It is the purpose of this work to compile and organize available material dealing with children's magazines published in the nineteenth century in America, and present it in a usable form.

Over the last quarter-century, scholars have taken a unified approach in discussing form in Italian and French opera of the nineteenth century. This approach centers around the four-part aria and duet form begun by Bellini, codified by Rossini, modified by Verdi, and dissolved by Puccini. A similar trajectory can be seen in French opera in the works of Meyerbeer, Gounod, and Massenet; however, only Meyerbeer and Gounod have received significant critical attention. This is in part due to Massenet's reception as a "composer for the people," a title ill fitting and ripe for reconsideration. This dissertation will examine duet forms in Massenet's oeuvre and will focus on the gradual change in style manifest in his twenty-five operas. Massenet's output can be divided into three distinct periods delineated by his approach to form. Representative works from each period will show how he inherited, interpreted, thwarted, and ultimately rewrote the standard formal conventions of his time and in doing so, created a dramaturgical approach to opera that unified the formerly separate number-based elements. Massenet's longevity and popular appeal make him the quintessential French opera composer of the fin de siècle and the natural choice for examining reconstructed conventions.

This dissertation examines core themes of the developing women’s movement in the United States from 1820 to 1920—the abolition of slavery, women’s property ownership, education, political identity, motherhood, and the franchise—through the lens of decorative needlework. I read the stitch as a key medium through which women visually and materially articulated their relationship to these concerns. My project has four main aims: first, to examine decorative needlework as a site of gender construction, performance, and contestation; second, to explicate the complex temporal dynamics of this stitched craft; third, to highlight the racialized, classed, and national dynamics of this work; and fourth, to theorize the sedimentary nature of crafted and gendered forms. Analyzing the rise of architectural iconography and feminized depictions of property in schoolgirl samplers, the uses of femininity and representations of Blackness in antislavery needlework, and suffragists’ debates about the political efficacy of needlework, I argue that American women used their needlework both to signal their belonging to normative femininity and to broaden its definition in deeply classed and racialized ways. As they made samplers and other textiles, I contend, stitchers worked to craft useable femininities, gendered positions from which to speak, act, construct themselves, and be remembered. My project seeks to excavate the racialized meanings of this clearly gendered work. I trace the intimate entanglements between white supremacy, colonialism, nativism, and white women’s work to materialize their own authority through textiles. I also probe the needlework strategies employed by Black and indigenous women who both encountered decorative needlework as a coerced form, but also worked to claim public visibility, remembrance, respectability, and remuneration with their stitches, challenging the whiteness of idealized femininity. By studying the ways in which white, Black, and indigenous women used the stitch to materialize gendered and racialized relationships to property, education, citizenship, empire, enslavement, and freedom, this dissertation recaptures the significant contributions that needleworkers made to women’s cultural and political activism and reconsiders gender itself as a crafted form, materially produced in the repetition of the stitch.

This dissertation examines the cultural role of three controversial yet popular heterodox sciences of nineteenth century Spain: phrenology; animal magnetism and hypnosis; and spiritualism or spiritism. It assesses the relationship between the development of phrenology and early Catalanism, the connection of animal magnetism and hypnosis to both Catholicism and emergent medical discourse, and the flourishing of spiritism in the context of the production of a national genealogy. The project draws on myriad sources like literary works, daily newspapers, specialized journals, dissemination pamphlets, and case histories, to argue that these heterodox sciences were an integral part of the social and cultural history of the nineteenth century. It rethinks not just the relationship between science and cultural production that scholars like James Secord, Gillian Beer, and others have studied but also what we understand as nineteenth-century scientific heterodoxies, seeking to understand them as a broad socio-cultural phenomenon in the way they helped construct cultural practices of the time. Alternative Presence contends that phrenology, animal magnetism and hypnosis, and spiritism expanded rhizomatically away from the confines of canonical institutions and yet contributed to early political regionalism, practices of medical and religious healing, and national historiography. To study such mediations, I look both at these sciences’ main actors — heterogeneous individuals and groups who disseminated them — and at a series of narrative and expressive strategies visible in the discourse through which they flourished. As the term “science” evolved and gained social authority through the appearance of increasingly demarcated fields of expertise, heterodox sciences’ tessellated networks lost ground and were ultimately relegated to the sphere of pseudoscience or popular belief. However, during their lifetime they served to generate alternative ideas of the subject and the nation. Their crucial role in the nineteenth-century Spanish cultural field has been ripe for rediscovery, and this dissertation probes their imbrication with mainstream ways of imagining the paths to modernity.

