The Baroness Pontalba is a biography of Micaela Almonester de Pontalba. The work begins with a discussion of New Orleans at the time of her birth in 1795, when streets were surrounded by mud and alligators, and the most prominent citizens were Cabildo Magistrates such as her father, Andres Almonester. At the age of fifteen, Michaelle, as she was called, married into a Creole family that envied her father's success. The Pontalbas looked on the marriage as a kind of business merger that would facilitate the transfer of the Almonester fortune into their hands. Michaelle went to live in France with the Pontalbas; there, surrounded by hostility and a legal system that deprived women of all rights, she fought to maintain control over her inheritance Michaelle's husband Celestin was apparently torn between his domineering father and his domineering wife; but he evidently loved Michaelle and was sometimes swayed by her. During one period, when Michaelle was attempting to get a legal separation, she apparently pried some concession from her husband which enraged her father-in-law. The elder Pontalba locked her in a bedroom and shot her three times. Though critically injured, Michaelle survived; but the old man killed himself The French courts at last allowed Michaelle to live apart from her husband and his family. She then started investing her fortune in buildings. In 1839 she began construction of a mansion in Paris that is now the residence of the United States ambassador; in 1849 she began the massive Pontalba Buildings in New Orleans. In her later years she remained in France with her three sons. She lived through the seige of Paris after the Franco-Prussian War, and the savage civil war of 1871, which was fought mainly in her neighborhood in the elegant Faubourg Saint-Honore of Paris. Her last twenty years were spent caring for her husband, who became ill and senile. She died in 1874 at the age of seventy nine / acase@tulane.edu

From the conquest of the Kingdom of New Mexico by the Spanish in 1598 to the Pueblo Indian revolt in 1680, the Franciscan Order was the dominant institution in that territory. As the only religious faction represented in the colony, the Franciscans controlled the rhythms of life in a Catholic state over the entire population. The friars were numerically the largest Spanish organization in the Kingdom and the most cohesive. The primary rationalization for the Kingdom's existence was the propagation of the Catholic faith to the indigenous population, hence the friars enjoyed virtual complete control over the natives politically, socially and economically. Through the powers of the Inquisition, the Franciscans jealously defended their privileges and powers at the expense of the local civil officials, Spanish citizens and Indians. Most of the missionary friars were devote, zealous individuals committed to evangelism After the Pueblo rebellion was subdued, the Franciscans returned to New Mexico to resume their tasks. However, the friars were unable to restore their former authority. The purpose for the colony to the Spanish monarchy was now for military ends and, consequently, the local civil government was given greater powers in relationship to the Church as well as over the general population. The Franciscans lost their total religious autonomy to the expansion of episcopal control and saw most of their Inquisition powers reduced by the Holy Office. Within the Order, the number of friars never rebounded completely to the levels prior to 1680, and the mission program was plagued by poor policy decisions and less ardent, capable priests Though scholars have long noted these changes in post-1680 New Mexico, the process by which the Franciscan Order's hegemony was eliminated has never been examined. It is the purpose of this dissertation to study in detail by what means and why the Franciscans' position in the Kingdom was reduced. Integral to this effort, special attention will be directed to the internal workings of the Order and to the careers of the friars that labored within the mission field of New Mexico through the first half of the eighteenth century / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation considers the role that Haiti and the Haitian Revolution played in the construction of the expanding U.S. in the early years of Manifest Destiny. It does so by examining various representations of Haiti published predominantly between 1820 and 1860, right at the beginning of the development of a specific Manifest Destiny ideology, its early applications and its subsequent critiques. During this era, U.S. 'expansion' was not limited to the Western frontier alone, but instead moved in all directions, both internally across the continent and externally across the seas. And as the U.S. continued to develop into the early to mid-nineteenth century, Haiti was increasingly used by various politicians, writers and social critics to talk about specific crises and conflicts within the U.S. itself. I consider the narratives of Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Leonora Sansay, Harriet Martineau and Herman Melville in light of contested issues of American exceptionalism, national expansion, New World imperialism, and slavery, and my analysis reveals that by writing Haiti's own history, these writers are additionally constructing and coming to terms with the bounded nation as it grows into an expanding empire If each of the writers considered are trying to manage broader issues of national expansion, they are also variously dealing with the U.S.'s own crisis over slavery and subsequent ways American 'identity' changes as a result of internal debate and external growth. The narratives studied in this dissertation use Haiti to point to the problems that plagued older forms of empire expansion while at the same time imagining how the U.S. can grow differently, and thus more successfully. I conclude that these narratives unconsciously expose the artifice inherent in the very notions of American exceptionalism that they are struggling to construct. This study, then, ultimately explores the various origins and spread of U.S. liberalism and finds that such an ideology is not as monolithic and unitary as many may believe. In fact, U.S. liberalism is necessarily heterogeneous, as ambivalence, uncertainty, anxiety and hysteria were built into its very fabric / acase@tulane.edu

