<p>Slavery and freedom are central issues in the historiography of nineteenth-century America. In the antebellum era (1820-1860), personal status was a fluid concept and was never as simple as black and white. The courts provide a revealing window for examining these ambiguities because court cases often served as the venue for negotiations over who was enslaved and who was free. In St. Louis, enslaved men and women contributed to debates and discussions about the meaning of personal status by suing for their freedom. By questioning their enslavement in freedom suits, slaves played an important role in blurring the law's understanding of slavery; in the process, they incurred the enormous personal risks of abuse and the possibility of sale. </p><p>Using the records of over 300 slaves who sued for freedom, as well as a variety of manuscript sources, newspapers, and additional court records, this project traces these freedom suits over time, and examines how slave law and the law of freedom suits shifted, mainly in response to local and national debates over slavery and also to the growing threat of anti-slavery encroachment into St. Louis. When the laws tightened in response to these threats, the outcomes of freedom suits also adjusted, but in ways that did not fit the pattern of increasing restrictions on personal liberty. Instead, the unique situation in St. Louis in the 1840s and 1850s, with its increasingly anti-slavery immigrant population, allowed slaves suing for freedom to succeed at greater rates than in previous decades.</p> / Dissertation

Charles-Valentin Alkan ( 1813-1888 ), French composer and pianist at early nineteenth century, devoted himself to write piano music only as Chopin during his entire life. As a child prodigy, his talent of performing piano was recognized when he was quite young, then, became as an outstanding pianist of his time. However, because of his unsociable personality and strange behavior, Alkan was soon forgotten by the public. His music was discovered in recent decades by scholars and pianists. They started to explore his works; consequently, he became famous again. There are three parts in this study. The first part aims on his mysterious life. The second part seeks to clarify the development of the concerto and the musical environment of Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The last part should focus on music style and structure based on his earlier work Concerto da Camera, No. 10. Hopefully, through the research, the historical significant of Alkan can be defined more precisely.

Until recently Alice Cary's works have gone largely unnoticed by the literary community, and those critics who have examined her writings have recognized her primarily as a regionalist sketch writer. However, studying Cary's total body of fiction, including her novels and children's fiction as well as her sketches, and examining the influence of Christian Universalism upon her work reveals that Cary is a much more complex and nuanced writer than she has been previously understood to be. This dissertation explores the way that Cary questions stereotypes of accepted behavior specifically as they pertain to the identities of men, women, and children and offers a more flexible and inclusive religious identity rooted in Universalist ideals. In her depictions of women, Cary uses tropes from gothic stories, fairy tales, and sentimental fiction to criticize evangelical faith, Transcendentalism, and separate spheres-based stereotypes of women's behavior, and she undermines these stereotypes and replaces them with a Universalist emphasis on communal service and identity. Similarly, Cary's depictions of manhood are influenced by her desire to dissect preconceived notions of masculinity like that of the Self-Made Man and his earlier counterparts the Genteel Patriarch and the Heroic Artisan and replace these stereotypes with a Universalist model that embraces gender fluidity and sacrifice of self interest for the larger community. Cary's treatment of children continues her critique of nineteenth century stereotypes. Cary, unlike most early nineteenth century writers, exposes the dangers of romanticized visions of middle class children, which physically isolated children from their families and endangered working class children by increasing the demand for child labor; thus Cary's Universalism leads her to depict all children, not just the wealthy ones, as God's children and worthy of protection. Cary also uses children metaphorically to represent minorities and tentatively question the treatment of African Americans and Native Americans. Cary stands as a prime example of an author who has been overlooked and whose obscurity has hindered the construction of literary history, particularly in regard to the antebellum roots of realism and the influence of liberal religious belief on realistic fiction.

As far as the traditional Turkish theater does not refer to any architectural structure / the theater buildings that are built during the nineteenth century are identified with the ideals of modernity and treated as the literally translations of the Western typologies.This study aims to investigate the possbility of a geniune architectural language in the theaters of nineteeenth century Istanbul. While doing this, rather than offering a pure formal analysis,the study concentrates on the cultural panorama of the nineteenth century Istanbul, political and ideological changes, international relations, economic downturn and their impact on theater that starts to appear as a popular leisure time activity of the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

In this study the Ottoman built environmet in the last period of the nineteenth century Anatolian city is examined. The study aims to explain the construction of new buildings as well as the transformation of earlier types during the process of contemporary modernization and centralization in the Empire. The main frame of the study is formed of the public and the private spaces that formed the urban built environment, and the transformation of these spaces. The city of Tokat has been chosen as the area of study, which still conserves built structures of the Ottoman as well as the earlier periods that are typical of an Anatolian city of the nineteenth century. Examining the transformation of public buildings and residential architecture in this city, this study emphasizes differences in degress of changes in public and private spaces, and the relation of such transformation with the central authority.

Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 43-45).