With its destabilizing shifts away from mercantilism toward liberal economics, early nineteenth-century Britain generated an increasingly powerful class of technocrats, including architects and builders, in design and construction. This burgeoning professional group involved in architecture, planning, and building directed processes, products, and technologies of construction toward maintaining societal order. In doing so, they cemented their social hierarchical status. Following abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and emancipation from 1833-1838, architects and builders had to adapt their techniques of communication and labor management, and adjust their building practices to material and technological innovations. In contrast to heroic narratives of industrial progress and optimism that conventionally dominated histories of modern architecture, figures of apprehension, anxiety, and anticipation more appropriately encapsulate the consequential events of this period. Through empirical analyses of small-scale techniques of drawing and building, this dissertation renders the general transition from rigid, mercantilist arrangements aligned with economies of enslavement toward ideologies of free trade, increasingly widespread wage labor regimes, and liberalism more broadly, into legible, tangible forms. Using as heuristics architectural technologies for preempting, mitigating, and suppressing fires—planning, constructional assemblies, mechanisms, materials, regulations, financing, and legislation—I demonstrate that preventing undesirable occurrences governed a heterogeneous array of activities. These ranged from English architects' professionalization initiatives, to plans for evacuating people from and extinguishing fires in theaters, to labor management in West Indian military outposts, to fire insurance offices that spread their risk profiles by indemnifying Caribbean sugar plantations beginning in the late eighteenth century. Thus capital and uncertainty went hand in hand as elements in conveying wealth, as architects and others involved in building at once made risk both fungible and material.

Strike waves in the late nineteenth century United States caused widespread property destruction, but strike leaders did not suggest threats to employer property as a comprehensive strategy until the I.W.W. adopted a deliberate program of sabotage. Contrary to historical consensus, sabotage was an intellectually coherent and politically generative response to progressive, technocratic dreams of frictionless social cooperation that would have major consequences for the labor movement. This dissertation treats sabotage as a significant contribution to the intellectual debates that were generated by labor conflict and rapid industrialization and examines its role in shaping federal labor policy. It contends that the suppression of sabotage staked out the limits of acceptable speech and the American political imagination.

