This dissertation explores how aesthetic claims in scientific arguments help construct scientific ethos through demonstrations of the rhetor's judgment. By examining the works of Josiah Willard Gibbs and Henry Rowland, two prominent nineteenth-century American scientists, through the lens of their formal rhetorical training as students in American universities, this dissertation investigates how aesthetic judgment is enacted in scientific writing and explores the rhetorical history of the terms "simplicity," "brevity," "imagination," and "taste" and their use in scientific arguments. The aesthetic judgment that both scientists demonstrate in their written work reinforced an understanding of scientific ethos. By placing nineteenth-century scientific writing in contact with the rhetorical theories of the time, this dissertation explores the history of aesthetic judgment in rhetoric and its influence on conceptualizations of the faculty of taste. The dissertation illuminates the connections between rhetorical training and the ability to perform appropriate judgment when creating a reliable scientific ethos in writing. Constructing a scientific ethos in writing became increasingly important and complicated during the time of great institutional change in scientific research, which occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century in America. Scientists constructed scientific ethos through demonstrations of aesthetic judgment in order to respond to the exigencies of both institutional pressures and disciplinary expectations. / English

In nineteenth-century medicine, it was generally agreed that “true hermaphroditism,” or the equal combination of male and female sexual characteristics in one body, was impossible in humans. Yet true hermaphroditism remained a significant presence in both fictional and non-fictional texts. Much of the scholarly literature is on the history of hermaphroditism as a history of intersexuality. Fantasizing Hermaphroditism: Two-Sexed Metaphors in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture is a study of both hermaphroditism and the hermaphrodite as a fantasy. My approach is a combination of historicization and close reading. The chapters are in chronological order, and each chapter is centered on a single text. Chapter 1 addresses Julia Ward Howe’s fictional manuscript, The Hermaphrodite; Chapter 2, S.H. Harris’ case narrative on “A Case of Doubtful Sex”; Chapter 3, James Kiernan’s theoretical treatise on “Responsibility in Sexual Perversion”; and Chapter 4, a memoir by an author who went by the names Ralph Werther and Earl Lind, titled Autobiography of an Androgyne. I begin with the broader cultural moment of the text’s writing, and then explore the text’s language and structure in greater depth. This range of texts demonstrates that the hermaphrodite was a fantasy for nineteenth century authors, described as an impossibility but inspiring very real fear and pleasure. The language that they—and we—use in fantasies about the unreal hermaphrodite can help us to unpack these anxieties and desires around marriage, the body, race, and the definition of the individual. / English

This dissertation focuses primarily on the Impressionist artist Gustave Caillebotte's paintings of rowers on the Yerres River outside Paris, created in the late 1870s. The works engage with many of the radical shifts in social and cultural norms that took place during the latter half of the nineteenth-century as industrialization and urbanization increasingly affected daily life in Europe and America. The paintings are in dialogue with developments in the fine arts, including the growing influence of Impressionism and avant-garde artists, and deal extensively with the male figure, reacting to and engaging with changing norms of masculinity. To fully examine the works, I focus on five areas of comparison. First, in considering the possible implications of changing masculine ideals in relation to the physical body during the period, I consider Caillebotte's controversial nude male bathers. I then contrast Caillebotte's oarsmen with both the professional rowers portrayed by his American contemporary Thomas Eakins, and the more leisurely boating scenes of his fellow Impressionists. Finally, I examine the history of the dandy/flâneurs figure, arguing that Caillebotte's rowers illustrate the artist's attempt to reinvent and modernize the concept. My thesis attempts to bridge different methodological approaches that have tended to isolate aspects of the artist's work, thereby obscuring his overall project of engaging with both the social and theoretical concept of modernity. Although the artist is underrepresented in the general literature of Impressionism, he has lately played a significant role in texts examining Impressionist interest in the suburban vacation spots along the Seine River. Such authors have illuminated Caillebotte's background as a serious sportsman, an aspect of the artist previously underexplored. I also build on feminist and queer theorists, who in recent years have called attention to the potential for sexual subversity within Caillebotte's oeuvre. Although acknowledging a debt to all of these scholars, my dissertation is an attempt to expand the scholarly conversation by examining how these works explore the concept of modernity, both formally, in the manner in which Caillebotte calls attention to the artifice of painting and socially, in how he engages with the changing physical landscape and the increasing potential for leisure activities outside Paris following the Franco-Prussian War. Finally, in arguing that Caillebotte rowers are transported flâneurs, who, though now engaged in daytime paddling rather than evening strolling, continue their mission of anonymity and observation, I suggest an expansion of the very definition of flâneurs, and by extension, the dandy figure that remains relevant as a type even today. / Art History

