The Charleston Single House's form is explored as a topical communicative artifact. The Charleston Single House, a single family urban house type, indigenous to Charleston, South Carolina, and almost 300 years old, is analyzed through its constituent elements of form. The architectonics of each element, in relation to other elements and the urban fabric, is examined. Knowledge gained from the analysis is used to manipulate the architectonics of the elements within the constraints of the type to produce a modern Charleston Single House. These topical artifacts are proposed as infill for a decaying neighborhood, consistent to the type and desiring renovation. Socio-political and methodological concepts derived from Thomas Jefferson and Hannah Arendt--focused on history, the public realm, and artifacts--grounding the thesis are enumerated.

American painting from the Revolutionary period, 1760-1790, is commonly evaluated according to the British Academic standard adopted by scholars of earlier colonial painting. This standard argues that a particular or realistic style is characteristic of provincial and less educated regions, encouraging theoretical assumptions about 18th century American portraiture: that it was void of intellectual and theoretical value; that its style resulted from limitations inherent to learning from books and prints; and, finally, that it sought to emulate British fashion. Trained in the Academic style and patronized by many individuals well-versed in British taste and tradition, Charles Willson Peale and Ralph Earl suggest that choice for a particular style resulted from native values and interests, the influence of issues like individualism and whiggism, and an awareness of the socio-political differences separating America and Britain.

This dissertation provides a narrative of the events in the conflict over the Dudley Observatory in Albany in the late 1850's. The controversy involved some of the most respected scientists, businessmen, and politicians of the nineteenth century and has been interpreted by scholars since that time as a symbolic struggle between an increasingly professional vision of science and an older, more popular view of science as a form of public entertainment. This dissertation contends that such an interpretation simplifies an incredibly complex situation. The observatory was never intended for public entertainment. From its inception, the Dudley Observatory was planned as a research institution and the trustees fully supported that purpose. The bitter quarrel which ensued was not based on conflicting visions of science. It was, instead, a struggle for power between two elites within an institution in which the boundaries of authority and responsibility were undefined. The scientists involved in the conflict--Alexander Dallas Bache, Benjamin Peirce, Joseph Henry, and Benjamin Gould--assumed an arrogantly authoritative version of their power which was far in advance of the nineteenth century American institutional context. The members of the board of trustees of the Dudley Observatory were not a provincial group of Philistines. The cultural elite of Albany had already set high standards of responsible patronage of science. The behavior of the scientists involved in this controversy denigrated that patronage and offended a now peculiar but strongly Victorian sense of the proper deference due to "gentlemen." The quarrel, once it began, expanded along lines of existing local rivalries and animosities within Albany. As it grew in bitterness, the conflict became a test of political influence on the national and on the state level. The scientists and the trustees used every available source of political power to which they had access during this battle of wills. As a result, the struggle moved to the highest levels of government. The scientists did not enter the conflict in order to ease the tensions and thereby preserved the institution for science, but to defend the Director, Benjamin Apthorp Gould, from any criticism, no matter how well merited. Gould's personality was undoubtedly a major factor in the development of the controversy. Early dissatisfaction with Gould arose out of his refusal to move to Albany from Cambridge to supervise renovations made to his specifications, his refusal to set up the telescopes to bring the observatory into a functioning condition, his refusal to accept responsibility for any expenditure which had been made under his direction, and his unnecessary secrecy. The final rupture, often discussed as the source of the conflict but in reality the "last straw," was a minor incident in which Gould's young assistants contemptuously dismissed the trustees seeking admission to the observatory. Far from being a simple conflict between increasingly professional scientists and a recalcitrant board of trustees, the controversy over the Dudley Observatory in Albany was a complex mixture of disparate motives and ambitions springing from a wide variety of individual sources.

