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“Will-with-the-Wisp”: Mass Surveillance and the Act of Pretending Among Runaway Laborers in Eighteenth-Century New England Henry Burch first appeared in the Boston News-Letter on the fifth of November in 1705. The next three issues of the paper tell the story of a young man who conned and cheated his New England benefactors under the guise of being an abused indentured servant from London. Burch’s story, including the falsehoods and the truths, reveals that fugitive laborers employed sophisticated means to evade a society that was structured to return them to bondage, by pretending to be something they were not. Parallel to Burch’s, and his fellow fugitives, desire for freedom, was their masters’ desire to retrieve their property. The intersection of these two separate but similar desires is the focus of this study, which will examine the development of mass surveillance and runaway culture in New England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “May possibly pretend to be a Free Woman”: Cultivating Identity Among Fugitive Laborers in Eighteenth-Century New England Since the publication of Carter G. Woodson’s “Eighteenth-Century Slaves as Advertised by their Masters,” in the Journal of Negro History, runaway advertisements have served as a bountiful source of information for scholars of multiple disciplines. This essay will use runaway notices for all bound laborers—slaves, servants, and apprentices—in eighteenth-century New England. Specifically examining how fugitives cultivated false identities. For the purpose of this essay, identity is defined as a clandestine disguise crafted by fugitive laborers to confuse the people they encountered. In order to acquire freedom, permanent or temporary, fugitives needed to outsmart would be captors. To achieve this end, fugitives cultivated identities based on space, mobility, and social knowledge.

White settlers in the Northwest Territory fashioned their self-understanding in racialized conceptions of property: landed and human. This thesis seeks to bring together competing strands of historiography to examine the interplay between these two forms of property and their production. Discursively, territorial petitions reveal the ideological language used by white settlers to racially justify dispossession, dislocation, and enslavement; whereas, physically, salt production, a procedure situated at the interstices of these interlocking processes, provides a view into the workings and effects of these rhetorics on the ground. Together, these areas of focus allow for insight not just into the activity of white settlers and the resistance of dispossessed Natives and enslaved Blacks, but also into the workings and creation of early American imperial state.

Rural women relied on their knowledge of fabric despite rapid changes in the women’s clothing, textile, and fashion industries. They created narratives of personal and group identity through their lived experience of dress, drawing on textile knowledge to make fabrics serve their distinct needs. Three broadly defined groups interested in the relationship between fabric and female identity played significant roles in shaping textile discourses in the early twentieth century: rural, predominantly white female middle-class consumers, mediators (in the form of home economists, government agencies, and consumer advocacy groups), and business executives in the fashion and textile industries who shaped and directed the production of fabric and clothing. These groups produced different, and at times competing, forms of textile knowledge which shaped discussions and understandings of dress as a lived experience. This dissertation examines three types of fabric – cotton, silk, and rayon – to interrogate the relationships between people and fabric as part of the interconnected processes of production and consumption, as well in connection to trends in changes in taste, aesthetics, and personal presentation. The chapters operate as case studies of a specific fabric, tracing change over time within each chapter. Each chapter considers distinctions between usage while simultaneously tracing how rural women used each textile to gain knowledge and have their perspectives taken seriously.