This dissertation examines Éliane Radigue’s collaborative compositional practice as an alternative model of creation. Using normative Western classical music mythologies as a backdrop, this dissertation interrogates the ways in which Radigue’s creative practice calls into question traditional understandings of creative agency, authorship, reproduction, performance, and the work concept. Based on extensive interviews with the principal performer-collaborators of Radigue’s early instrumental works, this dissertation retraces the networks and processes of creation—from the first stages of the initiation process to the transmission of the fully formed composition to other instrumentalists. In doing so, I aim to investigate the ways in which Radigue’s unique working method resists capitalist models of commodification and reconfigures the traditional hierarchical relationship between composer, score, and performer. Chapter 1 traces Radigue’s early experiences with collaboration and collective creativity in the male-dominated early electronic music studios of France in the 1950s and 60s. Chapter 2 focuses on the initiation process behind new compositions. Divided into two parts, the first part describes the normative classical music-commissioning model (NCMCM) using contemporary guides for composers and commissioners and my own experiences as an American composer of concert music. The second part examines Radigue’s performer-based commissioning model and illuminates how this initiation process resists power structures of the NCMCM. Chapter 3, which is centered on the role of the composer, score, and performer, is divided into three parts. The first details the relationship between composer, score, and performer in the mythologies of nineteenth-century Western classical music. I again draw from both primary sources and my own personal experiences as a composer to explore these normative frameworks. The second details the procedures of Éliane Radigue’s creative process in her earliest collaborative instrumental compositions (Elemental II, Naldjorlak I, and OCCAM I for solo harp) and the Occam Ocean series as a whole. Using these as a point of departure, the third part explores the role of the composer, score, and performer in Radigue’s collaborative process, examining the ways in which these roles are reconfigured to create new, more equitable relationships between creative actors.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis studies the way Indianapolis women and men from the 1820s to 1890s influenced the social development of the city through the creation and operation of benevolent institutions. Before the Civil War, Indianapolis citizens created benevolent institutions to aid individuals who could not care for themselves—specifically, individuals with physical and mental needs. When the city’s population drastically increased following the Civil War (and the emergence of railroads), Indianapolis citizens began founding benevolent organizations intended to shape certain behaviors/control specific societal problems—specifically, juvenile offenders and prostitution. A study of two Indianapolis orphanages reveals that some Indianapolis citizens established childcare institutions to care for individuals who could not care for themselves (i.e., dependent children) while other individuals created childcare institutions in attempts to control how children were raised. Founded in 1849 by white, Protestant Indianapolis women, the Widows and Orphans Friends’ Society (WOFS) subscribed to the belief that poor children should be raised away from the influence of their parents in orderly environments so they would grow into productive, contributing members of society. Established in 1870 by Quaker women, the Indianapolis Asylum for Friendless Colored Children (IAFCC) did not subscribe to this belief. Rather, African American parents used the IAFCC as a means of temporary childcare during a family crisis. The rich records left behind by the WOFS and the IAFCC allow for a study of these organizations’ founding, finances, and operations. This thesis concludes that African American parents had more agency with the Quaker-run IAFCC than white parents had with the WOFS.

This thesis project investigates the relationship between education, sympathy, and marriage by analyzing the courtship process in three early nineteenth-century novels alongside three female educational texts. The role education plays in Austen’s Emma, Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Gaskell’s North and South, particularly in terms of female characters’ marriage prospects, shows how writers at this time conceived of intellectual equality and opportunities for women, and how the terms in which they did so actively engaged with conduct book discourse. This project expands on Nancy Armstrong’s foundational study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction, Desire and Domestic Fiction, to show the continued interplay between novels and conduct literature through the mid-nineteenth century, a relationship she sees as defunct after the eighteenth century, as well as the vital role that the sympathetic exchange plays in completing a woman’s education. The thesis demonstrates how this fiction transformed possibilities for female characters’ social interactions, equality, and intellectual fulfilment by reimagining the terms of their domestic and romantic relationships in a dynamic engagement with the language and precepts of key conduct texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis examines the life of Mary Brown, a farmer’s wife in mid to late nineteenth century Indiana, through a detailed look at primary source materials including the journals of her husband, letters, and occasional journal entries by herself and her daughters. Mary’s story serves as a case study of the lived experiences of Indiana farm women. This research includes pertinent information regarding the farm tasks she took on both in the house and in the fields. Women did what they had to in order to assure the success of their household. This challenges and rejects the narrative of the homebound and devalued wife. In the case of the Browns, they operated as one unit, wholly committed to the success of the family and farm, not dictated by middle class or urban gender norms. Even in the face of illness, childbirth, and death, these women persevered. Women farmers are an underappreciated historical player in the development of Indiana. The comparative paucity of established works which explore the role of Indiana farmer’s wives’ duties and value shows the need for in-depth research of what life really was like for women in rural Indiana. This lack of scholarship has led to the anonymity of generations of women in Indiana. Farm women were foundational to agricultural enterprises and deserve recognition. To make certain that Hoosier farm women did not remain forgotten, an exhibit was created and story of Mary Brown was shared with the public in a way that allowed new perspectives of the past to be cultivated. This thesis will also share the process and final product of the exhibit component.