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This research utilized material culture concepts, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, and literary analysis methodologies to investigate the rhetorical and experiential legacies of the antebellum 'complex of sentimental principles' within the twentieth century North American culture industry. Drawing on Eric Lott's concepts 'love and theft' and the 'black mirror,' the author analyzed culture industry products like songs and novels, and argued that the terms of sentimental identification among North American whites came to depend on associative processes precedented by blackface minstrelsy. Whereas minstrels had once constituted the stage-form by appealing to sentimentalism, eventually, in the years after American Civil War and the marginalization of the minstrel show and sentimentalism from the realm of political discourse, the terms of sentimental identification came to depend on an appeal to the blackface mask. An experiential "Black Big other" emerged from the lingering object-agency of antebellum objects and tropes, that is, a perceived subjectivity from behind the agency of racialized objects which served to animate the white gaze. The study traced the experiential and rhetorical consequences of these developments throughout the history of the twentieth culture industry.

This thesis argues that Florida's natural environment was one of the United States Army's most formidable enemies during the Second Seminole War (1835–42), and that environmental factors, more than hostilities from Native peoples themselves, led the United States to abandon the War. Many White soldiers from the North were unprepared to cope with the environmental challenges posed by Florida. In order to build a foundation for this argument, the thesis examines how previous newcomers to Florida dealt with the environment, from the original First Peoples who arrived several thousand years ago, to European explorer/colonizers, to White Americans in the decades preceding the Seminole conflicts. After establishing some basic history and context for the War, the thesis then turns to examples of naive Romantic illusions that some soldiers carried into the War, which made them even more mentally unprepared. This Romantic outlook amplified the disillusionment, dread, and loss of morale among soldiers from the ground up. By examining letters, speeches, reports, and editorials from various Senators, Congressmen, Presidents, Generals, and journalists, the thesis demonstrates that the natural environment, including its inherent diseases, caused far more damage to the Army than the Seminoles did. Conversely, the very same obstacles of heat and water that plagued the Army were used advantageously by the Seminoles. Using new data that has been compiled by researchers in the Veterans Legacy Program, this thesis shows the true depth and consequences of the environmental challenges of the War in ways that have eluded previous historians. Data previously obtainable only through meticulous reading can now be absorbed visually, allowing researchers to juxtapose ideas in new ways. This data allows scholars to "see" the true scope of the environmental impact upon the troops, including the impacts of disease. Though some historians, most notably John T. Mahon and C.S. Monaco, have mentioned Florida's natural environment as a factor in the Seminole Wars, no prominent historian has submitted a lengthy, extended analysis of this idea. That is what I hope to add to the conversation.

This study examines the economic agency and participation of sixty-five women in Colchester, Fairfax County, Virginia throughout the years of 1760-1761 based on ledgers from a general store where they purchased goods on credit. To expand the view of women of different social standings in the colonial south, this study builds a more complicated picture of eighteenth-century women's scope of economic participation. "Control, Consumption, and Connections" explores how women could acquire credit, how they used that credit to make informed consumer purchases, and how they used the extensive social networks they lived in to earn and consume. By studying their transactions at the store, it becomes clear that women had several avenues for earning credit and that they used those methods, their purchases, and their social networks to provide for their households which some of these women, as widows, maintained on their own. This study contributes to the field of Chesapeake, economic, and gender history. Women's economic agency as consumers, producers, influential members of social networks, and providers for their households complicates the image of the Colonial South that has dominated public and scholarly discourse. Where women were primarily seen as exercising their influence in the domestic sphere and as consumers, here we see them actively using and acquiring credit and involved in different facets of the colonial economy.

In 1863, along the southern periphery of the American Civil War, a Union Brigadier General began recruiting Southern white men into a Union cavalry regiment known as the First Florida Cavalry (US). This study investigates the regiment and those who enlisted in it to show the fluidity of Southern loyalty during the Civil War and the conditions of the Deep South Homefront that existed on the periphery of Union occupation and continue to exist on the periphery of Civil War historiography. While scholars have recently addressed many aspects of Southern dissent in the Civil War, significantly less attention has been given to those who fought in the Union ranks. Utilizing previously unused archival materials paired with geospatial mapping, this study reveals the lives of Southerners who enlisted and their homeland. It examines both those who formed the regiment and those who enlisted in it. This analysis illuminates common soldier experience in the Sectional Conflict's Southern borderland. This study concludes that the volatile nature of loyalty and the needs of the homefront in the Deep South encouraged both Union generals to form the First Florida Cavalry and Southerners to enlist in it. While this assessment analyzes only several hundred men, it provides insights into the larger populations of Southern Union soldiers throughout the Deep South and their competing loyalties to nation and community.

