During an era when the Seminoles were little regarded in Florida, despite mass Indian reform nationwide, Minnie Moore-Willson of Kissimmee and Ivy Stranahan of Fort Lauderdale attempted to bring reform to the state. Living amongst members of the tribe, both women used their familiarity with Seminole life and practices, as well as their political and social connections, to enact change for the tribe. This was done, respectively, through the creation of reservations and attempting to increase educational and vocational opportunities for tribe members. This thesis examines the lives and activism of Minnie Moore-Willson and Ivy Stranahan over the first two decades of the twentieth century and details their attempts to reform federal and state policies towards Seminoles in Florida. It illustrates the relationships of the women with each other, the Seminoles, and political power brokers in early twentieth century Florida, and attempts to determine their motivations. In doing so, the thesis argues that, though often ignored in the historiography of Seminoles in Florida, these women served as key figures in enacting Seminole-related reforms during the era. Examining Moore-Willson and Stranahan's lives and works affords a greater understanding of how non-Seminole women conceptualized and carried out Florida reform efforts and provides a new perspective for evaluating the early stages of Florida Seminole reform and comparable efforts in other areas of the United States.

This dissertation considers sites of religious broadcast designed for and used by Protestant television evangelists in the postwar United States. It interrogates both the transformation of ritual space as it relates to and is infused by broadcast media, and the architectural and infrastructural adaptations that conditioned such spaces as a result of this mediation. These ritual sites, either retrofitted to accommodate television or designed explicitly for its technology between the late 1950s and the early 1980s, emerged in a period marked both by the ascendance of television broadcasting and by the increasing cultural and political visibility of conservative Protestantism in the United States. While the architecture of television evangelistic practice has also evolved in ways that parallel, and often complicate, changes in mainstream ecclesiastical architecture in the twentieth century, the protagonists of this narrative do not fall into two better-documented genealogies—neither the history of denominationally specific church consulting and the practical guidance penned in its support, nor accounts of high architectural, often academic, reflection on sacred space. Instead, the architecture of these often culturally marginal practices has been critically segregated from much other religious and spiritual construction, despite its effective proliferation across the American landscape to this very day. The wake of this bias leaves resultant lacunae in scholarly and critical attention, which this dissertation works in part to fill. In beginning to account for this history, I examine a variety of evangelical spaces—mostly worship spaces, but also broadcast stations, hospitals, and university campuses—and draw upon their archival and textual traces. Primary case studies in California, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Virginia are framed by questions of style and typology, examined alongside contemporary theories and criticisms of mass mediation, and located in relation to histories of mediated healing practices and apocalyptic thinking. This specific ritual architecture, which the dissertation terms televangelical space, not only negotiated between received ideas of the sacred and newer discourses around twentieth-century media, building practices, and community structures, but also raised the issue of conservative Christianity’s fundamental relationship to the modern world. It traced a basic ambivalence about the relationship between the contemporary and the sacred, and about the relationship between religious practice and the technological realities and cultural habits of an increasingly mediated and increasingly atomized present. I suggest that the historical materialization of this negotiation generated both new kinds of ecclesiastical architecture and spatial effects that transcended its walls. Rather than insist on the relevance of the spaces of broadcast religion according to a rubric of aesthetic value, this project examines them for what they can reveal both about architecture for and with media and about the transformation of spirituality and community under new forms of mediation.

By using oral history as the primary research method, the aim of this thesis is to document and analyse the experiences of women woollen textile workers in the mid-twentieth century. The thesis contains a critique of oral history as a research method in general and the feminist practice of oral history in particular. In order to locate the women in the study in a particular place, there is description of the development and eventual collapse of the woollen textile industry in the Huddersfield area of West Yorkshire. Tape recorded interviews were carried out with 17 women. The key findings from their experiences fall into two main areas. The first relates to the experiences the women describe about the daily routine within the woollen mill, especially for new recruits and the tasks they had which were unconnected with their job. The second relates to the descriptions of the actions the women took during the collapse of the industry. This thesis contributes to the wider body of work on working class women and offers original insights into the experiences of women who worked in an industry which has all but disappeared.

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Examining the rise and fall of a socially democratic Gotham between 1945 and 1985, my dissertation presents a multiracial history of American popular culture. "Syncopating Segregation" links two previously disparate domains of scholarship: studies of postwar urban segregation and cross-cultural mediation. I argue that African American, Latinx, queer, and ethnically white New York musicians served as mediators who sought to rethink and remap the spatial contours of a divided city. In doing so, my work presents a somewhat unfamiliar picture postwar urban life: it moves beyond narratives of cultural appropriation and differs from many historians who posit that rigid patterns of segregation turned cities into racial and ethnic battlegrounds. While acknowledging that cities created new forms of de jure segregation, I show how African American and Latinx New Yorkers spurred musical cross-pollination during an era of mounting racial and ethnic division. Over the course of five chapters, I explore how musicians facilitated cross-cultural exchange in mambo, doo-wop, psychedelic rock, disco, and hip-hop. Each chapter revolves around mediators who used music to bridge racialized boundaries; by creating and popularizing integrated performance spaces premised on racial interaction rather than isolation, artists disrupted—but did not destroy—patterns of segregation in New York. I maintain that they changed the rhythm of the city just as they syncopated their music with off-beat cadences. Dancing at mixed-race clubs allowed New Yorkers to momentarily escape their segregated day-to-day lives. The existence of these venues in a divided landscape speaks to mediators’ successes in syncopating segregation. Although my dissertation serves as one of the first historical studies of musical forms that have traditionally been the purview of record collectors and fans, it is more than a series of genre studies. Instead, I reconstruct a social history of interracial musical scenes in post-World War II New York. Unlike most urban historians, I draw on oral histories, bootleg concert recordings, and fan magazines, in addition to an array of municipal and scholarly archives.

This dissertation examines the links and lasting impact of reformist Muslim scholars, or ‘ula-ma, and the organizations they established in Algeria, Senegal, and Mali in the mid-twentieth century. The dissertation focuses on the Union Culturelle Musulmane (UCM), established in 1953 by a young Senegalese Muslim named Cheikh Touré along with several companions who had all studied together in Algeria with the Algerian Association of Muslim ‘Ulama (AUMA in French). The UCM became an important advocate for reformist Islam in the period before independence; it established branches in several countries (including Mali) and advocated across colonial and postcolonial borders not just for changes to “traditional” Muslim practices while also challenging the leadership and structure of Sufi brotherhoods. The UCM, inspired by the AUMA but also its diverse local and regional contexts, pushed French officials – and later officials in Senegal, Mali, and elsewhere – for a place for Islam in public life while also advocating for moral reform and more modernist Muslim education as an inte-gral and protected part of educational systems before and after independence. This dissertation makes several main arguments about the UCM and reformist Islam more broadly in the mid-twentieth century. Firstly, it argues that an enduring connection existed between reformist Muslims on both sides of the Sahara, one shaped by mutual exchange and discussion and which continued even after independence from France. Secondly, it argues that the UCM and its off-shoots represented an early example of Islamic advocacy that was both political and moral in its focus, stretching the confines of how “Islamism” is often defined while still using politics to obtain religious and social goals. And finally, this dissertation argues that reformist and salafi Muslims had a significant impact on social order as well as other Muslim groups, reshaping politics as well as Islam even beyond the reformists’ adherents.

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