Masters of Light and Flight: The Spectacle of Invention in fin-de-siècle U.S. Popular Culture, 1876-1917 Popular fascination with inventors in U.S. popular culture was at a high point in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. This paper analyzes the discourse surrounding inventors in the aviation and aeronautics industries: including Thomas Alva Edison, Nicola Tesla, Glenn Curtiss and Wilbur and Orville Wright. By analyzing invention as a spectacle, it sheds light on the relationships between the spectacle of invention and industrial modernity. On the one hand, inventors became popular symbols of control over the process of labor and its products during an era when the alienation of industrial and commercial labor, as well as the rising dangers of urban life were on the minds of many Americans. at the same time, popular coverage of inventors reminded the average person that mastery was no longer available to the ordinary but now only to exceptional celebrity-inventors. Finally, the discourse surrounding these celebrity-inventors facilitated a cultural transition from a 19th century worldview in which value was placed upon individual mastery to a 20th century worldview in which value was placed upon the collective mastery of corporations and the state. “This Most Republican Amalgamation:” The Ideology of the Manual Labor Movement in Early U.S. Education. In the 1820s and 1830s, reformers from disparate ideological traditions—including utopian socialists, abolitionist reformers, and more conservative reformers—were drawn to the manual labor system of education. They sought to introduce mechanical and agricultural labor into the curricula of colleges and seminaries for young men. Reformers believed that this would make education more affordable and healthful. This paper analyzes the way different supporters of the manual labor movement articulated visions of republicanism and Northern nationalism in their efforts to promote the manual labor system. In their articulations of republicanism and Northern nationalism, abolitionist and socialist manual laborites created legitimate space for the exercise of state power to promote and protect equality.

“Defenceless Wives” and “Female Furies”: Late Eighteenth Century Periodicals’ Depictions of Frontier Women The frontier had a firm hold on late eighteenth century popular imagination, trailing through newspapers and magazines of the era, which included, time after time, prominent accounts of the women who had made their homes on the outskirts of the “settled” colonies and early republic. My project examines the ways in which eighteenth century newspapers and magazines discussed frontier women’s experiences. Periodicals sought through their representations of women to illustrate the perils of the frontier by dramatizing women’s tales of trauma and woe, appropriating them in order to generate arguments in favor of political and military causes: anti-British sentiments, the Revolutionary War, and campaigns against Native Americans. Pursuing a multicultural consideration of the frontier, my paper compares the ways in which periodicals discussed white and Native American frontier women’s experiences. Ultimately, I demonstrate the pervasiveness of the female frontier in eighteenth century popular culture. Botany and the Early American Family as botany became increasingly popular and formalized in the eighteenth century, several well-known British North American botanists emerged, including Cadwallader Colden, William Byrd II, and John Bartram. These men collected, named, and categorized the flora of the New World, exchanging specimens and ideas with members of the British Royal Society. While historians have commonly portrayed these and other early American botanists as working alone or in the company of other learned men, I argue that scholarship of early botany has missed the most local of knowledge producers: the family. Early American botanists – and the knowledge they proliferated – were dependent upon family labor and connections. Participating family members included immediate family (spouses and children), as well as members of their household (slaves and servants) and kin who lived far away. My paper illustrates the ways in which botanists’ families assisted them in their projects. It demonstrates the importance of botanical knowledge production undertaken by entire families to our understanding of early American botany.

“In the Bosom of the Storied Blue Ridge Mountains:” Contesting the Future of American Culture in Shenandoah National Park, 1924-1936 In the early 20th century, as the National Park Service gained traction, legislators in the east pushed to preserve large tracts of land in the “western” mind. Yet the forces that converged in the early twentieth century to produce the National Park movement and to envision what those parks should be were more complicated than Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson’s presidencies imply. Theoretically parks for “the people,” National Park locations, resources, and regulations were often governed by the social and economic elite. In the case of eastern parks like Shenandoah, the government acquired land through land condemnation acts, often at the expense of rural and lower income communities. Efforts at Shenandoah, while drastic, illustrate how the creation of National Parks sought not only to preserve land, but also to craft and constitute a particular vision of American culture. Justified as places where the American public could go to enjoy health and continued prosperity, these places simultaneously offered lessons in what it should and should not mean to be an American. In their rejection of mountain culture in Shenandoah, the federal government defined America’s past, present, and future as a place of supposed national growth, consumer culture, and economic advancement. “The Yorktown Problem”: Constructing a Cultural Landscape, 1900-1935 The history of the Uniontown community and Yorktown National Battlefield demonstrates that sites of memory are always contested, and that meaning is not only inscribed through formal means, such as interpretive signs or government-sponsored events, but is also appropriated and generated through cultural uses of sites of memory. Moreover, the founding of Yorktown National Battlefield reveals that the reconciliationist narrative of erasure applied to Civil War memory does not always hold. Park administrators made decisions for pragmatic, though not unproblematic, reasons, guided by their understanding of what makes history and what is significant in history. Taken collectively, the story of Yorktown and Uniontown demonstrates that the history and goals of national spaces must continually be interrogated and revised to ask what has been expunged, and what needs to be uncovered again to generate a more inclusive understanding of the past.

