This dissertation examines Coxey’s Army of 1894 and the subsequent impact the organizers and march had on American politics. A handful of monographs have examined this march on Washington D.C. but all of them have focused specifically on the march itself, largely examining the few weeks in 1894 when the march occurred. By extending the period study to include the long life and activism of Jacob Coxey what historians can see is that although the march was an expression of anger and concern over general inequality in American society, Coxey’s Army was also protest for specific demands. These two demands were specifically a program of public works and a desire for fiat currency for the United States. By examining the life Jacob Coxey we see that both of these demands grew out of longer issues in American social politics and reflect Coxey’s background in the greenback labor movement.<br><div><br></div><div>The question over currency— whether the economy should rely on a gold, silver, or fiat standard— has largely been untouched by historians, yet reflects one of the most interesting aspects of the march, namely that it was an instance in a broader movement to drastically change the U.S. state and establish a socialistic commonwealth, or commonweal, for American society. Coxey fit into this broader project by arguing specifically that the U.S. should maintain a market-based economy but do so through a kind of socialistic currency backed by the state. By organizing various marches throughout his life, Coxey attempted to achieve this goal by direct organizing of the masses and in so doing contributed to the long history of American social reform movement’s various efforts to reshape and redefine the concept of “the people.”<br></div><div><br></div><div>This dissertation makes four major arguments. First that the concept and phenomena of American Populism is a broad based, elastic movement with no essential political character. Attempts to define Populism as either reactionary or radical miss the broader issue that Populism could take on various political flavors depending on how it positioned itself in opposition to various actors in the state, economy, and civil society. Second, Coxey’s Army shows how the first march on Washington D.C. was part of a longer legacy of direct political action, and that although this march did make a contribution to the overall political debate of the time, it was not as a communicative act that the march was most significant. Instead Coxey’s Army was significant in the way it led to a reconceptualization of “the people” and therefore reimagined what legitimate democratic action entailed. Third, the concept of the commonweal, although largely taken for granted in previous historiographies, was part of a much deeper and intellectually rich fight between various activists and thinkers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At stake in how a movement or party conceptualized something like the commonweal was what type of social, economic, and political order should be fought for and advanced by organizations of working class people. In this regard the currency question, far from being simply a side issue, was in fact central to how activists envisioned the role of the market and state in a more equitable society. Finally, this dissertation looks at the understudied career of Coxey after the march, specifically his short tenure as mayor of Massillon, Ohio. His failure as mayor raises further questions for historians to think about the promise and limitations of American Populism as both a protest movement and political force.<br></div>

“Ambassadors of Pleasure” examines the social and cultural history of ‘sin’ in the Detroit-Windsor border region during the post-World War II period. It employs the interrelated frameworks of “borderlands” and “vice” in order to identify the complex ways in which illicit economies shaped—and were shaped by—these border cities. It argues that illicit economies served multiple purposes for members of local borderlands communities. For many downtown residents, vice industries provided important forms of leisure, labor, and diversion in cities undergoing rapid changes. Deeply rooted in local working-class communities, prostitution and heroin economies became intimately intertwined in the daily lives of many local residents who relied on them for both entertainment and income. For others, though, anti-vice activities offered a concrete way to engage in what they perceived as community betterment. Fighting the immoral influences of prostitution and drug use was one way some residents, particularly those of the middle class, worked to improve their local communities in seemingly tangible ways. These struggles for control over vice economies highlight the ways in which shifting meanings of race, class, and gender, growing divisions between urban centers and suburban regions, and debates over the meaning of citizenship evolved in the urban borderland. This dissertation subsequently traces the competing interests brought together through illicit vice activities, arguing that they provide unique insight into the fracturing social lines developing in the postwar North American cities.

“Ambassadors of Pleasure” examines the social and cultural history of ‘sin’ in the Detroit-Windsor border region during the post-World War II period. It employs the interrelated frameworks of “borderlands” and “vice” in order to identify the complex ways in which illicit economies shaped—and were shaped by—these border cities. It argues that illicit economies served multiple purposes for members of local borderlands communities. For many downtown residents, vice industries provided important forms of leisure, labor, and diversion in cities undergoing rapid changes. Deeply rooted in local working-class communities, prostitution and heroin economies became intimately intertwined in the daily lives of many local residents who relied on them for both entertainment and income. For others, though, anti-vice activities offered a concrete way to engage in what they perceived as community betterment. Fighting the immoral influences of prostitution and drug use was one way some residents, particularly those of the middle class, worked to improve their local communities in seemingly tangible ways. These struggles for control over vice economies highlight the ways in which shifting meanings of race, class, and gender, growing divisions between urban centers and suburban regions, and debates over the meaning of citizenship evolved in the urban borderland. This dissertation subsequently traces the competing interests brought together through illicit vice activities, arguing that they provide unique insight into the fracturing social lines developing in the postwar North American cities.