During the Jim Crow era, streetcar and bus rides in southern cities provided relatively intimate, everyday experiences between blacks and whites. Among the many symbols of black subordination, urban transit segregation stands out as the most participatory form of racial apartheid. Brief depictions of racial confrontations on streetcars and busses appear frequently in most general studies of the Jim Crow era. However, no scholarly work had yet addressed continuity and change in segregated transit in one city over an extended period of time. This study surveys racial practices before, during and after the Jim Crow period in order to explain how race relations on the transit system functioned and changed in one city. New Orleans is an important city in which to base a longitudinal study of transit segregation, especially given the complexity of its tripartite racial structure In surveying such a long period, one gains insight into the more mundane and complex realities associated with urban transit segregation. Following the successful effort to end 19th century segregation, white passengers mainly waged rhetorical violence against black passengers, who rode with whites from 1867 to 1902. Letters and articles published in the daily newspapers recounted individual offenses taken by white passengers against black passengers, who were mainly female. Physical violence increased markedly following the re-introduction of racial segregation in 1902; however, verbal disputes stemming from the mobility of the 'race screens' designating compartments predominated. This study argues that white and black passengers exercised much more agency in racial segregation of public transit than most scholars have acknowledged. White passengers played a greater role in enforcing segregated transit than did the transit employees. Black riders both acquiesced to and challenged racial segregation throughout the Jim Crow period. Black passengers, when traveling on lines with a majority of black riders, often controlled the space. Two radical breaks from tradition receive special attention. A brief experiment in industrial unionism brought track gang workers and other black employees into the street carmen's union. Also, the employment of women operators as well as rural-born males during World War II exacerbated long extant racial conflict / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation examines the growth of a modern tourism industry in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the half century after World War II. It sheds light on the ways in which tourism shaped local culture, race and class relations, and public policy-making in a city that was struggling to reverse its slippage from the first order of American cities. Topical chapters explore how, in a time of urban decline, tourism assumed greater importance in concert with several developments: the rise of historic preservation, the resurgence of traditional jazz, and the expansion of the city's Carnival celebration. The study also considers how struggles to end racial discrimination in public accommodations and to stem prostitution, gambling, and other forms of vice and disorder both drew strength from the city's need to attract tourists and facilitated the further expansion of the hospitality industry. Finally, it traces the growing municipal and state partnership with private developers and tourism promoters to develop tourist attractions and venues, market the city's colorful heritage, and fill the calendar with conventions, festival, and other special events Much of this dissertation centers on the French Quarter, or Vieux Carre, the site of the French and Spanish colonial city in the eighteenth century. It argues that different groups in the city---including white social elites, business leaders, municipal officials, and preservationists---tried to use the French Quarter as a vehicle for tourism or as a preserve for an imagined romantic past that reflected a very selective memory. Conversely, many African Americans, whose cultural heritage and labor had proved essential to the city's rise as a tourist destination, viewed the French Quarter with much less affection. For transients, street performers, and nonconformists, the Vieux Carre was a place where they might drink freely, indulge in sexual activities, earn money by entertaining tourists, or live unorthodox lifestyles relatively free from harassment---far different from the upper-class notions of a genteel past. As tourism became more and more central to New Orleans' economy, city leaders and preservation-minded French Quarter residents clashed with those who did not use the urban district in ways they found acceptable / acase@tulane.edu

Grassroots studies of the implementation of the federal antipoverty initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s are showing that the War on Poverty did not operate in a vacuum; rather, it was profoundly shaped by a multifarious group of local actors that included public officials, local elites, grassroots antipoverty activists, program administrators, federal volunteers, civil rights activists, and poor people themselves. In Houston, grassroots activists created a local context in which to implement the War on Poverty that was much more diverse in its intellectual and political influences than the rather narrow confines of New Deal-Great Society liberalism. The moderate liberalism that motivated the architects of the federal War on Poverty certainly helped galvanize local antipoverty activists in Houston, but even more prominent in their antipoverty philosophy were Prophetic Christianity, radical civil rights activism, and the vision of participatory democracy and community organizing espoused by members of the New Left and iconoclastic figures like Saul Alinsky. This local context created a favorable environment for these activists to use the War on Poverty to advance an agenda of social change by empowering the poor and helping then engage in confrontations with the city's elite. By the same token, the diversity of ideas that fueled the implementation of the War on Poverty in Houston---and especially the small victories that grassroots activists were able to achieve in their quest to empower the city's poor---provoked a swift and powerful backlash from local public officials and conservative defenders of the status quo. In Houston, therefore, local political conditions and contests, even more than federal politics, determined how the War on Poverty was fought, and the interaction between the federal antipoverty program and a broad range of local ideas gave the War on Poverty a distinctive flavor in Houston that both created opportunities for grassroots activists to bring about social change and set limits on what those activists could accomplish.