“Emancipation is an Act, Freedom is a State of Being”: Remembering Emancipation in Hampton Roads, 1917-1963. This paper traces the centralized organization and an activist turn in the commemoration of emancipation in the Hampton Roads region of Southeastern Virginia and Northeastern North Carolina. While considerable scholarship exists on African American freedom commemorations from the Civil War through its semi-centennial, the story told of twentieth-century emancipation memory is mostly one of marginalization and decline. Accounts of these celebrations in the local Black press reveals their persistence well into the twentieth century. Jim Crow and racial violence haunted the celebratory culture of emancipation and revealed its limitations. The elimination of parades and the proliferation of rhetoric calling for a “new” and “complete” emancipation during celebrations in the decades prior to the civil rights movement illustrates a clear activist turn in the political culture of emancipation memory. Organizers replaced parades with protests, civic groups like the NAACP sponsored and coordinated Emancipation Day events, and prominent civil rights leaders and organizations participated in commemorations and weaponized emancipation memory in their campaigns. Commemorating emancipation became interconnected with activism to address its limitations. The intersection of memory and activism with the emergence of the civil rights movement illustrates that Black memory mattered to those who sought a more complete freedom. “Rest Assured”: Space, Memory, and Resistance in John Mitchell, Jr.’s Woodland Cemetery. This paper looks at the origins and significance of Woodland Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia and the legacy of its founder, John Mitchell, Jr. Closer analysis of Mitchell’s motivations; the political and economic forces that shaped Woodland; and Mitchell’s positioning of the cemetery as a site of memory, racial pride, respectability, and resistance in an era of segregation and discrimination demonstrates that Woodland was more than one of his many real estate ventures. This research reveals that it is impossible to understand the history of Woodland Cemetery without John Mitchell, Jr. and equally impossible to understand the legacy of Michell without considering his project at Woodland. Putting these two histories in conversation with one another allows a more nuanced view of Mitchell’s late-life activism, his efforts towards racial progress, the socio-economic limitations of his vision of Black respectability, and the interconnected and communal nature of Black collective mourning in the memory space of Woodland cemetery. Woodland was a venture in Black independence and racial pride. The cemetery’s vitality was dependent on its status as a segregated space. Woodland, alongside many business, social organizations, and institutions, helped meet the needs of the Black community in a segregated world. Mitchell intended Woodland to serve as an alternative space for Black people to enjoy in life and rest with dignity in death.

This dissertation examines the construction of historical memory of the abolitionist movement in the United States between 1865 and 1945. Specifically, it seeks to understand why the construction of celebratory memory of abolitionism occurred during a period of backsliding in the political status of African Americans. Using a series of case studies, this dissertation argues that the memory of abolitionism was more fragmented and more susceptible to local variation than existing scholarship acknowledges. The simultaneity of new patterns of remembrance of abolitionism with regressive political trends is unsurprising because the memory of abolitionism served a wide variety of ideological ends, and the content of the memory was inextricably shaped by the scale at which it was created. This allowed abolitionist history to become embedded in local progress narratives within Northern communities, even as Reconstruction collapsed and Jim Crow spread across the South. The dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter One addresses shifts in how abolitionists and the residents of Alton, Illinois, remembered the murder of the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy in Alton in 1837. It asks how the same town that countenanced anti-abolitionist mob violence in 1837 came to construct a monument to Lovejoy in 1897, with an emphasis on how antebellum polemical narratives about abolitionists and Lovejoy persisted and changed in the post-Civil War period. Chapter Two follows the afterlife of another episode of anti-abolitionist violence by tracing the evolution of local thinking about Prudence Crandall, an abolitionist teacher who local leaders forced to close her school for African American girls in Canterbury, Connecticut, with the help of the Connecticut legislature, in 1834. By the 1880s, shifts in public opinion about Crandall led the state legislature to approve an apology and pension for her. Chapter Three situates the 1872 publication of William Still’s The Underground Railroad in its Reconstruction political context. It argues that Still’s promotion of the memory of the Underground Railroad was shaped by his own views about postwar African American politics in Philadelphia. Chapters Four and Five use Underground Railroad survey correspondence collected by Wilbur H. Siebert to trace how localized remembrances of the Underground Railroad shifted across the North between the 1890s and the 1940s.

