Throughout the long nineteenth century, the European Great Powers and, after 1865, the United States competed for global dominance, and they regularly used their armies to do so. While many historians have commented on the culture of these armies’ officer corps, few have looked to the acculturation process itself that occurred at secondary schools and academies for future officers, and even fewer have compared different formative systems. In this study, I home in on three distinct models of officer acculturation—the British public schools, the monarchical cadet schools in Imperial Germany, Austria, and Russia, and the US Military Academy—which instilled the shared and recursive sets of values and behaviors that constituted European and American officer cultures. Specifically, I examine not the curricula, policies, and structures of the schools but the subterranean practices, rituals, and codes therein. What were they, how and why did they develop and change over time, which values did they transmit and which behaviors did they perpetuate, how do these relate to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century social and cultural phenomena, and what sort of ethos did they produce among transatlantic army officers? Drawing on a wide array of sources in three languages, including archival material, official publications, letters and memoirs, and contemporary nonfiction and fiction, I have painted a highly detailed picture of subterranean life at the institutions in this study. The reader will find that although practices, rituals, and codes varied from one type of school to the next, the values and behaviors they inculcated were quite similar . . . and quite anachronistic for the liberalizing societies that the products of the schools were meant to serve.

Although the Bible retained substantial cultural currency throughout the Victorian period (1837–1901), new approaches in biblical criticism challenged accepted ideas about its divine inspiration and theological unity. This dissertation shows that the pressures exerted by this biblical criticism prompted Victorian writers to undertake an imaginative recovery of wisdom literature. Adapting wisdom literature’s characteristic forms in their own works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction prose, these writers constructed dynamic frameworks of revelation and authority. My study analyzes a series of strategically chosen case studies from the 1840s to the 1880s: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s A Drama of Exile (1844), George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858), George Eliot’s Romola (1862–63), John Ruskin’s The Queen of the Air (1869), and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). This selection brings together writers who self-identified as Christian but whose eclectic ideas set them apart from their contemporaries, as well as those who rejected Christianity but nonetheless engaged thoughtfully with biblical texts in their own writing. By demonstrating that these writers used wisdom literature to productively re-imagine the experiences of questioning and doubt, this dissertation contributes to the interdisciplinary project of reassessing religion and secularization in the nineteenth century. More specifically, my focus on biblical wisdom literature aims to revise and supplement the critical paradigm of the Victorian sage, which has come to define scholarly understanding of biblical allusion and literary authority in this period. Where previous studies have focused on the sage’s prophetic rhetoric, this dissertation argues that adaptations of wisdom literature generated an alternative mode of writing, one characterized by an artistic and heuristic poetics. / Graduate / 2021-08-11

The following research explores the development of financial culture in the early American republic through the examination of New York's use of debtors' prisons. Beginning with the construction of the historical context surrounding the passage and abolition of the National Bankrupt Act of 1800, the project takes use of a series of archival sources that exemplify the character of credit in early American economic practices. The emergence of republican financial culture was often at odds with federal judicial and legislative action, the result of which was the creation of state policy and third party organizations dedicated to solving the plight of a growing debtor population. As the narrative of debt transitioned from understanding the debtor as a villain towards a victim, traditional criminal punishments no longer represented cultural values. One such institution scrutinized and debated was the debtors' Gaol.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Single women living in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America faced ever-changing, but constant, analyses of their lives. It seemed privacy was revoked when a woman chose to remain single in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, leaving them to be hyperaware and conscious of all other choices that they made in their lives. Not only was their business not theirs alone, but single women were often also defined by their lack of spouse, regardless of their accomplishments or fulfilled lives. Despite the full life that she led and ways in which her singleness allowed her to contribute to her family, friendships, and community, Julia Graydon Sharpe, a white, elite woman from Indianapolis, Indiana, was one of the many women whose legacy has been defined by her marital status. Sharpe was many things in her life: an artist and clubwoman being two of the most visible. However, it was her role as a sister, aunt, daughter, and friend that were the most fulfilling and important to her in her life as a single woman. An examination of what Sharpe saw as her defining roles within her immediate family and close friendships, as well as what coming from elite family afforded her, helps reveal the life she was able to lead and how she chose to present herself. The exploration of her many intimate roles also put into context how indispensable Sharpe’s commitment and contributions, albeit not monetary, were to her family and friends. Understanding these roles challenges the way we view the “spinsters” of the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century.

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This project uses cartoons to examine a period in Spanish history when the forces of a developing Spanish national identity met with the challenges of war and decolonization. I argue that fear of an uncertain future combined with the disaster of a collapsing empire were projected onto the images of the enemy and are preserved in the many editorial cartoons of the age. By deconstructing the iconology in these cartoons, and by exploring the dialectic of otherness present in these images, I reconstruct the turn-of-the-century Spanish identity that emerged during a period of rapid transition.

Under the modern mortality pattern females die at all ages at a lower rate than males. However, this was not always the case. For much of the nineteenth century in the United States and parts of Europe it appears that females died at a higher rate with respect to at least one disease, pulmonary tuberculosis. The purpose of this research is to investigate this question in four towns of the Connecticut River Valley, Massachusetts. First, it is necessary to establish age- and sex-specific mortality rates in the four rural towns in the Connecticut River Valley during the latter half of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. Secondly, it is necessary to identify those cases in which tuberculosis was the main disease and cause of death. This research seeks to discuss and contribute to the topic of excess female mortality. The four Massachusetts towns of Greenfield, Deerfield, Shelburne, and Montague constitute my research sites. These towns are appropriate for the anthropological pursuit of historical epidemiology due first to the towns’ rural nature at a time when the majority of Americans lived in rural towns, not large urban cities where studies are often focused. Secondly, these towns are of interest because of the extensive data collection that has been conducted previously. Tuberculosis (TB) is an interesting and instructive disease to focus research on. TB has re-emerged in recent decades, and research on the disease may have applied implications and value. TB was the number one killer during the study period, and the nature of the disease is such that it is very sensitive to the social environment. The combination of a rural setting and tuberculosis may give insight into the etiology of a disease that shares a long yet uneven history with humans, and has both biological and cultural significance. Under the traditional mortality pattern females of particular age ranges have greater mortality rates than males. This research discovered that females exceeded males in mortality rates at ages ten to 19 and 30 to 39 and that TB was the root cause of greater female mortality. Interestingly, the sex-specific gap in TB mortality rates was much wider than the gap in overall mortality rates. Thus, while females were dying of one cause, evidence shows that males were dying of another, which may have offset male TB mortality rates.

Thesis advisor: Christy Pottroff / Thesis advisor: Paul Lewis / In 1822 the Western world experienced a revolution in literature and archaeology when the Rosetta Stone was successfully translated, and a craze coined Egyptomania took over the Western world. American literature—ranging from newspaper articles, travel narratives, short fiction, and books concerning ethnology and race science—became inundated with discussion of the material culture of ancient Egypt. As authors interacted with the material culture, they began to question who the ancient Egyptians were and how they managed to create such monuments. Many American authors struggled to comprehend how such ancient people were so advanced in methods of art and engineering, thus thwarting the current nineteenth-century ideals of progress. Especially among white Americans, there was anxiety that the ancient Egyptians were not European, leading to an overall fear of Oriental superiority. My aim here is not to explore the effects of Egyptomania in general on American culture, but rather to analyze how specific artifacts, monuments, and mummies were received and adapted by nineteenth-century authors. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: English.