This dissertation contends that religion played a critical role in explaining why and how white South Carolinians decided to resist changes in the racial caste system of their society during the middle decades of the last century. As early as 1950 with the first stirrings of desegregation occurring in their state, white evangelicals in the Palmetto State began making appeals to both the Bible and the natural world to derive a theology that emphasized the divine mandate for racial segregation. In touting this "segregationist folk theology," religious white southerners proved willing and able participants in the political massive resistance movement that attempted to thwart racial reforms initiated by civil rights demonstrations, court rulings, and federal legislation in the South from the mid 1950s to the mid 1960s. Just as political massive resistance moved from explicitly racist language to coded appeals to racial prejudice in the period after 1965, however, so too was transformed resistance that drew upon religious sources for its inspiration. During the period from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s white evangelicals largely abandoned the biblical proof-texts that ostensibly revealed divine favor for racial segregation and turned instead to a rhetoric of individualism and colorblindness to fight against attempts to desegregate southern churches and schools. Tracking how white evangelicals' biblical defense of segregation changed over time to a rhetoric of colorblind individualism and examining the particular ways this transition affected southern religion and society by the mid 1970s is this dissertation's central focus.

<p>Few studies have historically assessed the surges and troughs of public perception regarding juvenile offenders across over a century of legislative and social change. Furthermore, a minority of juvenile crime investigations have holistically examined the interplay between changing demographic conditions (notably, economic stability, racial composition and crime rates) with its accompanying ideological shifts. Through a theoretical emphasis on social constructionism and moral panic theory, this dissertation illuminates the cyclical nature of juvenile justice reform and illustrates that panics regarding juvenile offenders are more closely related to fears regarding the maintenance of power and the insecurity that comes with historical change than with an authentic threat of juvenile crime. Over 9,000 records in The New York Times, Congressional record, and Supreme Court decisions were coded and analyzed to reveal three chronological partitions of the social construction of youthful offenders: (1) the 1890s-1930s during which the most destabilizing force to those in positions of power revolved squarely around urbanization, industrialization, and the waves of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe; (2) the 1930s-1970s during which faith in juvenile offender rehabilitation was replaced with punitive policies stressing deterrence and an increased focus on the "problem" of racial minorities; (3) the 1970s-present which demonstrates the declining discussion of race in print media and legislative debates even as its effects in sentencing and prosecution grow in strength. This dissertation illuminates the ways in which insecurity and panic breed violence and expounds upon that notion to specify that how the violence manifests itself, whether through punitive policies or interpersonal crime, depends on the resources available and the historically-situated social norms. Over time, however, the explicit racial hostility in rhetoric and policy has been replaced with an evasion the recognition that race undoubtedly affects both juvenile justice policies as well as their implementation. In order to combat the inevitable instability that accompanies historical change, a resurgence of dialogue acknowledging the connection between race and juvenile justice is urged.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation is at once a historical study of the emergence of U.S. hegemony through the lens of discourses and techniques of attention, and a sustained series of methodological reflections centering on how to write and think about historical dynamics of causality. Methodological emphasis is first on establishing a reconceptualization of the dynamics of scientific and commercial accumulation animating capitalist modernity. From there, this study maps the emergence of two intersecting truth technologies that I argue are central to the peculiar ways in which U.S. corporate capitalism has worked over the long twentieth century. These apparatuses of not-only scientific truth are the psychological problematic of attention as a model enabling the representation of, and intervention in, human cognition, and the Marginalist visualization of "the economy" as a welfare equilibrium. </p><p>Both technologies emerged in the final decades of the nineteenth century along with the trans-Atlantic proliferation of research universities, and subsequent re-organizations