<p> This thesis, <em>A Notre Dame Man: How Mike DeCicco Made Notre Dame Fencing into an International Powerhouse </em>argues that Mike DeCicco was different from the coaches who came before him, due to his connections within the American and international fencing community, and his relationship with Father Hesburgh. <em>A Notre Dame Man </em>also contends that a Notre Dame team can succeed without a vocal fanbase, united by a Catholic identity. This thesis engages with histories of sport, ethnicity, class, and gender in twentieth-century American history. </p>

<div>This study analyzes eleven collections created, saved, and preserved by rural Iowa women, during the middle of the twentieth-century to interpret change in the experience of rural American women, and consider their role in the preservation of historical evidence. Analysis of privately-held and institutional collections of calendars, journals, scrapbooks, notebooks, and club meeting records provides details of farm life, rural communities in transition, and the way collection creators conceptualized and enacted the identity of rural womanhood. In making decisions about which events to write down in a journal or clip-and-save from the local newspaper, these women “performed archivalness” in preserving their experience for family and community members and scholars. </div><div>The women who created the collections considered in this study experienced a rural landscape altered by the continuation and aftermath of agricultural specialization, mechanization, and capital consolidation. These changes altered rural community systems, economies, and institutions reshaping the experience of rural womanhood, as women upheld and adjusted the norms and values that defined the rural way of life. This study takes a three-part approach to considering the eleven collections as case studies. Chapter two analyzes five of the collections as unconventional forms of autobiographical writing, finding that nowhere else were women truer to themselves and their experiences than in their daily writing. In journals or on calendars, these women wrote their life stories by recording the daily details of work, motherhood, and marriage, and occasionally providing subtle commentary on local and national events. Changes in women’s work, education, responsibilities in marriage and motherhood, and involvement in public life and civic affairs happened in gradual and rapid ways during the middle of the twentieth-century. The third chapter in this study analyzes the collections of three women who used their writing to document, prescribe, and promote notions of rural womanhood during this time of change. Chapter four provides a meditation on the relationship between evidence and history by examining the ways in which three women performed archivalness in creating their collections. Consideration of the means by which the collections have been saved, provides insight into the importance of everyday individuals in the preservation of historical evidence. </div><div><br></div>

<p>This dissertation examines the rise of the country’s largest beef processor, IBP, Inc., during the late-twentieth century and its effect on laborers, farmers, business, and the communities in which it operated. Though scholars have cited IBP’s technological advances as the reason for the company’s success, I argue that IBP’s unique public relations approach that manufactured the consent of local communities to pay comparatively low wages, provide tax breaks, and in the instance of cattle producers defend IBP’s right to “free enterprise,” provided it with a competitive advantage. From 1960 through the 1980s, the meatpacking industry endured a revolution stemming from IBP’s ability to maintain enough community consent to gain large market shares and draw down substantial profits.</p> <p>Yet gaining and keeping consent was not easy, nor was it linear. At one point or another all of these entities opposed IBP on a myriad of fronts, but their early cooperation aided in creating a corporate juggernaut that often limited their economic or political power. For IBP’s part, the company’s founders and subsequent executive managers fostered a masculine, individualistic sense of corporate capitalism, which I refer to as cowboy capitalism. Executives painted themselves as farm boys and cowboys, as renegades who were bringing hard work and plain talk to the inefficient meatpacking industry. This conservative, bootstrap mentality played well in the Siouxland region of the Northern Great Plains, where IBP began. Just as corporate success is aided by community consent, rescinding consent creates challenges for the company that can temporarily cause a decline, or at the very least roadblock to company growth. Though founders, managers, and key innovators gain critical and laudatory attention for their role in growing American capitalism; extended community support in terms of governmental and non-governmental actors rarely have been the focus of a corporate study. It is community consent, both active and latent, governmental and non-governmental, that supported the cowboy capitalism IBP deployed to start a revolution.</p>

<p>  </p> <p>This dissertation is an examination of rural Hoosiers, and in particular to what extent they accepted outside assistance against a backdrop of disruption brought about by mechanization, depression, and in some cases dislocation in the first half of the twentieth century. The "farm experts" from Purdue University, and "government men" from federal agencies came to assist rural Hoosiers cope with the “Farm Problem,” joining a succession of outsiders who came to help. Those who came to the rescue confronted a particular quality of character influenced by environmental elements, migration patterns, and received world views. The study uses a range of sources. A wealth of secondary scholarship was written shortly after the end of rural New Deal programs during World War II. Purdue Experiment Station research publications, Purdue Extension annual reports, county Extension agents’ reports, farm journals, newspaper reporting and editorials, congressional records, records and promotional materials of the Resettlement Administration and its successor the Farm Security Administration, and personal correspondence all give voice to actors and observers at the time. This study contributes to our understanding of rural New Deal initiatives in the Midwest as witnessed through an Indiana lens. The inquiry reveals the uneven and sometimes incoherent nature of “progress” as promoted by agents of change. Try as they might, rural Hoosiers could not resist or control forces of change in the face of worldwide crisis of economic disruption, ideological confrontation, and military aggression.</p>