"A Meaningful Subjection: Kingly Government, Coercive Inequality, and Diplomacy in the North American Eastern Woodlands, 1000-1625 A.D.," offers an interpretation of Indigenous-European relationships in eastern North American during first contact and early settlement as significantly informed by an Indigenous political economy of coercive kingship. "A Meaningful Subjection" analyzes underemphasized features of early- historic period Indigenous politics, such as civil jurisdiction over the corporal and capital punishment of thieves, traitors, and adulterers, and contextualize these practices within better understood features of Indigenous economies (such as prestige good inequalities) and politics (such as military command). The primary contribution of this work is to assess the structuring influence coercive, kingly Indigenous regimes exercised upon historical developments such as: the reception of early European explorers; the formation of imperial strategy; the subsistence of early English colonies; the adoption of European material culture by Indigenous rulers; and the creation of diplomatic relationships between settler and Indigenous polities. “A Meaningful Subjection” begins (Chapter 1) with an analysis of our earliest documentary evidence from eastern North America, that produced in the Indigenous- Viking contacts of the eleventh-century. These documents claim that two North American boys, who were kidnapped from the continent and taught to speak Old Norse, attested that they were governed by konungar, or kings. The Viking Age concept of kingship which these boys likely intended to invoke is then surveyed and contrasted with the kingly concept which was next applied to North America—that of the intensely coercive and despotic kingship of Valois France. Moving then across the Atlantic (Chapter 2), the reception of contact reports and their integration into strategic plans for early modern empire are assessed. Here, it is argued that English intellectuals called upon a specific, Latin-derived vocabulary to describe civil authority outside of mass- scale, depersonalized polities: the terminology of petty kingship. This concept, which has been utterly neglected by early modern scholarship, is presented in its complete outline from classical Greece to Tudor England. Chapter 2 concludes with an analysis of how petty kingship was seen as a strategic vulnerability in the political geography of North America, and reveals its keystone function in the development of English prescriptions for vassalizing New World kings into imperial tributaries. The following two chapters return to the eastern woodlands to substantiate the historicity of petty kingdoms in North America and to survey the historical implications of this specific encounter with early English settlers. The first of these (Chapter 3) analyzes early settlement efforts in the Carolina Outer Banks and the Chesapeake, and interprets that region as one in which colonization schemes strategically oriented towards vassalage were overwhelmed by bellicose militarism and greed. Rather than accomplish the conquest of the country gradually, and with the cooperation of friendly vassals as encouraged by imperial strategists, these Englishmen foolishly focused on the interior, a choice that wrought wars of expulsion from coastal kings. Settlement was more easily accomplished in New England, as my final chapter (Chapter 4) demonstrates, where the English at Plymouth were able to rapidly construct diplomatic relationships with Wampanoag petty kings that succeeded at insulating them from expulsion efforts. Where early English colonies planted with relative ease and lack of bloodshed, they did so with the cooperation of coercive, kingly regimes.

