An ever-present figure throughout much of the nineteenth century, the prostitute existed in a state divorced from "traditional" womanhood as a shadowy yet "necessary" evil, and was largely seen as a static element of the city. The archetypes of the "endangered maiden" and the "fallen woman" were discursive creations evolving from an inchoate form to a more sharply defined state that were designed to explain the prostitute's continued existence despite the moral objections voiced by religious and social reformers. These archetypes functioned in an agrarian/proto-industrial society; however, under pressures of urbanization, industrialization, and population mobility, these archetypes were gradually supplanted by sharper, more emotionally loaded archetypes such as the "White Slave" and the trope of the "Vice Syndicate" to explain the prostitute. In this manner Progressive-Era social and moral reformers could interpret prostitution in general and the prostitute in particular within the framework of their understanding of a contentious social environment. In moving away from a religious framework towards a more scientific interpretation, the concept of prostitution evolved from a moral failing to a status analogous to a disease that infected the social body of the state. However, because the White Slave and the Vice Syndicate were discursive creations based upon anecdotal interpretations of prostitution as a predatory economic system, their nebulous nature encouraged a crisis mentality that could not survive a concrete examination of their "problem." Realities of race, class, and gender, as well as the fluid nature of the urban environment as well as non-moral concerns rendered the new archetypes and tropes slippery, and applicable to any reform-oriented argument. By the later years of the Progressive Era anti-vice discourse ceased to advocate moral arguments calling for the rescue of the prostitute and instead became a vehicle to articulate non-moral concerns such as political reform, social order, and female economic suffrage. After the First World War, the archetype of the White Slave collapsed in the face of women's suffrage and sexual agency, and the prostitute once more reverted to a state analogous to pre-Progressive cultural interpretations of prostitution. / History

Spiritualism was a popular cultural movement that flourished in the late-19th century across the United States and eventually Europe. While there were many facets of its philosophy, the primary conviction behind Spiritualism was that spirits of the dead could communicate with the living through human mediums. Although this basic definition of Spiritualism is virtually uncontested in contemporary scholarship, the cultural causes of the movement remain a highly debated topic. Historians have proposed a variety of theories for Spiritualism's inception, but none have yet to explore the economic motivations behind the movement. Spiritualism was, in fact, a vital commercial enterprise that spurred entrepreneurial and consumption opportunities for thousands of nascent capitalists. During the movement's prime, a host of Spiritualist merchandise was mass produced and marketed, including talking boards, spirit photographs, séances, and planchettes. Together, these products were produced and consumed in what became an "economy of the supernatural"--a thriving industry based on the desire to communicate with deceased humans. Through analysis of product advertisements and opinions raised about the issue found in mass media, this thesis will demonstrate that economic motivation was behind every aspect of Spiritualist practice. No part of the movement was left untouched by the desire for financial gain. Furthermore, this thesis argues that while various cultural forces influencing Spiritualism would diminish over time, the movement was able to sustain itself through the development of an economy of supernatural products and services, many of which continue to be produced to this very day. / History

This study is an analysis of the role educational programming has played in reforming inmates in American correctional institutions between the Jacksonian era and the 1970s. A case study, "Seminary of Virtue" focuses on the educational curriculum at Philadelphia's famed Eastern State Penitentiary, a cutting-edge institution that originated the Pennsylvania System of penal discipline. "Seminary of Virtue" argues that Eastern State Penitentiary's extensive and aggressive educational program reflected a general American belief that correctional institutions should educate inmates as a way of reducing recidivism and thereby "reforming" them. While Americans remained committed to educating inmates, Eastern State's curriculum evolved during its century and a half institutional life. As its emphasis shifted from the religiously oriented "reform" of prisoners in the early nineteenth-century to a medical model of "rehabilitation" a half century later, Eastern State's educational program evolved, shifting from a curriculum of rudimentary literacy skills, religious instruction and an apprenticeship of sorts to industrial education in the mid-nineteenth century and then finally to a traditional academic curriculum in the first third of the twentieth century. / History

Cold War era preacher Carl McIntire played a significant role in the politicization of fundamentalism during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. His libertarian political philosophy was shaped by the denominational politics in the Presbyterian Church of America during the fundamentalist - modernist controversy. / History

My dissertation, Racing the City: Intentional Integration and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in Post-WWII America, examines the creation, experience, and meaning of intentionally integrated residential space in the latter half of the twentieth century. Entering into the growing historiographical conversations on post-war American cities and the northern civil rights movement, I argue that with a strong commitment to maintaining residential cohesion and a heightened sense of racial justice in the wake of the Second World War, liberal integrationists around the country embarked on grassroots campaigns seeking to translate the ideals of racial equality into a blueprint for genuine interracial living. Through innovative real estate efforts, creative marketing techniques, and religious activism, pioneering community groups worked to intentionally integrate their neighborhoods, to serve as a model for sustainable urbanity and racial justice in the United States. My research, centered on the northwest Philadelphia neighborhood of West Mount Airy, chronicles a liberal community effort that confronted formal legal and governmental policies and deeply entrenched cultural understandings; through this integration project, activists sought to redefine post-war urban space in terms of racial inclusion. In crafting such a narrative, I challenge much of the scholarship on the northern struggle for racial justice, which paints a uniform picture of a divisive and violent racial urban environment. At the same time, my dissertation explores how hard it was for urban integrationists to build interracial communities. I portray a neighborhood struggling with the deeper meanings of integrated space, with identity politics and larger institutional, structural, and cultural forces, and with internal resistance to change. In that sense, I speak to the larger debates over post-WWII urban space; my research, here, implies a cultural explanation complementing the political and economic narratives of white flight and urban crisis that scholars have crafted over the last two decades. This is at once the story of a group of people seeking to challenge the seeming inevitability of segregation by creating an economically stable, racially integrated community predicated upon an idealized vision of American democracy, and it is the story of the fraying of that ideal. / History