<p dir="ltr">This dissertation argues that the use of rainbow imagery to describe efforts to bridge racial divides both inside and outside social justice campaigns became tied to concepts of economic justice in the 1960s but lost its radicalism following the failed presidential bids of Jesse Jackson in the 1980s. Conventional narratives analyze these multiracial campaigns —organized by figures as diverse as W.E.B. Du Bois in 1911, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Panther Party in the civil rights era of the 1960s, and Jesse Jackson in the 1980s —as separate, isolated efforts. My research, however, examines the origins and trajectory of what I term “racial rainbow rhetoric,” —the use of rainbow imagery to describe racial difference in the United States, usually with the aspiration of overcoming these racial divisions – to underscore meaningful conceptual continuities in twentieth-century campaigns for social and economic justice.<i> </i>Although racial rainbow rhetoric did not initially emphasize economic justice activism, throughout the 1960s, activists increasingly used rainbow imagery to build interracial coalitions to attack poverty. This dissertation traces the history of racial rainbow rhetoric from its obscure origins in the early twentieth century to its intersection with the anti-poverty activism of the Poor People’s Campaign and the Black Panther Party to its appropriation by liberal politicians, such as Jesse Jackson in the 1980s. This history of rainbow symbolism in the struggle for racial justice demonstrates the longstanding and continuing damage that state violence and the cooptation of such concepts by indifferent, liberal politicians had on the implementation of genuine economic and social justice.</p>

[pt] Esta tese pretende contribuir para compreensão da maneira pela qual Henry James representa a cultura nacional norte-americana, em sua obra tardia. Em 1907, são publicados, sob o título The American Scene, os relatos de sua viagem aos Estados Unidos. A análise deste conjunto de relatos, no contexto da tradição literária norte-americana do século XIX, permite que se reconstitua a imagem construída por seu autor da relação entre indivíduo e sociedade na cultura norteamericana, na virada do século XIX para o XX. A partir dos anos 1820, ensaístas, ficcionistas, sermonistas, poetas e teólogos norte-americanos começaram a identificar o mito etiológico judaico-cristão com o mito fundador da democracia nos Estados Unidos. Inicia-se, deste modo, uma disputa intelectual entre aqueles que pretendiam associar a identidade norte-americana à inocência do Adão antes da Queda e aqueles que a vinculavam à imagem do Adão decaído. A herança desta disputa e o legado literário de autores como Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville e Henry James Sr., conjugados à experiência cultural europeia, fundamentam a versão alegorizada de Henry James do mito do Adão americano, que constitui a narrativa de seu último romance publicado em vida, The Golden Bowl. A análise combinada deste romance e dos relatos de viagem tem como objetivo compreender a importância simbólica que James atribui às noções de Queda e pecado para o amadurecimento moral e o desenvolvimento da sensibilidade estética nos indivíduos. / [en] This thesis intends to contribute to the understanding of Henry James s representation of North-American national culture in his late works. In 1907, he publishes, under the title The American Scene, the travel reports of his visit to United States. The analysis of this array of reports, in the context of the American literary tradition of Nineteenth Century, helps to reconstitute the image constructed by the author of the individual-society relation, in American culture, in the turn of Nineteenth to Twentieth Century. From 1820s onwards, North-American essayists, fictionists, ministers, poets and theologians began to identify the Judeo-Christian etiologic myth with the founding myth of American democracy. It thus began an intellectual dispute between those who intended to associate American identity to the innocence of Adam s before the Fall and those who referred it to the image of the fallen Adam. This dispute s heritage and the literary legacy of writers as Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Henry James Sr., combined with his European cultural experience, ground Henry James s allegorized version of the American Adam s myth, which constitutes the narrative of his last published novel, The Golden Bowl. The conjoined analysis of this novel and the travel reports makes possible to understand the symbolic relevance, in James s work, of the categories of Fall and sin to the moral growth and the development of aesthetic sensibility in the individuals.

<p>The written component of the dissertation accompanying the "Harmonic Resurgence" mixtape is a captivating exploration of the extraordinary lives of the Godino twins. Through meticulous research and eloquent storytelling, this written work delves deep into the experiences, struggles, and triumphs of the twins, offering a profound and thought-provoking narrative. The dissertation showcases a pioneering approach that merges music and academia, demonstrating the creator's prowess in both artistic expression and scholarly investigation.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Each chapter of the dissertation is dedicated to dissecting significant moments in the twins' lives, meticulously analyzing the emotions and themes portrayed in the mixtape's tracks. It unravels the intricacies of the twins' profound connection and individual growth, while shedding light on the innovative fusion of storytelling and music that makes "Harmonic Resurgence" an unparalleled work of art.</p> <p><br></p> <p>The written component transcends conventional norms in academic research, inviting readers on an immersive journey through the Godino twins' legacy. With meticulous attention to detail and a seamless interweaving of music and narrative, this work serves as a testament to the power of creativity and its ability to touch lives on a profound level.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Overall, the written component of the dissertation complements the "Harmonic Resurgence" mixtape, providing a comprehensive and deeply insightful perspective on the Godino twins' tale. Through this extraordinary academic exploration, their legacy is honored, celebrated, and forever etched into the hearts of those who engage with this groundbreaking work.</p>