News of Romantic Women: Solving the Tensions Between Victorian Womanhood and Patriotism in the Coverage of Women Soldiers During the Civil WarMy Fall 2020 paper examines the newspaper coverage of women soldiers who served as men over the course of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) and the narratives, tropes, and themes within this coverage. Examining both Union and Confederate sources, this paper expands on previous work on women soldiers that identifies the romantic “Female Warrior Bold” literary narrative as a style of coverage, and expands to discuss more specific tropes and further narratives popularized during the war, such as the romantic trope of the clever Colonel, the soldier-turned-nurse, the soldier-turned-wife, and the veteran. I argue that the narrative tropes, which shifted over the course of the war, expressed and sought to resolve for the readership a tension between the ideals of patriotism and expectations of domestic womanhood that the presence of women soldiers triggered. This paper also does a brief regional analysis of coverage, which indicates that stories of women soldiers were most common in the Midwest and the Southeast, as well as the Kentucky/Tennessee region due to the unique case of the Nashville Dispatch. “The Picture of Manners”: “The Ladies’ Friend” Advice Column and the Complex Coexistence of Womanhoods, 1816-1820My Spring 2021 paper examines the Boston Intelligencer young women’s advice column “The Ladies’ Friend” in order to investigate the ideals of womanhood that were being imparted on young Bostonian women from 1816 through the end of 1820. This half-decade, situated after the end of the War of 1812 and through the early years of the Panic of 1819, sits at the juncture between previously historically defined ideologies of womanhood, and offers insight into a potential moment of ideological change with regards to how U.S. society viewed the ideal woman. Looking closely at suggestions regarding social behavior and marriage, education, and economics, we can trace a change in emphasis from the ideal young woman of 1816, whose role as the moral guardian of society aligned closely with the ideology of republican womanhood, to the ideal of 1820, whose role as the center of the domestic realm was increasingly emphasized and often aligned closely with the ideology of the cult of true womanhood. Additionally, if somewhat unintuitively, the ideal young woman was also increasingly expected to have at least a practical education, and, as the Panic of 1819 came into full swing, to play an active role in household finances.

During the Civil War, thousands of refugees from slavery fled to Yorktown, Virginia, where they established a thriving community. Unlike many refugee communities across the South, Yorktown’s residents successfully fought to occupy the land they had claimed after the U.S. army demobilized. In doing so, they established a permanent base from which they launched their efforts to claim the rights and privileges of citizenship and protect their newly gained political power. Visitors to modern day Yorktown will glimpse only traces of this history on its current interpretive landscape, one that today commemorates not black freedom gained during and after the Civil War but rather the independence achieved for white colonists in the American Revolution. Landscapes of Freedom: Restoring the History of Emancipation & Black Citizenship in Yorktown, Virginia, 1861-1940 seeks to address this imbalance by tracing the history of emancipation and freedom in Yorktown. It centers the actions of black Virginians in this history to explain how formerly enslaved and newly enfranchised people envisioned, enacted, and contested freedom. And it emphasizes how black Americans have always been central actors in the history of the nation. In mapping the history of this community from the Civil War through the postwar era, Landscapes of Freedom reveals continuity in strategies formerly enslaved people utilized to advocate for themselves. By centering the words and actions of black actors rather than federal agencies, Landscapes of Freedom demonstrates that from the moment they claimed freedom, black Americans sought to be central participants in the work of defining its meaning. When white allies – whether Quaker teachers, Union generals, Freedmen’s Bureau agents, or white Republicans – did not acknowledge black residents’ equality, black residents acted independently and charted a path that prioritized self-determination. Landscapes of Freedom takes seriously the work of memory not just as a contest over the legacy and meaning of the Civil War, but also of the nature and identity of the nation. By engaging in memorial activities, black residents made claims on the postwar state, demanding recognition as equal participants in the saving of the Union and as members of the body politic. They used these commemorative events to remind audiences that black Americans had always been important members of the nation and that they deserved an equal role in determining its fate. In fact, black residents in Yorktown used the historical significance of their home during the Revolution to underscore their claims to citizenship and belonging after the Civil War. By understanding these events as part of a broader narrative landscape Americans were establishing in the postwar era, Landscapes of Freedom frames black commemorative activities as an important form of calculated political rhetoric. Exploring this history at the community level adds texture and complexity to the history of wartime emancipation and postwar freedom by making the actions of everyday people legible. While historians such as Chandra Manning and Amy Murrell Taylor have produced excellent studies of refugee communities during the Civil War, their investigations are by necessity wide-ranging. In contrast, Landscapes of Freedom enables readers to see how people engaged in political work through everyday transactions and interactions. Moreover, it highlights how the work of claiming and negotiating freedom did not end when the U.S. army left the South. In the twentieth century, the National Park Service forcibly relocated descendants of the founding generation of Yorktown’s black community from what is now Yorktown National Battlefield, a celebration of Yorktown as the “birthplace” of the United States in the Revolutionary War. In doing so, the N.P.S. constructed an exclusionary and incomplete narrative of the United States. Landscapes of Freedom seeks to help recover Yorktown’s black history so that we can begin the work of reincorporating black Americans into the essential history of the nation.