This thesis examines the production and reception of French opera in New Orleans in the first half of the nineteenth century, through a focus on the city’s principal French-language theatre from 1819 to 1859, the Théâtre d’Orléans. Building on the small body of existing scholarship concerning the theatre’s history and repertoire, here I draw upon a greatly expanded range of sources—including court cases, sheet music, and novels—in order to understand more about the ways in which operatic culture shaped and was shaped by city life in this period. New Orleans’s operatic life relied on transatlantic networks of people and materials in order to thrive, and this thesis explores the city’s place within growing global operatic systems in the nineteenth century. The five chapters each reflect on different aspects of operatic translocation and its significance for New Orleans. The first two argue for the centrality of human agency to the development of transatlantic networks of production and performance by examining the management of the theatre and the international movement of singers in turn. Chapter 3 investigates the impact of French grand opéra on New Orleans, arguing that the genre provided a focus for the negotiation of local, national, and international identities among opposing critical (and linguistic) factions within the city, while also providing an impetus for the development of a material culture of opera. Chapter 4 explores opera-inspired composition in New Orleans through a focus on popular sheet music for the piano, in order to problematise our expectations of ‘local creativity’. Finally, Chapter 5 examines travel writing from both sides of the Atlantic in which the Théâtre d’Orléans features, arguing that the ‘idea’ of opera—including the imagined experience of Parisian opera-going— played an important role in articulating the authors’ perceptions of inter-cultural encounter in New Orleans. This thesis, therefore, seeks to unpick the processes involved in transatlantic opera from a number of angles. I resituate New Orleans, arguing that the city was not simply on the musical periphery, but that it was instead an integral part of an increasingly connected operatic world, which nonetheless sustained its own individual theatrical culture. This work, therefore, helps us both to challenge and expand ingrained ideas about French centralisation, North American cultural development, and cultural transfer up to the mid-nineteenth century.

This is a study of the gangs that inhabited Philadelphia and its neighboring districts in the mid-nineteenth century. In discussing the drastic societal shifts taking place in major American cities during this period--industrialization, immigration, urbanization, and the solidifying of class lines, this work paints a chaotic scene. Within this tumultuous setting, gangs emerged in working-class neighborhoods to meet two basic needs of their members and the communities they occupied. First, gang membership allowed working-class boys and men to establish shared identities. Utilizing a gender analysis, this study will demonstrate how working-class males developed a distinct version of masculinity. Set in defiance of middle-class values of self-control, wealth accumulation, and respect for the social hierarchy, this brand of masculinity embraced rowdiness, intemperance, and libertinism. Participation in activities such as assault, drinking, and battling rivals allowed gang members to assert their working-class manhood. Additionally, gang membership helped working-class boys and men carve out identities within their own neighborhoods. In the rapidly changing urban landscape, native-born whites, immigrants, and African Americans often lived alongside one another. By forming gangs along ethnic, religious, and political lines, these young men developed a sense of community and camaraderie in a sea of strangers. The second function mid-nineteenth century Philadelphia's gangs served was to empower their members and communities. Through violent attacks, gangs could establish a degree of control over which ethnic, racial, or religious groups lived and worked within their neighborhoods. Second, gangs empowered their members and communities politically. Recognizing their skill in using force, politicians in the mid-nineteenth century allied themselves with gangs in order to win elections. In return for their services, gang members received patronage positions and a degree of protection from the law. To Philadelphia's ruling elites, the poorer masses' increased participation in politics was unacceptable. In an effort to curb the influence of the city's and surrounding districts' gangs, reformers fought to establish a more effective system of law enforcement and to bureaucratize local government. As this thesis argues, the consolidation of Philadelphia and its neighboring districts in 1854 represents the traditional authorities' attempt to wrangle political power from the ward bosses of less affluent communities. / History

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / When the Shakers arrived in revolutionary America, colonists regarded them with suspicion and hostility. A century later, Americans viewed Shakers as models of agricultural excellence, morality, and healthy living. Although Shaker material culture has long been a subject of fascination for cultural historians, much of the scholarship has focused on Shaker furniture, crafts, and architecture. This dissertation examines the primacy of food in the establishment and growth of Shakerism. Drawing on relatively untapped Shaker sources, including newsletters and advertising collateral, as well as cookbooks, daily journals, and visitor accounts, it demonstrates how food provided the economic basis for their communities and established the Shaker reputation for excellence. Moreover, it underscores the importance of food in developing Americans' regard and respect for the Shakers, despite the sect's unusual lifestyle and unorthodox beliefs. [TRUNCATED]

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Janet Taylor made major contributions to Victorian navigational practices. She did so through creating business opportunities for herself as an educator, author, and inventor of nautical instruments. / Master of Arts / Janet Taylor, a woman who made major contributions to Victorian navigation, is representative of a large historiographical gap in maritime and nautical histories. In these fields historians are typically inclined to look at famous men in navigation: John Hadley, John Campbell, and others who invented nautical instruments such as the octant and sextant. However, we have failed to contextualize the significant women who have innovated maritime practices throughout history. Taylor, for example, adjusted calculations for locating positions at sea according to the realization that the shape of the earth is not spherical, but spheroidal. She conveyed this new mathematical principle to the maritime community of London through the classes she taught at her nautical academies, the dozens of books she would publish, and the navigational tools she invented or innovated. Her multiple careers, and her success in each of them, were varied and far-reaching, making her truly a Jane of all trades. Her success as a woman in a male-dominated field was largely dependent on the industrial spirit of the nation and time in which she lived. As the industrial revolution created a need for advancement in technology and navigation, gender norms and the public/private dichotomy of Victorian England began to blur.

