, and personal histories of the community are achieved, yielding a composite view of the general church population and its history between the 1820s and 1900.</p>

<p> This study focuses on how secular, governmental, and ecclesiastical Hispanic Empire institutions influenced the response and resistance of San Francisco Native American groups from 1769 to 1846. This project draws on late 18th and early 19th century primary Spanish documents and secondary sources to help understand the context of indigenous people's adaptive and response behaviors during this period as well as the nuances of their perspective and experience. Using both electronic and physical documents from a number of archival databases, primary Spanish documents were translated and correlated with baptismal and death mission records. This allowed for formulating alternative perspectives and putting indigenous response and resistance into context. The results of this study indicated that when acts of resistance to the colonial mission system led by charismatic Native American leaders are placed into chronological order, it appears these responses did not consist of isolated incidents. Rather, they appear to be connected through complex networks of communication and organization, and formal Native American armed resistance grew more intensive over time.</p>

<p> In this dissertation, I analyzing the invagination of slavery and madness as constitutive of the political, medical, economic, legal and literary institutions of the United States. In my introduction, I discuss my previous project concerning all black mental institutions that emerged in the American South after Reconstruction. My first chapter, "Haunting Asylums: Madness, Slavery and the Archive," addresses my difficulties with the fragmented records of the racially segregated mental asylums and how figurations of the ghost or the inhuman failed to provide me with a salvific moment. In Chapter 2, "Compounds of Madness and Race: Governing Species, Disease and Sexuality in the Early Republic," I map the epistemic ground of race, mind and nation in the Revolutionary-era United States. My third chapter, "Worse than Useless, Too Much Sense: Enslaved Insanity in Plantations, Courtrooms and Asylums" is the culmination of previous two, where I trace the admission and treatment records of a sixteen-year-old slave interned in a mental asylum to the discourses and institutions surrounding the internal slave trade. I conclude by discussing two deaths separated by two centuries but connected by the violent conjunction of antiblackness and madness.</p>

<p> During the Civil War, twenty northern states changed their laws to permit absent soldiers to vote. Before enactment of these statutes, state laws had tethered balloting to the voter's community and required in-person participation by voters. Under the new laws, eligible voters &ndash; as long as they were soldiers &ndash; could cast ballots in distant military encampments, far from their neighbors and community leaders. This dissertation examines the legal conflicts that arose from this phenomenon and the political causes underlying it. Legally, the laws represented an abrupt change, contrary to earlier scholarship viewing them as culminating a gradual process of relaxing residency rules in the antebellum period. In fact, the laws left intact all prewar suffrage qualifications, including residency requirements. Their radicalism lay not in changing rules about who could vote, but in departing from the prewar legal blueprint of what elections were and how voters participated in them. The changes were constitutionally problematic, generating court challenges in some states and constitutional amendments in others. Ohio's experience offers a case study demonstrating the radicalism of the legal change and the constitutional tension it created. In political history, prior scholarship has largely overlooked the role the issue of soldier voting played in competition for civilian votes. The politics of 1863-1864 drew soldiers into partisan messaging, since servicemen spoke with authority on the themes the parties used to attack their opponents: the candidates' military incompetence, Lincoln's neglect of the troops, and McClellan's cowardice and disloyalty. Soldiers participated politically not only as voters, but also as spokesmen for these messages to civilian voters. In this setting, the soldier-voting issue became a battleground in partisan efforts to show kinship with soldiers. The issue's potency became evident nationally after the 1863 Pennsylvania gubernatorial race, presaging the 1864 presidential contest. The Republican incumbent ran as "the soldiers' friend" and attacked his Democratic rival as the enemy of soldiers for opposing that state's soldier-voting law. The issue was decisive in securing civilian votes for the victorious Republican. That experience launched a nationwide push by Republicans to enact soldier-voting laws in time for the 1864 elections.</p>

