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The present dissertation argues that more fully than any other fictional work in the latter third of the nineteenth century, Harold Frederic's _The Damnation of Theron Ware_ illuminates the cultural controversies within fin de siecle America. Given the inconsistent nature of its subsequent critical examination, Theron Ware lends itself to a type of new as well as traditional forms of historicist inquiry. While recent efforts by Lisa MacFarlane and Donna Campbell have broadened earlier perspectives to include the gender and theological controversies of the post bellum era, Theron Ware remains unexplored by still another vehicle that Frederic provides (127-143; 80-81). Within a complex and repeated series of episodes, Frederic uses standards of personal etiquette enunciated through a century-long series of published manuals to ponder both the inevitability and the likely consequences that will result from these "compendium of intellectual currents" (Campbell 80).

This study is an examination of the cultural interaction that occurred between Native and European peoples in Illinois between 1795-1830. During this period many Native groups splintered into factions--nativists and accommodationists--that advocated opposing strategies for dealing with Euro-Americans. Nativists equated the use of Euro-American foodways and selected material culture items with a loss of traditional values while accommodationists adopted Euro-American faming methods, clothing styles, and foodways in an attempt to avoid removal west of the Mississippi River. Drawing upon historical and archaeological information recovered from Kickapoo and Potawatomi sites in Illinois, I argue that early nineteenth century nativist peoples in Illinois actively created and maintained a social identity expressed through continuity in Indigenous forms of subsistence, settlement, and artifact manufacture; the recycling of Euro-American metal artifacts into tools and ornaments that expressed a Native identity; and the use of selected Euro-American material culture items compatible with such an identity. Change did happen, but it occurred within a Native context and served Native needs.

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The American Transcendentalists are often equated with Romanticism in nineteenth-century America. This dissertation thoroughly complicates that equation, arguing that a group of "Cautious Romantics" emerged as an alternative and conservative Romantic religious tradition. Drawing on history, art history, philosophy, literature, and theology, this dissertation provides a much fuller picture of the way European Romantic texts and authors functioned in American intellectual, cultural, and religious history by highlighting the contribution of these Cautious Romantics. Taken together, the Cautious Romantics represented a distinct religious discourse. They were American Romantics: relentless and introspective questers who emphasized epistemological intuition, artistic inspiration, and spiritual experience. In fact, some of them were the first Americans to promote European Romantic influences. Nevertheless, the Cautious Romantics continued to embrace Trinitarian Christianity, and they celebrated institutions--colleges and churches--in contrast to the often anti-institutional temperament of the Transcendentalists. Moreover, the Cautious Romantics defied religious categorization among standard antebellum groups. They were neither evangelicals, nor traditional Congregationalists, nor Unitarians. Although many became Episcopalians or Catholics, their Romantic intellectual lineage and historical relationships with one another distinguished them from their denominational kindred. Functioning on two levels, this dissertation resituates several well-known American artists and intellectuals such as Washington Allston, Orestes Brownson, Richard Henry Dana Jr., and Harriet Beecher Stowe by connecting them historically and intellectually with a wider discourse. This dissertation also unearths or re-contextualizes numerous lesser-known religious intellectuals such as Richard Henry Dana Sr., James Marsh, Sophia Dana Ripley, George Allen, Henry Hope Reed, Gulian Verplanck, Leonard Woods Jr., and Isaac Hecker. While conservative, these intellectuals were neither committed to the antebellum American South's unique conservative vision nor did they celebrate the free-market conservatism common in twentieth-century America. Thus, in addition to its contribution to intellectual and religious history, this dissertation contributes to a growing body of literature on cultural conservatism in America. Moreover, although the Cautious Romantics were American, this dissertation highlights the important historical relationships between the Cautious Romantics and Coleridge, Wordsworth, the Roman Catholic Church, and, in Harriet Beecher Stowe's case, transatlantic social reform, thereby demonstrating the transatlantic nature of Romanticism in the nineteenth century.

This dissertation explores a history of prosperity in Egypt from the vantage point of engineering works. It examines an Ottoman-Egyptian conception and organisation of prosperity and shows how it was unmade by practices of profit-making implemented by British civil engineers and colonial officials. The dissertation explores the case of one engineering project, namely the Egyptian railways, which were built over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In disputes over routes, connections, construction methods, costs and accounts, Ottoman-Egyptian engineers and officials attempted to organise the country's possibilities through “entanglements” with agrarian forms of life and particular configurations of debt, money and commodities. Ending with the decades of the Anglo-French financial control and British occupation of Egypt, the dissertation shows how “interest” and “development” emerged to reflect the priorities of European bondholders to whom the railways were pledged. In considering “interest” and “development,” the dissertation provides a colonial history of two of the most persistent economic categories.

