This project examines U.S. womens diverse literary contributions to the social settlement movement at the turn of the twentieth century. Beginning with Jane Addamss Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) and examining other fictional and non-fictional considerations of the settlement project, I explore the ways in which the authors in my study individually and collectively confront a Progressive-Era ideal of societal regeneration. Working with well-known authors such as Addams and Anna Julia Cooper, as well as with rare and archival texts by writers such as African American activist Fannie Barrier Williams, Social Gospel writers like Vida Scudder, and regional novelists such as Elia Peattie, I analyze the writers use of social, scientific, and religious arguments in service of urban reform work. I consider the interrelationships between text, activism, and identity for these women writers, and I argue that in writing about the settlement movement, each middle-class author in this study offers her own vision of what a Woman Reformer is and should be. Though Addamss memoir identifies the female activist as a singular, individualistic, and somewhat masculine figure along the lines of Abraham Lincoln and Leo Tolstoy, other writers challenge this identity even as they refer and defer to Addams and her dominance. Most of the writers emphasize the importance of factors such as community, partnership, and religion through their texts, but ultimately, the literature as a whole largely relies on an image of a (usually white) middle-class heroine who will help save industrial America, and the final text I examine, Peatties The Precipice, extends that idea to a eugenics-based reform program. The People in the Neighborhood shows thatfor its pervasiveness, its position at the nexus of Progressive-Era culture, and its discourse over gender, race, and classthe settlement movement and its literature is a crucial area of study that provides an avenue for scholars to examine the long and sometimes subtle history of prejudice in radical movements.

This dissertation investigates the contentious advocacy rhetorics which are associated with the surge of autism diagnoses over the past decade, a phenomenon which some refer to as an "autism epidemic." The primary aim of this study is to describe why autism advocacy is controversial and to suggest ways in which a "rhetorical" approach might be instrumental in helping advocates move beyond "stalemate." This dissertation employs Krista Ratcliffe's notion of "rhetorical listening." Chapter 2 explores intersections between scientific and public discourse about autism, particularly the movements that have emerged around the vaccine-debates. Discussion centers around the emergence of the vaccine controversies and around the rhetoric on the websites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Generation Rescue, a high-profile anti-vaccine advocacy organization. Particular attention is given to the rhetorical strategies Generation Rescue uses to convince parents that autism should be treated as a form of mercury-poisoning despite the medical establishment's nearly unanimous disavowal of such beliefs. Chapter 3 shifts the discussion to the to the personal-public rhetoric on autism-parent blogs. Attention is first given to the particular affordances and genre-conventions of blogging. Then, two specific parent-blogs/bloggers are studied: one who promotes the idea of "autism acceptance" and another who rejects "autism acceptance" and deems it irresponsible. Particular attention is given to how each parent blogger engages with public discourses about autism and associates him/herself with larger autism advocacy movements. Chapter 4 focuses on the online self-advocacy of autistics and the burgeoning "neurodiversity" movement, which is, in many respects, a web-enabled phenomenon. The discussion focuses on the genesis of this "Autism Rights" and Autism Self-Advocacy and shows how it is rooted in but also extends previous disability rights movements. Two specific online self-advocacy organizations are studied: Autism Network International and Aspies For Freedom. Chapter 5 turns briefly to a debate within College English about autistic students in writing classroom. I show that the "rhetorical stalemates" of autism advocacy also pervade professional discourses in Rhetoric and Composition and also warrant a rhetorical listening approach.

This study argues that rather than allowing the American population to suffer under scarcity, the United States federal government made radical efforts to afford every American access to a balanced and nutritious diet. Specifically, the federal government used the expanded powers afforded to it during World War II to reshape both agricultural production and the food consumption patterns of America in accordance with a national nutritional standard, the Recommended Dietary Allowances, created solely for the purpose of guiding government food policy. This study describes the production of the first national nutrition standard (the Recommended Dietary Allowances) and delineates the process and mechanisms by which the federal government controlled the nation's food production and consumption during World War II. It concludes that the government's efforts were largely successful during the war but that they also had some unforeseen and undesirable consequences.