Giles Corey as Man, Myth, and Memory Giles Corey is remembered today as the man who suffered the singular fate of being pressed to death during the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. Corey was neither the first, nor the only, man killed during the trials, yet has captured the public imagination where others have not. His refusal to stand before the court is depicted as a testament to his principled moral commitment, idealizing him as a hero ahead of his time. An examination of seventeenth-century records, however, reveal Corey engaging in illegal behavior, heckling his neighbors, alienating members of his own family, and generally inspiring dislike. How, then, did the glorified popular image of him originate, and why? Surveying the earliest works focused on Corey reveals him as a mythic construction of late nineteenth century. Authors recast his story out of shame for the 1692 executions and a general nostalgia for the agrarian past as a foil for the turmoil and corruption they saw in the present. Through these revisions, Corey entered American cultural memory as a symbolic caricature of preindustrial virtue and small-town values. Family, and Tradition in the Lives of George Robert Twelves Hewes, Robert Twelves, and Boston’s Old South Church George Robert Twelves Hewes, familiar to scholars of the American Revolution as the central figure of Alfred Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, had an unusually long name. Middle names were rare at the time of his birth, and multiple middle names rarer still. Why did Hewes’ parents bestow such an unwieldy name on him? Although Hewes shared his name with his father and uncle, another namesake, Robert Twelves (a distant relative, who built the original Old South Church), provided valuable social capital. However, the ties commemorated by the name did not remain transparent, and its meaning evolved over time. Just as Robert Twelves faded from memory in the Hewes family during the late nineteenth century, the caretakers of the Old South Meetinghouse revived his name to serve a new purpose. In saving the church from the threat of demolition, they reimagined its role in the nation’s founding and attached it to a version of the past that celebrated great men, including its purported builder. Exploring the intertwined histories of Hewes, his namesakes, and the church where his family worshipped illuminates both the varied purposes a name could serve and the role of memory in reconstructing the past.

“Native Citizens!” Citizenship, Family, and Governance During the Haitian Revolution, 1789-1806 Given the upheaval of the Haitian Revolution, and first head-of-state Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s insistence on divesting Haiti from all French influence, it is unsurprising that many historians have depicted Dessalines’s rule as a dramatic rupture; the end of an old state, and the beginning of a new one. However, despite Dessalines’s stated desire to divest from French influence, he continued to use the language of citizenship in legal texts, speeches, and proclamations, despite its strong association with French republicanism. By examining legislative texts and proclamations from 1793 to 1806, I argue that Dessalines used the language of citizenship as a shorthand for duty, obedience, and unity, in order to ensure the security both of the nation, and of his own authority. In doing so, he continued a trend set by pre-independence administrators, who used citizenship rhetoric in their attempts to establish order after the proclamation of emancipation in 1793. “Thrown into this Hospitable Land:” French Refugees in Virginia, 1793-1810 I explore the experiences of French refugees from the Haitian Revolution in Virginia, tracing several members of one refugee household in order to understand how refugees negotiated the opportunities and limitations that they faced upon arrival in the state. French refugees were received in the state with a combination of enthusiasm and suspicion, with the latter being particularly directed towards enslaved refugees, who were feared to carry the “contagion” of slave revolt. By piecing together the archival traces left by two members of the Burot family – planter Alexander Burot, and enslaved domestic Julia Ann Burot – and their immediate relatives, I speculate on the ways in which they addressed the obstacles they faced in Virginia, and argue that their ability to exploit personal and professional relationships, together with sheer good fortune, was instrumental to their achieving some level of socio-economic success in the state.