Between 1919 and the establishment of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Kensington's American Federation of Hosiery Workers (AFHW) built a remarkable movement for social justice in Philadelphia, that played an important role in the establishment of the CIO, the New Deal, and labor-based feminism. Most historical accounts have portrayed the years following World War I through the early 1930s as a period of reversals and apathy for both the labor and women's movements. Fractured by factionalism, racial and ethnic conflict, and government repression, it would not be until the Great Depression, and within the "culture of unity" of the CIO and New Deal, that this "doldrums" would be overcome enough to spark a revived labor movement and a "labor" feminism that emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s. The roots of the social movements of the 1930s and beyond are, however, longer and much more complex. In several places, working-class men and women continued to advance throughout the period of perceived "doldrums." In fact, the 1920s and early 1930s were a period of organizing, education, and network building that laid the groundwork for the later movements. This dissertation uses the AFHW and Kensington as a lens to examine these developments. A left-wing-Socialist-led union, the hosiery workers developed a subculture of radicalism that drew on the long working-class traditions of the textile unions of the community of Kensington. Representing an industry whose very product, silk full-fashioned hosiery, epitomized the "flapper," the union developed a movement that celebrated--and subverted--the 1920s "New Woman" and the culture of the Jazz Age youth rebellion. Hosiery workers developed a romantic, rights-based movement that promoted class solidarity across differences of age, ethnicity, race, and gender. Over the course of a campaign to organize the industry and rebuild labor, the AFHW developed a heroic movement that utilized pathbreaking female-centered imagery and propelled women and the union onto the national consciousness. Their activities put them in the forefront of a movement for social democracy and led in direct ways to the CIO, the New Deal, and labor feminism. / History

This dissertation explores the complex interactions between the Cold War military-scientific apparatus, the idea of a culture of the Cold War, and the desert environment of the Tularosa Basin in south-central New Mexico. During and after World War II, the War Department and then the Department of Defense established several military reserves in the region. The massive White Sands Missile Range (at 3,200 square miles the largest military reserve in North America and larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined) and other military attachés would increasingly define the culture and economy of the Tularosa Basin. Historians have cast places such as White Sands Missile Range as cratered wastelands. Yet the missile range and surrounding military reserves became a contested landscape that centered on the viability of the nonhuman natural world. Diverse communities sought to find their place in a Cold War society and in the process redefined the value of a militarized landscape. Undeniably, missile technology had a profound impact on south-central New Mexico and thus acts as a central theme in the region's postwar history. However, in the years after 1945, environmentalists, wildlife officials, tourists, and displaced ranchers, amongst many others, continued to find new fangled meanings and unexpected uses for the militarized desert environment of south-central New Mexico. The Tularosa Basin was not merely a destroyed landscape. The design and sheer size of the missile range compelled local, national, and transnational voices to not just make sense of the economic implications of the missile range and surrounding military sites, but to rethink its cultural and environmental values in a changing Cold War society. It was a former home to ranchers still tied to the land through lease and suspension agreements. New Mexico Department of Game and Fish personnel cast the site as perfect for experimentation with exotic big game. Environmentalists and wildlife biologists saw the site as ideal for the reintroduction of the Mexican wolf. Tourists came to know the landscape through the simple obelisk at the Trinity Site. While missiles cratered the desert floor, the military bureaucracy did not hold absolute power over the complex interactions between cultures, economies, and the nonhuman natural environment on the postwar Tularosa Basin. / History

This thesis is about how human rights issues were mediated by the American media, and as a consequence, influenced U.S-China relations at the end of the Cold War. Focusing my research on the news framing by some American news outlets of the 1989 Tiananmen enabled me to observe and understand their role. "Framing" suggests a strategy of news reporting. In some ways, it facilitates our recognizing the ideological lens through which Americans perceived China affairs. I conceptualize their ideological bent as an imagination of a "special relationship" between America and China. My thesis consists of three sections. The first two sections concern the American media coverage of the protests at Tiananmen and the military crackdown on June 4th. The news coverage consistently characterized the Tiananmen protest as a democratic movement intelligible to the informed public in the U.S. As a consequence, this news framing raised the American public's expectations for the protesters. When disillusioned, they turned hope into anger, which was then expressed in Congress in wake of the Tiananmen massacre. Thus, the final section addresses how the Congressional leaders' arguments corresponded with news framing of the Tiananmen protest. My thesis concludes with a reflection over the moral dilemma of liberalism in U.S. China policy and analyzes its implications for both publics in both countries in the future. / History

This dissertation addresses the development of the movement of Reconstructionist Judaism in the period between 1935 and 1959 through an examination of ideological writings and institution-building efforts. It focuses on Reconstructionist rhetorical strategies, their efforts to establish a liberal basis of religious authority, and theories of cultural production. It argues that Reconstructionist ideologues helped to create a concept of ethnicity for Jews and non-Jews alike that was distinct both from earlier "racial" constructions or strictly religious understandings of modern Jewish identity. / History

Racism and sexism pervaded American society during the nineteenth century, creating unusual disadvantaged conditions for Chinese immigrant women. As a weak minority in an alien and often hostile environment and as a subordinate sex in a sexist society, Chinese women suffered from double oppression of racism and sexism. In addition, the Chinese cultural values of women's passivity and submission existed within Chinese communities in America, and affected the lives of these immigrant women. This work uses government document, historical statistics, accounts from newspapers and literature to examine the life experiences of Chinese immigrant women and American attitudes towards them, and to analyze the roots of the oppression of racism and sexism. / Master of Arts