This thesis argues that the significance of pre-Civil War southern opposition to slavery has been largely marginalized and mischaracterized by previous historiography. By contextualizing southern antislavery activism as but a single wing within a broader reformist movement, historians can move beyond simplistic interpretations of these antislavery advocates as fool-hardy and tangential "losers." While opposition to slavery constituted a key goal for these reformers, it was not their only aspiration, and they secured considerable success in other aspects of reform. Nineteenth-century Russians, simultaneously struggling with their own system of bonded labor, offer excellent counterpoints to reorient the role of antebellum southern reformers. Through their shared commitment to reforming liberalism, a preference for gradualism as the vehicle of change, and a shared intellectual framework based upon new theories of political economy, the Russian and southerners' histories highlight a transatlantic intellectual community in which southern reformers were full members. Adapting multiple theories from this transnational exchange of ideas, southern reformers were remarkably liminal figures useful for contemporary scholarly exploration into the nineteenth-century culture of reform. Ultimately, it was this liminality coupled with the inegalitarian nature of their movement that ensured that the southern antislavery movement would fail to secure a gradual demise to slavery. / Master of Arts

Yes / Despite the revival of interest in nineteenth century psychology and ethics in Britain during the 1980s, and the current debate around Utilitarian ethics in medicine (Buckle, 2005) and care (Offer, 2004), Utilitarian premises, understood as a psychological theory rather than as a moral philosophy, remain largely dormant in contemporary British Psychology. This is so despite their apparent survival in Behaviourism (Plaud & Vogeltanz, 1994). This article examines aspects of their decline within Victorian psychology, by focussing upon the relatively neglected psychological writings of Herbert Spencer. In doing so, it seeks to make a modest contribution to unravelling the complex changes in the nature of nineteenth-century psychology. In particular it is argued that, whilst some explanations of the decline of Utilitarian premises in the Victorian development of psychology focus upon the later part of the century and cultural or institutional factors, an examination of Spencer's works at the mid-century supports the view that changes were under way earlier. Whilst several explanations might be offered for this, changes in economic organisation and in the experience of individual agency are highlighted. The relation between Utilitarian psychology and Utilitarian ethics will then be considered. Finally, at this stage it should be possible to comment upon the significance of the marginalization of Utilitarian premises within the development of Victorian psychology for the contemporary debate about health resource allocation. / ESRC

The purpose of this thesis is to look at the motivations behind the life and work of Caroline Chisholm, nee Jones, 1808-1877, and to ascertain why British historians have chosen to ignore her contribution to the nineteenth century emigration movement, while attending closely to such women as Nightingale for example. The Introduction to the thesis discusses the difficulties of writing a biography of a nineteenth century woman, who lived at the threshold of modernity, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, in the period identified as late modernity or postmodernity. The critical issues of writing a historical biography are explored. Chapter Two continues the debate in relation to the Sources, Methods and Problems that have been met with in writing the thesis. Chapters Three to Seven consider Chisholm's life and work in the more conventional narrative format, detailing where new evidence has been found. By showing where misinformation and errors have arisen in earlier biographies that have been perpetuated by subsequent biographies, they give specificity to the debate discussed in the Introduction. Chapters Eight to Ten discuss, in far greater depth than a conventional narrative format allows, the relevant political, religious and social influences which shaped and influenced Chisholm's life, and which facilitate an understanding of her motivation and character.

This dissertation studies the earliest years of photography’s invention. Attention to the earliest conceptions of photography reveals a more complex and contested understanding of the nature and significance of photographic representation than has previously been attributed to the Victorians of the early nineteenth century, providing not only a more comprehensive picture of the history of the new technology, but also new insights into the interactions of Victorian photography and visual culture. The earliest representations and receptions of photography are gathered from inventors’ reports, the first photographic texts produced for a specialist and general audience, and periodical articles that reveal the popular reception of photography by a non-specialist audience. The evolving representations and reception of photography are traced throughout the 1840s, as the medium grew increasingly popular, with a particular focus on photographic portraiture. Arguing that the earliest figurations of a new medium directly inform or “premediate” how the medium is negotiated as it becomes established in the culture – that is, even though the technology and use of photography changed quite rapidly, the earliest perceptions of the medium powerfully influenced how it was used, perceived, and resisted – I examine the central anxieties raised by photography that persisted throughout the 1840s and early 1850s. Using Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as a case study, I then turn to literature of the realist genre to assess how photography is imagined and contested in novelistic form. This not only provides a model with which to examine the incorporation of photographic allusions and themes into the realist novel, but also contributes new insights into the ways in which the issues of photography and other aspects of visuality intersected with the literary realist enterprise.