Completed in 1888 Georges Seurat's monumental canvas, Les Poseuses, depicts three models in various states of undress within the artist's studio. Given the relative seclusion of this work until the Barnes Foundation's landmark move to Philadelphia in May of 2012, Les Poseuses has not received the same amount of critical attention as his other canvases of combat. Despite the fact that artists in the nineteenth century regularly used professional models, their profession and, by extension, their very being had become significantly stigmatized in Parisian society. Over time prejudices developed and resulted in the unwarranted ostracizing of these working-class women from general Parisian society. This thesis will attempt to prove Seurat was not only keenly aware of the reputation of models, but that in Les Poseuses he actively sought to recognize these preconceptions through a consideration of the influence of Orientalism and fashion and the implications of the inclusion of Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte in the background in his depiction of three working-class women. / Art History

This project reconsiders nineteenth-century hysteria and recovery in selected works of 1990s historiographical Canadian fiction. Using a material feminist perspective, I develop an understanding of the "archival hysteric": a figure whose permeable mindbody reacts in eccentric ways to her environment. The material mindbody becomes a physiological archive of intersubjective interactions, social expectations, and past traumas. Expanding the concept of the archive to include the human subject, the family home, and the landscape, the fictions provide models for personal and social change. Chapter One explores the eccentric nature of the female body as viewed in nineteenth-century documents and in Alice Munro's "Meneseteung." This chapter focuses its analysis on the hysteric's eccentric mindbody as the site of partial recovery. I propose that moving from hysteria to sanity involves a transformation to health of the mindbody that can occur through the ethical relationship and an acknowledgement of the permeable nature of intersubjective boundaries. The nineteenth-century concept of female flow is replaced by a model of viscous porosity. Chapter Two explores how the archive functions as a metaphor for hysterical subjectivity. Following Kelly Oliver's theory of witnessing, I show how the act of shared witnessing reveals the permeable boundaries between researcher and research subject. Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace provides a case study of an archival hysteric that illustrates the ways in which shared witnessing can lead to both illness (reactivity) and health (response-ability). Chapter Three explores Away, in which Jane Urquhart mobilizes the figure of the love-mad hysteric in postcolonial and environmental contexts. The archival hysteric here represents permeability not only between human subjects, but also between human and non-human subjects. The archival hysteric illustrates human subjects' unfixed positions in the world: relying upon the binary of mental health and illness, diagnostic labels therefore misrepresent the complexity of states of being. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This paper examines the everyday details of the domestic dining scenes in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Cranford (1853), and North and South (1855). By viewing dining etiquette in terms of a dramaturgical metaphor, this paper attempts to demonstrate the cooperation, complexity, labour, and significance of the self-aware performances that structure nineteenth-century domestic dining scenes in relation to the sense of pleasure and community care that those scenes produce both for their duration and for the external ‘everyday’. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / This paper examines the everyday details of the domestic dining scenes in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Cranford (1853), and North and South (1855). By viewing dining etiquette in terms of a dramaturgical metaphor, this paper attempts to demonstrate the cooperation, complexity, labour, and significance of the self-aware performances that structure nineteenth-century domestic dining scenes in relation to the sense of pleasure and community care that those scenes produce both for their duration and for the external ‘everyday’.