While the study of war rhetoric has traditionally concentrated on items such as speeches, memorial sites, propaganda artifacts, books, and films, this dissertation enlarges that discussion to demonstrate that the words of American troops are being used to resurrect the idea that war can be both personally and corporately ennobling. My study analyzes the National Endowment for the Arts' Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, a project to collect and publish first-hand accounts of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from military personnel and their families. Submissions were accepted through March 2005 from anyone who served in the armed forces on or after September 11, 2001; selected entries were compiled into a 374-page anthology which was released in September 2006. Much analysis has been performed on obvious propaganda commissioned by the War (and now Defense) Department, but this more subtle instruction from a government agency traditionally focused on fine arts calls for a deeper understanding because it is not typically thought of as a source of war rhetoric. Drawing on recent scholarship in epideictic theory, public memory, and the construction of the heroic, I analyze the how the project was conducted, the epideictic effect of the anthology's structure as an epic narrative, Preface and Introductory remarks by NEA officials, dominant themes throughout the anthology, the events of the project launch, book launch, and subsequent signing tour, and the Academy-Award nominated film based on the project. My dissertation demonstrates that Operation Homecoming (OH) resurrects the image of the heroic soldier to match the World War II ideal, which stands metaphorically for the image of America itself. By linking the war on terror to famed wars of antiquity and the country's own founding fight for freedom, OH creates a narrative which draws upon national mythic history to reinscribe a traditional vision of America and its place in the world. I situate my project as part of a body of scholarship dedicated to critiquing ways in which war in general and U.S. wars in particular are being framed, discussed, and commemorated in ways that support conservative, nostalgic ideology.

Chapter 1, "Introduction and Overview: Changing the Tools," introduces my dissertation as an attempt to answer two sets of calls: calls for Burkean scholarship on social movements to be updated and calls for case studies of online rhetoric. I explain how social movements have been among the most important users of the Web and I introduce the subject of my dissertation, Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain (HTB). Chapter 2, "Social Movement Rhetoric Online: How Form is Formed," conceptualizes a way to meet the challenge of updating Burkean methods to better understand social movement rhetorics created, disseminated, and received online. I examine the Web on its own terms, tracing its origins and blending insights from new media scholarship and rhetorical scholarship. I introduce and examine relevant Burkean rhetorical concepts, including symbolic action/nonsymbolic motion and rhetorical form. I argue that previous rhetorical scholarship on social movements, while valuable, has omitted the media-specific analysis necessary to understand the Web as a rhetorical event. Chapter 3, "Rewiring Kenneth Burke," maps a rhetorical understanding of the Web as a vast global hypertext. I develop a critical tool, a three-layered heuristic, toexamine the Web as a whole experience. That tool blends the material specificities of the Web with rhetorical form by considering "Behind the Screen, Off the Screen, and On the Screen." This three-layered heuristic complicates our rhetorical readings of websites as websites, as mediated human drama and supplies a more sensitive means of reading rhetorical context and symbolic action. Chapter 4, "The Change Needs to be Khilafah," applies the heuristic developed in the third chapter to examine a wide range of artifacts from HTB's online rhetoric surrounding the proposed ban. I use a case study of HTB's online rhetoric in the two years following the 7/7 bombing and proposed ban to test that heuristic and to show its usefulness for "rewiring" Burkean methods for understanding social movement rhetoric. Chapter 5, "Looking Back, Looking Forward," draws out the overall contributions of this study and suggests some implications for future research.

Granburys Texas Brigade C.S.A. chronicles the history of Granburys Texas Brigade in the American Civil War while advancing the thesis that loyalty to the Confederacy could not override the local circumstances experienced by these Texans. It also seeks to answer the question of what role common soldiers played in the Confederate war effort by exploring Granburys Brigade as a microcosm of the war effort. Granburys Brigade also explores the socioeconomic context of the soldiers of Granburys Texas Brigade in an effort to understand their behavior. Perhaps most importantly, Granburys Brigade examines the issue of Confederate desertion in the context of these Texas regiments in an effort to better understand Confederate desertion across a broad spectrum. Despite the early difficulties and desertion, the leadership of Hiram Granbury and Patrick Cleburne helped turn the small remnant of Texans into Granburys Texas Brigade, a crack fighting unit. This small band then became The Color Brigade of the Army, from November, 1863 to November, 1864, until the Battle of Franklin destroyed them.