of the material bases, and representational strategies and practices, of authoritative truth-making. In the U.S., these developments effected a particular displacement and broad re-orientation of previously theological frameworks for understanding human cognition and the "Natural" order of society. I argue that one consequence of this displacement and re-orientation has been the formation of a governmental rationality of the U.S. "Market Republic" that takes the welfare equilibrium of a mass-market economy as its telos and idiom of rational order, while simultaneously rendering civic freedom a matter of choices made after paying the right kind of (primarily economic or scientific) attention. As my examples indicate, this rationality is not necessarily state-based, but rather unfolds medially as a series of conceptual-discursive and socio-technical conventions in three primary institutional sites of attention-gathering and market-making: early mass-circulation print culture, systematic corporate management, and modern research universities. In all three sites, my focus is on communication technologies conceived as staging procedures for the socialization and accumulation of attention.</p><p>As mentioned above, my historical horizon of significance for these investigations is the emergence of U.S. hegemony between 1870 and 1929. By conceptualizing hegemony in terms of a nation's intermediating position as a dominant global "center of (commercial and intellectual/scientific) calculation," I keep in play a general conception of accumulation wherein knowledge, money, and indeed, human attention, are all forms of currency that have kept U.S. hegemony current throughout the long twentieth century (1870 - present). At stake in this alternative account of capitalist accumulation and scientific knowledge as tightly linked networks is not the by-now-standard conflation of scientific and class-based authority to "make things mean;" but rather, an insistently historical, constructivist, and indeed relativist conceptualization of how resources and power systematically concentrate and disperse in the very micro-processes by which people think "truth" with their eyes and hands -- by what they look at, interface with, are constituted in terms of, and so on. To accomplish this, the study proceeds by holding together Giovanni Arrighi's macrosociological theory of world historical capitalism, Bruno Latour's microsociological account of the power of "immutable mobiles" in (scientific) modernity, and Michel Foucault's genealogical conception of history as well as his theory of governmentality (the "conduct of conduct" through practices of freedom).</p> / Dissertation

<p>In the century and a half since Emancipation, slavery has remained a central topic at Somerset Place, a plantation-turned-state historic site in northeastern North Carolina, and programmers and audiences have thought about and interpreted it in many different ways. When North Carolina's Department of Archives and History first adopted the former plantation into its Historic Sites System in 1967, Somerset was dedicated to memorializing the planter, Josiah Collins III; the enslaved rarely made it into the site's narrative at all, and if they did it was as objects rather than subjects. In the final decades of the twentieth century, Somerset Place began to celebrate the lives of the 850 slaves who lived and worked at the plantation during the antebellum era, framing their history as a story about kinship, triumph and reconciliation. Both versions of the story--as well as the many other stories that the site has told since the end of slavery in 1865--require careful historical analysis and critique. </p><p>This dissertation considers Somerset's history and varying interpretations since the end of Reconstruction. It examines the gradual invention of Somerset Place State Historic Site in order to explore the nature and implications of representations of slavery, and the development of Americans' historical consciousness of slavery during their nation's long transition into freedom. It employs manuscript sources; oral histories and interviews; public documents, records and reports; and material artifacts in order to trace Somerset's gradual shift from a site of agricultural production to one of cultural representation, situated within North Carolina's developing public history programming and tourism industry. This research joins a rich body of literature that addresses southern history, epistemology, memory, and politics. It is comparative: it sets two centuries side by side, excavating literal cause-and-effect--the ways in which the events of the nineteenth century led to those of the twentieth--and their figurative relationship, the dialectical play between the ante- and post-bellum worlds. By examining the ways twentieth-century Americans employed the antebellum era as an intellectual and cultural category, this dissertation sheds light on slavery's diverse legacies and the complexity of living with collective historical traumas.</p> / Dissertation