Yes

In 1962, historian Michael Harrington published The Other America, the inaugural work in the field of the history of poverty. Part history and part call to action, Harrington argued that the poor have largely remained invisible in American society. He endeavored to make America's poor visible as the first step towards addressing the tragedy of poverty. Today, 40 million Americans live in poverty, indicating that it is as much a societal issue in need of solution in the twenty-first century as it was in Harrington's time. Although the field is small, a few scholars have taken up Harrington's call and written histories of the poor and poor relief. This work seeks to complicate and expand upon the conclusions reached by these historians by studying poor relief at the local level of one singular community in the rural South. This research asks how the residents of nineteenth-century Montgomery County, Virginia understood the county's responsibility for providing poor relief, and what underlying values and beliefs informed that understanding. Using local government records and state legislative and administrative records, this research will argue that, largely because the county had not yet industrialized, poor relief in nineteenth-century Montgomery County diverged from national and regional trends in three significant respects.: attitudes towards the poor in Montgomery County tended to remain more benign than national attitudes well into the postbellum era; poor relief in Montgomery County was available to black residents, both before and after the Civil War; and Montgomery County continued to offer outdoor relief well into the postbellum era. An analysis of why poor relief differed to such a degree in a rural, Southern community, as opposed to more urban, Northern, or Midwestern locales, illuminates the effects of economy, geography, and demography on societal conceptions of the poor. / Master of Arts / In 2017, the number of Americans living in poverty stood at just under 40 million, or approximately 12% of the total population. For these Americans, daily life presents not only a material struggle, but a psychological battle as well. For in addition to facing the hardships inherent in poverty, they must also contend with societal scorn and condemnation. In modern America, popular culture frequently blames the poor for their own condition, characterizing them as lazy, criminal, or unintelligent. This research explores the historical roots of these negative attitudes towards the poor. Specifically, this research asks how the residents of nineteenth-century Montgomery County, Virginia understood the county’s responsibility for providing poor relief, and what underlying values and beliefs informed that understanding. Using local government records and state legislative and administrative records, this research will argue that, largely because the county had not yet industrialized, poor relief in nineteenth-century Montgomery County diverged from national and regional trends in three significant respects.: attitudes towards the poor in Montgomery County tended to remain more benign than national attitudes well into the postbellum era; poor relief in Montgomery County was available to black residents, both before and after the Civil War; and Montgomery County continued to offer outdoor relief well into the postbellum era. An analysis of why poor relief differed to such a degree in a rural, Southern community, as opposed to more urban, Northern, or Midwestern locales, illuminates the effects of economy, geography, and demography on societal conceptions of the poor.

John D. Wagg was a native of Ashe County, North Carolina and a Southern Methodist circuit minister active immediately before and during the Civil War. His surviving journal, sermons, and received letters allow us to employ him as a window into a particular time, place, and set of conditions. To facilitate this, selections from the Wagg documents have been transcribed, edited, and presented as a Web-based digital edition, the Digital John D. Wagg Papers. This edition is designed to work with many other editions of similarly narrow historical and geographical scope as one historical witness in a network of witnesses. We must draw from several varieties of documents in the John Wagg collection and from contextualizing historical scholarship to construct a history of Wagg as a product of and participant in his times. Born 8 July 1835, Wagg began keeping a journal in 1854 as he worked toward a degree in medicine at Jefferson, North Carolina, the Wagg family hometown. As a diarist he often explored the place of humanity in a God-made world, a theme that foreshadows his turn from medicine and entry into the itinerant ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in October 1858. Wagg spent the Civil War years preaching throughout western North Carolina and southwest Virginia, generally striving to keep his heavily Confederate-leaning politics from the pulpit. This lifestyle allows the Wagg Papers to bring an alternate point of view to any archive of Civil War documents consisting primarily of the letters of combatants. / Master of Arts

Yes / In AD 1836, the General Register Office (GRO) was established to oversee the national system of civil registration in England and Wales, recording all births, deaths and marriages. Additional data regarding population size, division size and patterns of occupation within each division permit urban and rural areas (and those with both urban and rural characteristics, described here as ‘mixed’) to be directly compared to each other. The annual Reports of the Registrar General summarize the collected data, including cause of and age at death, which is of particular value to historical demographers and bioarcheologists, allowing us to investigate demographic patterns in urban and rural districts in the nineteenth century. Overall, this paper aims to highlight how this documentary evidence can supplement osteological and paleopathological data to investigate how urbanization affected the health of past populations. It examines the data contained within the first Registrar General report (for 1837-8), in order to assess patterns of mortality of diverse rural, urban, and mixed populations within England and Wales at a point in time during a period of rapid urbanization. It shows that urban and mixed districts typically had lower life expectancy and different patterns in cause of death compared to rural areas. The paper briefly compares how the documentary data differs from information regarding health from skeletal populations, focusing on the city of London, highlighting that certain age groups (the very young and very old) are typically underrepresented in archeological assemblages and reminding us that, while the paleopathological record offers much in terms of chronic health, evidence of acute disease and importantly cause of death can rarely be ascertained from skeletal remains. / This research was funded by the Royal Society of London (Grant Reference IES\R1\180138) and supported by the University of Bradford and SUNY Plattsburgh.