<p> "A Worthy Cause" brings to life a topic never before researched on the nineteenth-century Regular Baptist position surrounding the preservation of the Lord's Day (also known as Sabbatarianism) in Upper Canada. Within nineteenth-century Evangelicalism in the province the crusade for the protection of the Lord's Day was preeminent among social reform initiatives. Canadian Regular Baptists in Upper Canada viewed the observance and celebration of the Lord's Day as vital and of paramount significance in the quest for social reform and religious piety. Viewing this topic through the lens of various newspapers that made up the Regular Baptist press, this thesis demonstrates why the Lord's Day was considered to be one of the most worthy causes among nineteenth-century Upper Canadian Regular Baptists. The thesis contends that Baptist support for the Lord's Day was rooted in a number of interrelated convictions: its scriptural, doctrinal and confessional significance, its observation strengthened personal holiness and the family unit, its desecration was harmful to society, and lastly, its observance would bring a blessing to the nation. The Baptist approach was especially unique in that Baptists, champions of the separation of Church and State and religious liberty, deviated from their evangelical counterparts when it came to the legal enforcement of the Lord's Day. The thesis is an original contribution to the social and intellectual history of Baptists and the province at large.</p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This dissertation argues that the significance and extent of American animal “acclimatization”—the nineteenth-century term for the purposeful introduction of non-native wild animals—has been drastically underestimated in previous historiography. Far from a negligible “fad” that only briefly interested a small number of hunters and wildlife enthusiasts, American acclimatization was in fact a large-scale and enduring exercise in bioengineering that introduced dozens of new species to the nation over the course of more than a century. At first led by private individuals and organizations, American acclimatizers introduced several new birds and fish into the country from the mid-nineteenth century, including modern-day mainstays like the English sparrow, ring-necked pheasant, and German carp. While private organizations devoted to animal acclimatization mostly dissipated by the late nineteenth century, the federal government’s biologist-bureaucrats made the acclimatization of new animals a central component of vast efforts to supply America’s hunters and fishers deep into the twentieth century, a persistence that has been heretofore overlooked. In composing the first dedicated study of American animal acclimatization, I visited a dozen different archives and have brought hundreds of previously unexamined sources to bear. These revealed the enduring popularity of animal acclimatization and its persistence as a wildlife rejuvenation tool. These sources also laid bare the ideological motivations for animal acclimatization. Far from salving a nostalgic yearning for the fauna of Europe, Euro-Americans often saw animal acclimatization projects as progressive techniques of environmental management instead. Animal acclimatization projects, moreover, were intertwined with the Euro-American colonization of the American West. Settler-colonial ideology, that fusion of Euro-American racial supremacy with grandiose notions of national identity and expansion, runs through the rhetoric of many acclimatizers. More concretely, the United States Fish Commission effected the violent dispossession and subordination of the Winnemem Wintu People on California’s McCloud River in order to set up the nation’s first chinook salmon hatchery. The USFC used the hatchery to artificially spawn tens of millions of salmon to replenish American waters as well as establish chinook salmon in American and international watersheds where the fish had never existed before. Finally, I argue that the story of American acclimatization—what I call the American “acclimatization exchange”—offers important nuance and modification to the two most famous paradigms in environmental history: the conservation movement and Alfred Crosby’s “Columbian Exchange.” Massive parallel efforts in animal acclimatization indicate that the conservation era featured far more interventionist environmental management than usually appreciated. The early adoption of “fish culture” in 1860s American also suggests that the conservation era’s periodization should be significantly backdated. Furthermore, the sheer popularity and endurance of foreign species acclimatization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, plus the fact that Americans often obtained and exchanged species from Asia, India, and the broader Pacific World, temporally and geographically expands on Crosby’s notion of an Atlantic World “Columbian Exchange” in the wake of initial European discovery and colonization.

“Unhappy Endings” explores dynamics of novelistic closure by examining Victorian texts that come to a halt in a way that invites subsequent continuation. Each chapter of this dissertation confronts a different fact pattern: a different kind of incompletion and subsequent continuation. “Unhappy Endings” investigates texts left explicitly unfinished, texts left ambiguously unfinished, the impact of the Victorian serial form on the concept of “finishedness,” and the perceived kinds of finishedness, of a text. These Victorian texts that question the concept of finishedness are taken up and continued in several different ways: continued by the original author, by an author’s family member, by an editor or publisher, by some other author or writer, or even by the reader-public. Thus, as the factual circumstances that create the “unfinished” and “continued” status of my exemplar texts vary from chapter to chapter, the working standard for what qualifies as “unfinished” and “continued” necessarily alters accordingly. The following questions are inherent in my focus here on continuation and completion: What is an ending? What is “whole”? What makes a whole complete? Must a novel have a discernible ending to be complete? To be a whole? What can we learn when a novel, abandoned for whatever reason by one author, is “continued” and completed by another author? I use close reading, digital humanities, and biographical criticism to identify the ways that literature of the Victorian era was, and still is, particularly susceptible to continuation. This continued susceptibility paves the way, perhaps, for Victorian literature’s sustained impact on modern literature and media.

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