This work examines the perceptions of women in art and literature in Russia during the later half of the nineteenth century. It specifically focuses on the women question and examines women's function and role in Russian society and how different visual artists along with Tolstoy examine this issue through their artwork. The first section of the work focuses specifically on women's social conditions in Russia highlighting their role as daughter, wife and mother. It examines the educational system in place designed for women and the limitations placed upon women concerning marriage and family life. Along with the historical and social analysis, this section also examines three Russian artists' portrayal of various issues relating to the woman question and the role, or lack thereof, of women in society. The second section examines Tolstoy's initial examination of women's issues through his novella "Family Happiness," and attempts to answer the question: On what side of the woman question debate is Tolstoy? It challenges the accepted,traditional reading of Tolstoy's work as misogynistic and anti-woman, and reveals through a careful reading of the text, a sympathetic female character. The last section deals with his monumental work, Anna Karenina, with a specific examination of how Tolstoy deals with the character Anna. It negates previous readings of the text by other critics who attempt to reveal Tolstoy's antagonistic behavior toward the women characters in the text. Through a careful reading of specific passages of the text, the work shows that Tolstoy also creates a sympathetic character in Anna. This work concludes attempting to position Tolstoy on neither side of the woman question, not the case with the artists studied in the work nor other authors mentioned during this period in history, and instead reveals Tolstoy's determination to create characters and situations which are present in every society. In his approach, Tolstoy has succeeded in surpassing the boundaries of class and time and created characters and situations universal.

Research into the material culture of the household and the domestic interior has increased rapidly during recent years. It has primarily focused on the appearance and use of domestic space leaving household management and maintenance a neglected area of study. Furthermore the relationship between the ownership of goods, the domestic interior and the use of the home has not been studied in conjunction with the management and maintenance of the household. Additionally, research into the material culture of the household has predominantly focused on quantitative changes experienced during the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth. It has long been established that the ownership of household goods increased in this period, but similar research has not taken place to explore the nature of these goods, nor to extend this work to the subsequent period. This thesis brings these aspects of research together for the first time to create a synthesis between the ownership of goods and the changing nature and use of the home and household maintenance and management. The argument proposed here suggests that the changing nature of the material culture of the household and developments to the use of the home had an impact upon the way that the household was managed and maintained. The complex inter-woven relationship between the material culture of the domestic interior and the ways in which it was maintained and managed reveals that both elements were a part of an emerging middle class culture of domesticity. Therefore, this thesis makes a significant contribution to a holistic understanding of the household by looking at the ownership of goods and the use of domestic space within the context of maintenance and management.

The purpose of this study is to examine literary representations of religiosity and the spiritual realm in late nineteenth-century Mexico, in prose works by Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (1859-1895), Federico Gamboa (1864-1939), and Amado Nervo (1870-1919). Through an analysis of selected texts by these authors, I will explore how they articulated the Roman Catholicism that permeated their cultural context, amid the processes of modernization. I will also show how they expressed subjective spiritual experiences, independent of the doctrinal precepts of the Church. All three of these writers devoted attention to the pervasive religiosity of their milieu, and wrestled with the question regarding the relevance of the Church in modernity. However, each one presents a distinct vision for the role that institutional religion should play. Each of these authors also portrays his own individual experiences of the metaphysical realm. Part One is based on an analysis of selected articles, chronicles, and short stories by Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera. This author utilizes the modernista aesthetic of the era to transform the religious impulse into subjective expressions of the Divine. In this regard, he presents a secular form of spirituality, although his texts often contain undertones of a lingering Catholicism. Part Two addresses the tension between religious orthodoxy and modernity in three novels by Federico Gamboa, narratives that reflect the author’s close adherence to Church dictates. In these stories the protagonists often come into conflict with the prevailing religious discourse that attempts to thwart their autonomy. Yet the narratives ultimately reaffirm and uphold Catholic values. In Part Three of this study I turn my attention to a selection of articles, chronicles, short stories, and novellas by Amado Nervo, the most spiritually inclined of the three authors. His early novellas present similar themes as Gamboa’s novels regarding the interference of the Church in the lives of the characters. However, Nervo’s later texts reveal that he did not feel compelled to remain within the limits of Church doctrine. Instead, he follows Nájera’s lead in exploring alternative perspectives of the Divine, such as spiritualist practices and the other religious traditions. / text

This dissertation is an exploration of Charles Bird King’s Gallery of Paintings. The Gallery opened in 1824 and, aside from a brief hiatus in the mid-1840s, was open to the public through the end of the antebellum era. King, who trained in London at the Royal Academy and under the supervision of Benjamin West, presented to his visitors a diverse display that encompassed portraits, genre scenes, still lifes, trompe l’oeils and history paintings. Though the majority of the paintings on display were his original works across these various genres, at least one third of the collection was made up of copies after the works of European masters as well as after the American portraitist Gilbert Stuart. This study is divided into four chapters. In the first, I explore late-colonial and early-republic public displays of the visual arts. My analysis demonstrates that King’s Gallery was in step with a tradition of viewing that stretched back to John Smibert’s Boston studio in the mid-eighteenth century and created a visual continuity into the mid-nineteenth century. In a second chapter, focused on portraiture, I examine what it meant to King and to his visitors to be “American.” The group of men and women King displayed in his Gallery was far more diverse than typical for the time period. King included many prominent politicians, but no American President after John Quincy Adams (whom King had painted before Adams’ election). Instead he featured portraits of many men of commerce as well as prominent women and numerous American Indians. In the third chapter, I look at a group of King’s original compositions, genre paintings. King’s style in this category was clearly indebted to seventeenth-century Dutch tradition as filtered through an eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British lens, in particular the works of Sir David Wilkie. My final chapter continues the exploration of Dutch influences over King’s work. These paintings draw together the themes of King’s sense of humor, his attitudes towards patronage and his methods of circumventing inadequate patronage through the establishment of the Gallery. Finally, they prompt us to reconsider the importance of European precedents in our understanding of how artists and viewers worked together to establish an American visual cultural dialogue. / text