Central to this study is the argument that the development of the law of Texas governing married women's property rights from 1840 to 1913 reflected a national rather than an isolated and indigenous process. Texas' first marital property rights act in 1840 and subsequent legislation were components of a national movement of the first half of the nineteenth century by American states to clarify, codify, and reform the property rights of married women, the so-called Married Women's Property Acts. Like other states' acts, the 1840 Texas statute initiated a series of piecemeal changes in the property rights of married women which concluded with more substantive alterations in the twentieth century. Despite Texas' Spanish-Mexican heritage and its subsequent adoption of a version of the Spanish community property system, its marital property statutes resembled in substance the marital property acts of those states whose legal bases was the English common law. By protecting the property of married women from irresponsible and dissolute husbands, Texas' acts functioned in the same manner as those states' acts which derived solely from Anglo-American custom. In the most fundamental way, Texas' laws like other states' laws constituted a family support scheme or a social welfare policy for a society unaccustomed to collective solutions. Shared or diffuse socioeconomic needs produced common responses among the states despite legal cultural differences. Those needs prompted lawmakers to define the rights, remedies, and responsibilities of family members. Texas' comparatively conservative response was a variation of a national pattern and from that perspective was a miniaturization of a national experience.

In the decade after the Civil War, the task of defining the rights of state and national citizenship, in the context of the Reconstruction Amendments, fell to a relatively small number of federal judges. This dissertation focuses on one of the most influential judges in the initial stages of that process, Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Bradley of New Jersey. Bradley's was the most analytic and the most disciplined mind on the Court in the 1870s and 1880s. His tightly reasoned arguments were reflected in the more than 400 opinions he wrote over the twenty-two years of his tenure. An examination of relationships among the Court's members in this period suggests that Bradley's influence was considerably greater than that immediately apparent in his quiet, private demeanor. Bradley was the first federal judge to comment on the scope and meaning of the Reconstruction Amendments. The occasion was the Slaughterhouse Cases in 1870. That opinion underscored the Amendments' broad reach as well as the authority of the Congress to secure their aims in law. This dissertation traces Bradley's civil rights jurisprudence from his circuit opinion in Slaughterhouse and his exchanges with Judge William Woods reflected in Woods' decision in U.S. v Hall in 1870, through his opinion in the Civil Rights Cases in 1883. Initially, Bradley had been a powerful advocate of the supremacy of federal authority in protecting the rights of all citizens under the post-war Amendments. By the mid-1870s, Bradley had begun to vacillate on the value of congressional efforts to fulfill the Amendments' goals. After his experience on the Commission to settle the disputed election of 1876, in which Bradley cast the deciding vote for Hayes, Bradley sat in virtual silence while his Supreme Court colleagues chipped away at the civil rights enforcement program's constitutional underpinnings. By 1883, Bradley had joined the majority. The occasion was the Civil Rights Cases. The effect of Bradley's decision was to deny to Congress primary authority for protecting citizens in their fundamental rights and to return that responsibility to its prewar locus--the states. For historians of the Reconstruction era, the Civil Rights decision is the symbolic culmination of the Compromise of 1877, the revolutionary "deracializing" of the post-war Amendments. For Bradley, it was also the end of an era, the terminus of the civil rights odyssey he had begun within months of his appointment to the Court in 1870. This dissertation traces the evolution of Bradley's civil rights jurisprudence between 1870 and 1883. It is a biographical treatment. The beginning chapters examine Bradley's early life, his pre-Court career as an influential New Jersey lawyer, his several forays into elective politics in the 1860s, and the politics of Bradley's appointment to the Court. Other chapters examine the decisions through which Bradley's jurisprudence evolved and detail his participation in the settlement of 1877. This dissertation's central argument is that Bradley's political views and subsequently, much of his civil rights jurisprudence were shaped by his enduring passion for the Union, the goal he prized above all. By 1883, the enforcement program had become, in his view, a divisive tool rather than one of reconciliation. Bradley's Civil Rights decision in 1883 acknowledged what had become a fact of American political life twenty years after Appomattox. The civil rights issue had been substantially wiped from the nation's agenda until the "second Reconstruction" of the 1960s.

