Cette thèse vérifie l’effet d’une philosophie sur la représentation historique d’une réalité sociale, et ce des lendemains de la Révolution américaine jusqu’à l’aube du XXe siècle. Cette représentation concerne l’Autochtone, son rapport au contexte et à l’État. Comment la culture politique des cadres étatsunien et canadien respectivement mène l’élite s’y inscrivant – soit celle concernée par la question -, de 1783 à 1900, à se représenter la réalité amérindienne et son rapport au contexte social et à l’État? Aux États-Unis, projet libéral et individualiste, l’élite réfléchit l’Autochtone en fonction de fins libérales, raison d’être des institutions. L’individualisme balise la pensée; l’Autochtone n’est respecté et reconnu collectivement qu’en tant qu’il n’affecte point la téléologie du cadre. L’Amérique du Nord britannique voit les nécessités impériales, plus tard nationales, fonder la réflexion. Elles définissent la place lui revenant dans ce projet, celle déterminée par l’autorité gouvernant sa réalisation, laquelle doit alors préserver son contrôle sur l’Amérindien. En fonction d’un ordre est-il pensé. Cette étude le confirme. Méthodologiquement centrée sur l’analyse de la réflexion d’élites politiques et juridiques, la différence entre une représentation fondée sur des impératifs libéraux et une centrée sur des notions d’ordre et d’étatisme y est appréhendée. Le cadre américain oppose un individualisme à une reconnaissance légale de la tribu. Le premier devra primer, signifiant l’américanisation de l’Autochtone, car la loi et le politique doivent, pour le colon, servir la finalité territoriale. Le cadre britannique s’élabore sur une réflexion fondée sur des impératifs d’ordre. La réalité et la place des collectivités sont réfléchies, définies et déterminées par une autorité légitimée sur une tradition. Elle gère le contexte, ses éléments, comme les tribus, pour s’assurer d’un développement ordonné. L’Autochtone n’est pas impérativement individualisé, mais plutôt collectivement protégé, gouverné et ségrégé. Son contrôle passe avant son individualisation, l’ordre devant baliser le développement. Ainsi s’élaborent deux pensées au sujet de l’Amérindien, formatées à l’intérieur des pôles individu/collectivité.

Sweet Briar House is one of the best documented sites in Virginia, with sources ranging from architectural drawings and extensive archives to original furnishings. Sweet Briar House was purchased by Elijah Fletcher, a prominent figure in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1830. Thirty years later it passed into the possession of his daughter Indiana Fletcher Williams, and remained her home until her death in 1900. In her will, Williams left instructions for the founding of Sweet Briar Institute, an educational institution for women that exists today as Sweet Briar College. This dissertation examines Sweet Briar House in three distinct phases, while advancing three theses. The first thesis proposes that the double portico motif introduced by Palladio at the Villa Cornaro in the sixteenth century became the fundamental motif of Palladianism in Virginia architecture, generating a line of offspring that proliferated in the eighteenth century and beyond. The Palladian plantation (Sweet Briar House I, c. 1800) featured this double portico. In 1851, following the return of the Fletcher children from an extended Grand Tour of Europe, the house was remodeled as an Italianate villa (Sweet Briar House II, 1851-52). The second thesis advances the contention that by renovating their Palladian house into an asymmetrical Italianate villa, the Fletcher family implemented an ideal solution between the balanced façade that characterized the Palladian Sweet Briar House I and the fashion for the Picturesque that dominated American building in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1876, the Williams family traveled to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where visitors were presented with an unimaginable array of artistic possibilities from countless eras and nations, exactly the conditions that the Aesthetic Movement needed to flourish in America. The third thesis maintains that the Williams family’s decision to transform Sweet Briar House into an Aesthetic Movement retreat was inspired by their reaction to the Centennial, and in particular by their appreciation for the Japanese objects presented there.