<p> From 1880-1920 the United States struggled to incorporate former slaves into the citizenship of the nation. Constitutional amendments legislated freedom for African Americans, but custom dictated otherwise. White people equated power and wealth with whiteness. Conversely, blackness suggested poverty and lack of opportunity. Straddling the Color Line is a multi-city examination of influential and prominent African Americans who lived with one foot in each world, black and white, but who in reality belonged to neither. These influential men lived lives that mirrored Victorian white gentlemen. In many cases they enjoyed all the same privileges as their white counterparts. At other times they were forced into uncomfortable alliances with less affluent African Americans who looked to them for support, protection and guidance, but with whom they had no commonalities except perhaps the color of their skin. </p><p> This dissertation argues two main points. One is that members of the black elite had far more social and political power than previously understood. Some members of the black elite did not depend on white patronage or paternalism to achieve success. Some influential white men developed symbiotic relationships across the color line with these elite African American men and they treated each other with mutual affection and respect. </p><p> The second point is that the nadir in race relations occurred at different times in different cities. In the three cities studied, the nadir appeared first in Charleston, then New Orleans and finally in Cleveland. Although there were setbacks in progress toward equality, many blacks initially saw the setbacks as temporary regressions. Most members of the elite were unwilling to concede that racism was endemic before the onset of the Twentieth Century. In Cleveland, the appearance of significant racial oppression was not evident until after the World War I and resulted from the Great Migration. Immigrants from the Deep South migrated to the North seeking opportunity and freedom. They discovered that in recreating the communities of their homeland, they also created conditions that allowed racism to flourish. </p>

<p> A dynamic institutional relationship exists between the United States executive branch and the United States Supreme Court. This dissertation examines how the Court affects constitutional and political development by taking a leading role in interpreting presidential decision-making in the area of foreign affairs since 1936. Examining key cases and controversies in foreign policymaking, primarily in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this dissertation highlights the patterns of intercurrences and the mutual construction process that takes place at the juncture of legal and political time. In so doing, it is more than evident that the Court not only sanctions the claims made by executives of unilateral decision-making, but also that the Court takes a leading role in (re)defining the very scope and breadth of executive foreign policymaking. </p>

<p> Liberal feminist theorists such as Martha Nussbaum restrict agency to conventional strategies, but in this dissertation I claim that feminists need to understand the value of other, unconventional performative tactics that can open up feminism to radical interventions. I not only support Judith Butler's claim about the need for "non-state-centered forms of agency and resistance" but also historicize the emergence of nonliberal strategies of political contestation, particularly in Victorian feminist activism. Although Victorian feminists are traditionally associated with liberalism, and figures such as John Stuart Mill and Josephine Butler have been used to criticize post-structuralist theorists, I show that some of their practices and interventions reveal a radical, nonliberal aspect to their feminism that strengthens the post-structuralist call for creative and innovative practices of democratic action. Nineteenth-century activists imagined various types of sexual and affective relationships that undermined the privileged role of the institution of marriage. They also used shaming and humiliating language to challenge traditional gender roles and produce profound social transformations. </p><p> Building on the activism of these Victorian feminists, I develop a conception of agency that politicizes tactics such as the use of shame, humiliation, silence, and nonconventional relationships. Because the liberal understanding of shame is insufficient, I offer an alternative queer conception that challenges the perception of shame as destructive. The central element of this conception is that shame not only generates negative feelings and low self-esteem but also has an important capacity to provoke political activism, such as strategies for resignifying political norms that excluded sex and gender marginals.</p>

<p> The aims of this microhistory are to provide a narrative concerning the possession of Southern masculinities and to untangle the hegemonic, convergent, and divergent forms of these identities that played out on the plantation stages. As this essay will show, the plantation stages were the sites where Southern men engaged in their most heated and personal conflicts over what was theirs and why. This thesis brings gendered selves to the forefront of conflict: the Southern men at the top of the plantation system fought to maintain their power through continuous assertions and redefinitions of their hegemonic masculinities. Thus, any man, regardless of his class or his race, could rise to the top of this symbolic status quo&mdash;for even just an instant. What ensued was an increasingly unstable hierarchy imposed by the planter standing on top, the black slave chained to the bottom, and other white men fighting or subtly negotiating their way up. Though challenged daily by enslaved black men and women, as well as the white men in their employ, the success of planters' masculinities in possessing what opposed them kept their ideal alive.</p>