What is freedom? The Civil War brought forth this central question as a result of the interaction of war and slavery. The different constituent elements of the northern war coalition--abolitionists, Republicans, war Democrats, and conservatives--each perceived the reality of war and slavery differently. Hence, the answer to the question of "what is freedom" was different for each group. The present study suggests that the abolitionist vision of freedom as a positive, substantive force matched the reality of war-created circumstance, and that Republicans adopted this radical vision as the means to defeat the Confederacy. An equation of slavery, secession, rebellion, and treason allowed Republicans to break through heretofore constraining ideological and constitutional limits. Once the attack on slavery began the subsidiary issue of the freedmen arose. What to do with four million ex-slaves was a problem that plagued Americans during the War, Reconstruction, and subsequent eras. The realization that white southerners would re-enslave freedmen if given the chance led abolitionists and Republicans to the idea of freedom as more than the absence of slavery. Rather, freedom contained natural law rights which, translated into the American idiom, meant citizenship and at least civil equality. The Thirteenth Amendment is founded upon this substantive, expansive view of freedom. The struggle to embody freedom for blacks in the Constitution is the history and lesson of the war itself. America came close to accomplishing that embodiment. Yet, the war's cessation removed the motivating necessity of defeating the Confederacy. With victory over treason, Americans precipitously retreated from civil equality, content to allow more normal, peaceful patterns to determine racial relationships. The lesson of the Civil War was forgotten.

This dissertation traces the medical-legal career of Isaac Ray, a prominent physician who specialized in the treatment of insanity and wrote extensively on medical jurisprudence. Ray's writings influenced every major development in the common law of insanity during his lifetime, including the famous trial of Daniel McNaghten in 1843, "irresistible impulse" tests, and the New Hampshire doctrine of criminal insanity. Ray's brand of human psychology was both materialistic and deterministic. Until the early 1830s he championed phrenology which held that all of a person's mental attributes were the result of the functioning of discrete organs in the brain. Thereafter Ray was America's leading advocate of a controversial concept called moral insanity which held that victims of mental disease could not help but act in ways they knew to be wrong. Ray's belief in moral insanity's uncontrollable impulses provided the foundation for his unyielding criticisms of the common law and dramatized his fundamental conflict with legal thinkers. Anglo-American common law implied that a person was responsible whenever he could distinguish right from wrong. By stressing uncontrollable impulses, Ray's medical determinism challenged the law's assumption of man's free agency. Ray also lobbied actively in favor of involuntary confinement of the insane. From the 1840s through the 1870s, he wrote and promoted a model law sanctioning the forced commitment of people whom physicians had judged to be insane. Ray bitterly opposed judicial interference in asylum confinement procedures because he believed that judges and juries were scientifically too unsophisticated to determine whether someone should be committed. Moreover, he opposed government oversight of the confinement of the insane because state regulation conflicted with his ideals of asylum management. Both in his attacks on criminal law and in his defense of involuntary confinement Ray sought to give physicians quasi-judicial authority by weakening the actual authority of judges and juries. In criminal cases he stressed the value of expert testimony in determining responsibility and in confinement law he emphasized the control of the asylum manager.

This study examines the extent to which the Bible's teaching regarding feminine nature and role shaped the changes modernity imposed on American women's lives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It focuses on Texas Baptists between 1880 and 1920--a biblically conservative group of lower- and middle-class southwesterners--and provides alternative data to the existing studies of northeastern and southern women. Chapter II delineates the specific biblical teaching regarding women that was emphasized by Texas Baptists and the ways they utilized those passages to justify an expanded role for women while retaining a concept of male authority in both the family and the church. Baptist women enlarged the scope of their religious activities most significantly between 1880 and 1920 in the creation of a successful missions support organization, the development of which is described in Chapter III. Although this all-female "union" enhanced women's administrative skills and gave them an avenue to power, it maintained an auxiliary position to the denomination as a whole and avoided theological and political issues. Chapter IV notes the same configuration of change in other religious activities of women: they expanded their sphere in worship, education, and benevolence but left ordination to both the ministry and the diaconate as a male prerogative. The widest field of service and the best possibility of a religious vocation for women lay in their serving as missionaries. Chapter V moves from the explicitly religious realm to other aspects of Baptist women's lives and focuses on the way Christian goals were translated into character models, educational pursuits, marriage, motherhood, and the exercise of civic responsibility. Between 1880 and 1920 Texas Baptist women used the Bible to justify their exercising greater freedom, but the patriarchal orientation of the church and the family was retained. Although this conservative reaction to change had some positive elements--it emphasized the interdependence of the sexes and the need for rearing children in a stable environment--it severely limited the full equality of Baptist women. That attainment necessitated further reinterpretation of their ideology and a willingness to deal openly with issues of conflict and power.