The following essay examines the image of "Barbary piracy" created by two prominent political figures, Thomas Jefferson and William Eaton, and by the American public from 1784 to 1805, and how those images shaped the policy of the American-Barbary War. Eaton‟s Orientalist approach to describing piracy and the North African population limited his views of this region, thus reducing the American conflict to the annihilation of animalistic "brutes." Jefferson‟s practical approach to describing piracy and the North African population focused on emancipating the region from the corrupting influence of greed, allowing him the necessary flexibility to solve the conflict by either by military force or with peace treaties, whichever was necessary. I will show the impact that categorizing piracy as either the result of a depraved society or as a corrupting force had on both American perceptions of the North Africa people and on the outcome of the American-Barbary War.

Papers, memoirs, diaries, letters and autobiographies from 1791-1807 are studied to determine the relationship between Jefferson and Burr. A limited examination of congressional records for the same period was made. Monographs and biographies of Jefferson, Burr and their contemporaries were studied. This study shows that the relationship between Jefferson and Burr was one of political expediency and that Jefferson's antipathy toward Burr began in 1791 and not as a result of the House presidential election of 1801. The thesis concludes that Jefferson used Burr's political influence in New England to achieve Democratic -Republican control of the federal government and then used the alleged conspiracy between Burr and the Federalists during the House election of 1801 as an excuse to begin Burr's political destruction.

This dissertation illuminates the links between agriculture, popular culture, social class, and agrarian nostalgia. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I draw from the fields of American Studies, American History, Agricultural History, Environmental Studies, popular culture, and cultural geography. Consisting of four diverse case studies, my project focuses on America's evolving relationship with its agrarian roots from the late eighteenth century to the present. Each case study pays close attention to the ways in which the forces of modern consumerism have shaped public understanding of agricultural issues. The dissertation pivots on two main arguments: 1) the modern realities of industrialized agriculture have sparked a desire for highly romanticized visions of farming, particularly tourism to rural places that promise temporary pastoral transcendence to consumers, and 2) as a result of the public demand for idyllic constructions of American rural life, agrarian nostalgia has frequently been deployed in the service of commerce. From the writings of Thomas Jefferson and Laura Ingalls Wilder, to Currier and Ives painting, Martha Stewart's media empire, and state fairs of the American Midwest, I analyze a variety of highly romanticized cultural forms that enrich our understanding of the nation's agrarian heritage. Yet, I also make important links between the past and present, and demonstrate how and why debates about such issues as farm policy and the politics of food once again stand at the forefront of popular consciousness in the twenty-first century. / text

This thesis contends that Anglo-Saxon studies made a powerful contribution to Thomas Jefferson's development of public concepts of American identity and nationalism in ways that have been elided by scholars preoccupied with Jefferson's classicism. Jefferson's comprehensive survey of Anglo-Saxon grammar, language, law and emigration provided him with a precedent for revolution and helped him develop a model of American nationhood. Jefferson's detailed study of the Anglo-Saxon era set him apart from writers on both sides of the Atlantic in the period 1750-1860, and this thesis will argue that to generalize his interest as 'whig history' or a subscription to a theory of Teutonic superiority is unjustified. Chapter One considers Jefferson's educational background, his exposure to Anglo-Saxon history and the degree to which he might have been encouraged to pursue it. Previous studies of Jefferson's Anglo-Saxonism have presumed that there was a 'Gothic font' from which American Founding Fathers could drink; the detailed study of Anglo-Saxon historiography in this chapter will show otherwise. Chapter Two is concerned with a detailed examination of the collections of books relating to Anglo-Saxon history and language that Jefferson collected throughout his lifetime. If Jefferson was concerned with whig dialogues, or interested in the Saxons as a product of a passion for Tacitus we should find evidence of it here. In fact, the study of Jefferson's library in Chapter Two demonstrates that Jefferson was genuinely an expert Anglo-Saxon scholar and regarded that knowledge base as a political tool. Chapters Three and Four constitute detailed examinations of the nationalist use to which Jefferson put his understanding of early English history. Chapter Three considers the problem of shared heritage with Britain confronting the American statesman in the 1760s and 1770s and his employment of pre-Norman history in resolving this conflict. Chapter Four enlarges upon the study of American national identity, with specific reference to the linguistic debates following on the Revolution. This chapter revolves around a reconsideration of Jefferson's Anglo-Saxon Essay and his attempts to introduce this language into the education of future American statesmen. Jefferson's examination of Anglo-Saxon history, when considered in this light, seems oddly discordant with the simplistic notion of Jefferson as a founder of Teutonic superiority. Chapter Five is interested in Jefferson's impact on historical rhetoric in the nineteenth century. Thomas Jefferson used English history as an aid to separating an American nation from the British Empire and he believed that Americans could look to their Anglo-Saxon ancestors for a precedent that would justify their independence from Britain. He saw in Anglo-Saxon studies a means for appropriating those parts of English history that could underpin a national identity defined by freedom, initiative, and perhaps a racial predilection for democracy, while simultaneously rejecting Britain's authority in his present.

