Recent environmental scholarship has suggested that nature is chaotic and the concept of a balanced nature is a false one. Yet the attempt to balance nature is a human-driven effort arguably rooted in a paradigm that started in early modern Europe. This paradigm emerged at the end of the fifteenth century as Western man began to separate from and elevate himself above nature. With the renewed religious vigor of the sixteenth-century European Reformations man embraced the scriptural concept of his God-given dominion, and thus control, over nature. Men of faith initiated the Scientific Revolution, which culminated with the Newtonian idea of mechanization and led to the idea of nature as balanced. These ideas formed, in part, the basis for natural resource management into the twenty-first century. In the United States nineteenth-century Romantics and twentieth-century Progressives influenced the paradigm through direct response to the free market economy, the driving ideals of American exceptionalism, and the enlistment of the elitist values of Social Darwinism and the cult of masculinity, which further shaped American environmental policies. Mans effort to seek a balanced nature has caused him to invent and reinvent nature within the framework thus making nature a cultural, rather than a scientific, construct. Perhaps one of the best case studies concerning the paradigmatic influences on wildlife policy is the effort of various managing entities in Yellowstone National Park to revive the American Bison. In examining the decisions of Yellowstone National Park and Department of Interior management the emerging, overarching theme in Yellowstones first seventy-five years of bison management includes both cultural determinism and cultural hegemony, though not always in the strictest Marxist/Gramscian model. Even as policies changed, and sometimes drastically, the underlying theme proves that scientists and policy-makers alike made decisions more often influenced by cultural paradigms that proved mired in social and cultural constructs. Embracing the theory of the balance of nature, wildlife managers allowed nascent cultural concepts to permeate policymaking. Hence, the American Bison has been left hanging in a man-made attempt to balance nature both for natures sake and for the pleasure of mankind.

This dissertation examines 211 critical articles published by William Michael Rossetti in multiple Victorian periodicals over fifty years spanning 1848 to 1909. Innovative new digital technology is employed to sort qualitative and quantitative attributes of each article and construct a fine-grained comparative analysis of Rossetti's critical intent, strategy and effect as a critic, historian and founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The dissertation includes a searchable digital archive of the collected annotations with citations for all 211 articles, supported with hyperlinked and embedded cross-references to Rossetti's two memoirs and his collected letters. The results of the study are comprised in both textual analysis and multiple graphic charts offering a close-up, detailed and supported examination of Rossetti, his periodical criticism, his interaction with the periodic press and other critics, as well as with some of the major figures of Victorian aestheticism.

The Jay-Grenville Treaty, signed between Great Britain and the United States in 1795, resolved numerous outstanding diplomatic disputes and diffused a potential second Anglo-American war. It provided ten years of peace, and through new commercial opportunities materially aided a decade of remarkable American economic growth. Yet the treaty caused considerable political controversy in the United States. The compromise it involved on liberal principles of maritime law proved politically unpopular with instinctively Anglophobic Jeffersonian Republicans. Bitter memory of defeat in the treaty ratification later led President Thomas Jefferson to reject a second Anglo-American treaty in 1806, after the first had expired. Though not solely responsible, this decision led directly to the War of 1812. Chapter one employs British records to show how far the Jay-Grenville Treaty improved the fortunes of American merchants in admiralty court proceedings. Chapter two uses personal papers of American merchants to examine their collective view of the treaty. Chapter three analyzes the importance of the treaty to Alexander Hamilton's theory of political economy, focusing particularly on finance and social mobility. Chapter four shows the very different theory of political held by Thomas Jefferson, explaining why the treaty proved so controversial despite its successful operation. Chapter five uses newspapers to describe popular engagement with the political issues outlined in chapters three and four, emphasizing the treaty's role in the emergence of American democracy.

Gwen Bristow's best sellers had all but disappeared from bookshelves, libraries, and the memories of American readers until recently when several of her more popular historical novels were reissued. Although some of Bristow's novels are available, her most important work, a three-part series that would eventually be called The Plantation Trilogy, has been largely ignored by scholars. Yet, of particular import are the ways in which Bristow uses the genre of the historical novel to further an agenda that gives insight into several important issues of her own time, the 1930s. Bristow sets her narratives in previous time periods to address the needs of the Great Depression era from a safe distance. She is specifically concerned with how people can and do cope with the Depression, how the South is defining itself culturally and regionally, and how the changing roles of women are informed by the ideology of Progressivism.

Scholars often oversimplify Southern Baptist reactions to the civil rights movement. This study recovers the nuances of Southern Baptist responses by interweaving church records, Atlanta Baptist Association minutes, church member interviews, and primary documents on neighborhood racial transition to articulate the story of six Atlanta-area churches from 1954 to 1975. Capitol Avenue Baptist, Bellwood, and Kirkwood, all located in racially transitioning areas, faced the decision of whether to stay and minister, close, or follow white members to the suburbs. At First Baptist Atlanta, months of demonstrations revealed a membership divided on desegregation. On the affluent northside, Second-Ponce Baptist directly experienced little of the civil rights movement, highlighting differences in Southern Baptists' attitudes based on class and experience. Dogwood Hills Baptist members contested the fate of their racially progressive pastor. This study contributes to the growing scholarship concerning southern whites occupying the broad middle ground between hardliner segregationists and racial activists.