Before contact, the Cherokees strove to maintain individual liberty and natural harmony throughout their autonomous villages by using positive sanctions of religious purification and kinship control and negative sanctions of deference and withdrawal. In the eighteenth century, disease and a shifting economic base weakened the prestige of the priests and undermined tribal purification rites. Maintenance of trade and avoidance of conflict with the Europeans unified the autonomous villages. Cooperation among influential village headmen created a tribal-wide council; experienced diplomats emerged who, in order to maintain peace and trade, exercised coercion over individual Cherokees. By the 1790's, horse theft was the most common crime on the frontier and frequently led to widespread retaliation by both Cherokees and whites in violation of treaty provisions. The Cherokees in council passed a law in 1797 which defined the act of murder and which created the light-horse or regulating party to prevent horse theft. Institutional coercion, the regulating party, brought into council from the warrior political structure and directed by tribal chiefs, overrode kinship connections which formerly protected a horsestealer or murderer. The regulating party operated over defined territory: political contraction and centralization yielded the institutions for the making of a state. In the early 1800's, the federal agent exercised legislative, executive, and judicial functions over both Indians and whites in the Indian country. The tribe overcame political factions to protect their ancestral homeland from being sold off by individual members. The tribal council passed laws establishing a more organized permanent, paid regulating party and abolished the practice of clan revenge. The main incentive to establishing more formal institutional mechanisms over individuals was the protection of property. By 1827, the Cherokees had ratified a written constitution patterned after the federal constitution. After the discovery of gold in Cherokee territory and the presidential election of Jackson, Georgia and other states retaliated against the Cherokee assertion of sovereignty by extending state civil and criminal jurisdiction over the Cherokees. The Cherokee criminal justice system of promoting national harmony through restraint of individual liberty met with the Jacksonian ideals of individual liberty and "the union."

During and immediately following World War I, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People broadened its antilynching program to include a demand for a federal antilynching statute. Seeking the organization's support, several congressmen--most notably Republican Leonidas C. Dyer of Missouri--also sought to push through Congress an antilynching bill based on the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. However, amidst concern that such a law might have a harmful, long-term impact on the racial order and on a federal system based on shared sovereignty and state rights, Congress and the NAACP initially concentrated on a war-powers bill. The end of the war and the continuation of lynching, however, soon caused the NAACP and its advisers, including NAACP president Moorfield Storey, former attorney general George Wickersham, and reformer Albert Pillsbury, to seek a broader based bill that did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment's operational meaning as defined by the Supreme Court. By 1921, when Dyer introduced his third antilynching bill, the Association also sought in Congress sufficient support to overcome racist and state rights theories that supported southern lynching of black "offenders" and northern apathy toward the South's "Negro problem." In its congressional battle, the NAACP used constitutional, humanitarian, and political arguments. In response, the House Judiciary Committee favorably reported Dyer's H. R. 13 in October 1921 and the full House passed it on January 26, 1922. After failing to convince Republican William E. Borah of his duty to champion H. R. 13's constitutionality, the NAACP succeeded in averting an unfavorable vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee in the summer of 1922. And although unable to push the Senate to a vote prior to the 1922 elections, the organization attempted during a special two-week session in late November to persuade Republican Senators to fulfill their party's antilynching "pledge." The effort failed. Without access to the political weapons it used before the elections, the NAACP impotently watched as a determined Southern Democratic filibuster ended in the Republicans' official abandonment of H. R. 13 on December 4, 1922.