This thesis explores the implications of chinoiserie, or Western creations of Chinese-style decorative arts, upon an eighteenth century colonial American audience. Chinese products such as tea, porcelain, and silk, and goods such as furniture and wallpaper displaying Chinese motifs of distant exotic lands, had become popular commodities in Europe by the eighteenth century. The American colonists, who were primarily culturally British, thus developed a taste for chinoiserie fashions and wares via their European heritage. While most European countries had direct access to the China trade, colonial Americans were banned from any direct contact with the Orient by the British East India Company. They were relegated to creating their own versions of these popular designs and products based on their own interpretations of British imports. Americans also created a mental construct of China from philosophical writings of their European contemporaries, such as Voltaire, who often envisioned China as a philosopher's paradise. Some colonial Americans, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, fit their understanding of China within their own Enlightenment worldview. For these individuals, chinoiserie in American homes not only reflected the owners' desires to keep up with European fashions, but also carried associations with Enlightenment thought. The latter half of the eighteenth century was a time of escalating conflict as Americans colonists began to assert the right to govern themselves. Part of their struggle for freedom from England was a desire to rid themselves of the British imports, such as tea, silk, and porcelain, on which they had become so dependent by making those goods themselves. Americans in the eighteenth century had many of the natural resources to create such products, but often lacked the skill or equipment for turning their raw materials into finished goods. This thesis examines the colonists' attempts to create their own chinoiserie products, despite these odds, in light of revolutionary sentiments of the day. Chinoiserie in colonial America meshed with neoclassical décor, thereby reflecting the Enlightenment and revolutionary spirit of the time, and revealing a complex colonial worldview filled with trans-oceanic dialogues and cross-cultural currents.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 59-64).

The parity violating weak decay of hyperons offers a valuable means of measuring their polarization, providing insight into the production of strange quarks and the matter they compose. Jefferson Lab’s CLAS collaboration has utilized this property of hyperons, publishing the most precise polarization measurements for the Λ and Σ in both photoproduction and electroproduction to date. In contrast, cascades, which contain two strange quarks, can only be produced through indirect processes and as a result, exhibit low cross sections thus remaining experimentally elusive. At present, there are two aspects in cascade physics where progress has been minimal: characterizing their production mechanism, which lacks theoretical and experimental developments, and observation of the numerous excited cascade resonances that are required to exist by flavor SU(3)F symmetry. However, CLAS data were collected in 2008 with a luminosity of 68 pb−1 using a circularly polarized photon beam with energies up to 5.45 GeV, incident on a liquid hydrogen target. This dataset is, at present, the world’s largest for meson photoproduction in its energy range and provides a unique opportunity to study cascade physics with polarization measurements. The current analysis explores hyperon production through the γp → K+K+Ξ− reaction by providing the first ever determination of spin observables P, Cx and Cz for the cascade. Three of our primary goals are to test the only cascade photoproduction model in existence, examine the underlying processes that give rise to hyperon polarization, and to stimulate future theoretical developments while providing constraints for their parameters. Our research is part of a broader program to understand the production of strange quarks and hadrons with strangeness. The remainder of this document discusses the motivation behind such research, the method of data collection, details of their analysis, and the significance of our results.