In the Cold War atmosphere of the late twentieth century, NASA and Houston came together to produce a remarkable story. This dissertation focuses on the American space agency between 1961 and 1969 in an effort to examine how NASA had a transformative effect on southeast Texas. A number of scholars have written about the space flights that occurred during the late twentieth century, but few works explore the economic, political, and social impact of America's space program on a regional level. The purpose of this study is to describe how NASA affected southeast Texas's population, academic institutions, race relations, residential communities, political attitudes, and economy during the late twentieth century. Accordingly, the establishment of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston represented the culmination of nearly sixty years of economic growth and progress in Texas, which began with the discovery of oil at Spindletop in 1901 and continued with the expansion of the oil and petrochemical industries during World War II.

John Foster Dulles regarded the creation of a powerful Western Pacific collective security organization as the cornerstone of Americas East Asian policy, but the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) fell well short of his vision. SEATO never had the military might of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the alliance crumbled when the United States entered the Vietnam War. Even so, SEATO failed because the Eisenhower administration mismanaged its East Asian policy, not because of any perceived military inadequacy. The Department of State under Dulles had a dualistic approach to its East Asian relations. It sought to treat developing Asian nations as sovereign equals in order to disassociate the United States from charges of colonialism. At the same time, it rabidly opposed communism and sought to limit its spread throughout the nonaligned nations of Asia. The two policies competed with one another and kept Asian leaders from trusting American motives. Furthermore, Dulles pushed for the creation of SEATO in response to the 1954 French defeat at Dienbienphu. The time was not right for the creation of a multilateral alliance, but Dulles believed he had no other option available to halt the growth of communism in the region. The reactive nature of SEATOs creation combined with Americas dualistic Asian policy kept nations in the region like Burma and Japan from joining, and as a result, SEATO never grew into the more powerful collective security organization that Dulles wanted.

Manichaeism imbues both the history and the historiography of domestic American anticommunism. Within the latter, two major schools dominate. One identifies anticommunism as little more than an anti-intellectual anti-liberalism directed by conservatives against various social and political dissenters. The other rejects this view as dangerous revisionism that obscures the very real threat posed to the United States by the agents of (especially Soviet) communism. This study proposes a new understanding of domestic American anticommunism as a rhetorical battle to define the parameters of legitimacy and authenticity within the twentieth-century United States. In this view, neither of the main branches of the historiography fully guides the historian. Instead, tools from the field of rhetoric studies aid more traditional historical inquiry in illuminating the multivariate ways in which social and political forces deployed the construct of anticommunism as a tool for legitimation or delegitimation. Various chapters explore the interactions of political liberalism and conservativism with mainstream definitions of anticommunism, as well as the social construction of a national identity or a hero mythology within a peculiarly American anticommunist environment. Ultimately, domestic American anticommunism may be seen as a fundamentally conservative force for defining authenticity, and in a Manichean way, illegitimacy. For the better part of a century, anticommunism helped delineate us from them in U.S. social and partisan politics.

My dissertation examines the representation of the Asiatic Orient in nineteenth-century U.S. literary culture and the implication of such transnational imaginings in the formation of U.S. national and imperial identity. Building upon the critique of Orientalism initiated by Edward W. Said and followed by others, such as Malini Johar Schueller, who have examined U.S. discourses of Orientalism, my project investigates the intersection of the Asiatic Orient and U.S. national imagination in the light of current theories of transnational and global cultural exchanges. In doing so, I demonstrate that the orientalist construction of the Asia-Pacific region in U.S. cultural narratives provided an ideological basis for the dual articulation of U.S. national identity, an identity imbued with postcolonial anxiety and imperial desire. The bulk of existing scholarship on Western representations of the Orient either critiques orientalist discourse as the Wests attempt to legitimize its power over the East through colonization and imperial subjugation or views such discourse as benign cross-cultural understanding. Instead, I ground my study in the cultural and material changes that the Orientalist imaginary has produced within Western metropolises in order to understand how seemingly localized national identities are forged transnationally. My project interrogates and challenges popular approaches in current scholarship in nineteenth-century U.S. literary studies. It goes beyond the critique of Orientalism in showing how the discourse of Orientalism, in the specific context of the nineteenth-century United States, complicated internally stratified racial, gender, and ethnic differences at home. Moreover, it establishes the roots of transnational imaginary within the nationalist project of nineteenth-century U.S. culture and demonstrates how the so-called transnational turn in American studies may not necessarily be a post-ethnic or post-national.