This paper examines the relationship between Union soldiers from states along the Ohio River and Copperheads, members of the Peace faction of the Democratic Party during the American Civil War. The unique process of the Union Army's politicization was in large part driven by these Copperhead agitators. It encompasses soldiers' experiences both on the home front, as described in letters from family and friends, and in the field, marching through territory with residents who resented their presence. Throughout the war, soldiers and society grappled with questions of loyalty and what constituted a loyal citizenry. This region was a hotbed of Copperhead activity during the war, and to many soldiers Copperheads represented a tangible threat to their homes and families along with the war effort. Many soldiers struggled with the concept that such men could have a say in politics, while they, far from home, could not. An important facet of this relationship is the way in which these accounts of Copperhead agitation clashed with the political leanings many soldiers may have had towards the Democratic Party. Although some positions, such as pro-slavery and anti-emancipation, had sympathetic ears amongst the army, the consistent drumbeat of anti-war sentiment from these Copperheads drove soldiers towards the Republican Party. This most notably shows during elections, especially in the key elections for Ohio Governor in 1863 and U.S. President in 1864. By voting from the field in 1863 and 1864, soldiers remained active participants in the growing American democracy.

From 1815 to 1848, Richard M. Johnson was involved in some way in the great political and social issues addressed by the nineteenth century United States. A Representative and Senator from Kentucky, Johnson embodied the democratic spirit of the western frontier in his lifestyle, relationships, and most notably his politics. He remained an unrepentant slaveholder who nonetheless engaged in open relationships with enslaved women. He acknowledged his children from his relationship with his enslaved mistress Julia Chinn and sought to introduce his daughters into white society. Although elite southerners along the Atlantic Coast balked over his mixed-race relationships, Johnson was controversially elected to the Vice Presidency in 1836. Most historians attributed Johnson's electoral difficulties to his mixed-race relationships, Johnson in fact angered elite Tidewater southerners from the beginning of his political career. He championed a more authentic democracy than contemporary Jeffersonians or Jacksonians, often taking positions at odds with the planter elite that comprised the leadership of the Jefferson and Jackson influenced Democratic Party. Johnson embraced the tenants of democratic nationalism--congressional compensation, abolishment of imprisonment for debt, worker's rights, the rights of immigrants, government sponsored exploration of the west, and large-scale electoral democratization--well before southern slaveholding Democrats and before many northern Democrats as well. He refused to be tied to ideology, occasionally affirming banks and internal improvements if he believed the cause democracy and the West might be furthered. He courted urban workers, a constituency largely ignored by southern party bosses. In the process he made enemies, angering at times Andrew Jackson, James Polk, and others committed to the wholesale maintenance of the plantation system. Although his legacy has been vastly underappreciated by historians, Johnson, not Jefferson or Jackson, laid the groundwork for the Democratic Party's transformation from a party committed to state rights agrarianism into one that embraced populist nationalism.

This work examines James Monroe's attempt to craft his historical legacy. The American founders believed that they had created a new form of government dedicated to the protection of liberty. They dedicated their political lives to the promotion of this new kind of liberal republicanism. Thomas Jefferson taught James Monroe that his personal legacy would be inexorably tied to the American experiment. Monroe dedicated his life to championing the republican cause. Monroe believed that his particular part in the promotion of the cause would be to help spread republican ideas around the globe. As a young minister to France during that nation's Revolution in the 1790s, Monroe's first attempt to spread republicanism nearly destroyed his career. For the rest of his life Monroe believed that the United States had not done enough to support the republican cause in France. During the next two decades as Monroe made his way up the political ladder he came to understand that only by first achieving high political office could he acquire the power to cement his legacy as a republican champion. Monroe finally tried to make up for his and the country's failure in Revolutionary France and secure his legacy with the Monroe Doctrine. Monroe saw the Doctrine as his last, best chance to cement his legacy as a champion of the republican cause. He hoped to use it as a signal to the world that the United States would support any people who hoped to throw off the shackles of monarchy and follow in the footsteps of the United States by embracing the republican experiment. He hoped that championing the republican experiment in the west would be his legacy to the world. It would allow him to stand beside men like his mentor Jefferson and be remembered as the Revolution's greatest diplomat helping to spread republicanism around the globe.

My dissertation offers a re-vision and melding of critical pedagogies and epideictic rhetoric in an attempt to show the critical educative function of epideictic and how a critical pedagogy operates rhetorically. I define epideictic as any rhetoric that helps shape or critique cultural beliefs, values, and practices, and I show how the common understanding of epideictic in educative settings as a means for upholding orthodoxies limits epideictic's educative potential. Specifically, I look at how the Christian genesis for Paulo Freire's writings has been largely ignored in the field of Composition and how understanding religious rhetoric as epideictic rhetoric enables compositionists to more readily adapt and use Freire's theories in our classrooms. Not only does translating the religious rhetoric found in Freire into epideictic rhetoric allow the religious aspects of Freire's pedagogy to be applicable to any educative setting, it also opens up a conversation about how to use rhetoric to help teachers and students understand the purposes of critical pedagogies. By focusing on epideictic, I add a substantive and tangible focus on writing and rhetoric to critical pedagogy.

My thesis shows how J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy uses nineteenth-century gender norms discussed in children's periodicals but undercuts these norms through the interjections of his conflicted narrator. My first chapter demonstrates how two widely known nineteenth-century boys' magazines, the Boys of England and the Boy's Own Paper, portray manly boyhood through the lens of the feminine. These periodicals present conflicting views of boyhood, but both suggest that boys need girls. In the second chapter, I argue that J. M. Barrie expresses these norms, absorbed during his own youth, in his novel, Peter and Wendy. This novel also suggests that boys need girls, employing the ideals of boyhood and girlhood expressed in the nineteenth-century boys' periodicals. The narrator's frequent and disruptive comments, however, undermine these gender norms, drawing attention to the fractures in late Victorian models of ideal boyhood and girlhood.