La tesi si occupa di verificare l’influenza che i classici greci e latini hanno esercitato su i padri fondatori americani e più in particolare su Thomas Jefferson. La prima sezione tratteggia il contesto universitario e lo studio delle lingue classiche tra seicento e settecento, comprendendo non solo le università inglesi (Oxford e Cambridge) e scozzesi, ma anche i nuovi college nati nelle colonie americane. Tale analisi dei modelli e delle pratiche educative ha permesso, in effetti, di comprendere meglio l’influenza dei classici sui rivoluzionari americani. Nello specifico viene scandagliata a fondo l’educazione ricevuta da Jefferson. Tra i numerosi spunti di studio aperti da codesto argomento, il lavoro si concentra sulle modalità con cui i classici gli furono insegnati, sul suo Commonplace Book (una raccolta di brani tratti in parte da autori antichi letti in giovinezza) e su documentazione epistolare. Quest’ultima è oggetto particolare di studio, allo scopo di scoprire quali opere antiche Jefferson, in età adulta e durante la vecchiaia, lesse e apprezzò. Essendo un collezionista di libri, comprò moltissimi testi classici come dimostrano alcuni suoi manoscritti. Nonostante manchino dati precisi a riguardo, risulta inoltre che Jefferson, benché facesse largo uso di traduzioni, preferiva leggere in originale e che probabilmente abbia letto la maggior parte di questi libri durante il ritiro dalla vita politica. La seconda parte della tesi si concentra, invece, a indagare quanto la sua educazione classica abbia contributo alla formazione della sua personalità e delle sue idee, nonché alla forma stessa del suo pensiero in merito ad alcune tematiche. Lo studio è di conseguenza dedicato all’esperienza umana di Jefferson, in particolare alla sua riflessione sulla morte e sull’eternità, temi fortemente legati alla sua ricezione di idee epicuree e stoiche. Epicureismo e Stoicismo rappresentano, in definitiva, i due sistemi filosofici antichi che hanno maggiormente influenzato la sua personalità e il suo pensiero. / The aim of the present work is to evaluate the impact of the ancient classics on the American Founding Fathers, with a particular focus on Thomas Jefferson. The first section gives a wide portrait of the academic context in which the Founders were educated, comprising not only of Oxford, Cambridge, and the Scottish universities, but also the colonial colleges. The evaluation of the educational practices in use at the time makes it possible to understand better the classical impact on revolutionary Americans. In particular, this analysis studies in depth Jefferson's education. Of the many possible perspectives and approaches to this topic, the present work focuses on the way ancient classics were taught to him, his Commonplace Book, which reports part of the ancient classics he read during his youth, and his correspondence. The latter has been studied especially to understand which other ancient writers he read, valued, and esteemed in his adulthood and old age. As book collector, Jefferson bought an incredible number of ancient classics, as attested by a few manuscripts of his book lists. Despite the dearth of sure evidence, it is very likely that he read the ancient works largely during his retirement. He loved reading them in the original, though he made great use of translations. The second part of this work is dedicated to investigating how Jefferson's classical education contributed to the building of his personality and ideas, as well as how he elaborated specific classical themes in his own life. The study is thus focused on Jefferson's personal human experience, specifically on his reflection on human mortality and the afterlife. These themes, indeed, are strictly linked to his reception of Epicurean and Stoic tenets, the two ancient philosophical systems which had the greatest and most profound impact on Jefferson's personality and thought.