“This important war”: The American Revolution and History-Writing in Eighteenth-Century Göttingen This first essay looks at the process of history-writing during the Age of Revolutions in eighteenth-century Göttingen, a vibrant university town which played host to some of German-speaking Europe’s greatest minds, but which also found itself tethered to the cameralist bureaucracy of the Duchy of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, otherwise known as the Electorate of Hanover, and thus fell under the jurisdiction of the British monarchy. Years before revolution broke out in France, the war in America was recognized by contemporary German-speakers as an event of immense political consequence. As Britain’s colonies in North America became restless in the 1760s and 1770s, and news about the incipient unrest began to trickle into Europe, Göttingen’s intellectuals became increasingly ambivalent about how to react to the conflict in America. A survey of the University of Göttingen’s official scholarly publication, the Göttingische Gelehrten Anzeigen, supplemented by book reviews in other Göttingen-based publications and ephemera, shows how the writing of history took on a distinctly overt political character in the late-eighteenth century, as intellectuals found themselves unable to come to a consensus about the meaning of the war in Britain’s colonies, leading to a crisis of interpretation that heralded the advent of modernity itself. “This seems to be a prelude”: Editorial Creativity in Johann Christoph Saur’s Pensylvanische Berichte, 1739-1755 This second essay analyzes English-German processes of news compilation and foreign news circulation in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Johann Christoph Saur was the editor and printer of Colonial America’s most successful German-language newspaper prior to the Revolution, the Pensylvanische Berichte, which began its first print run in 1739 and ran continuously until the destruction of the Saur printing house during the Battle of Germantown. By tracing and comparing how foreign news paragraphs (a commonly overlooked section of colonial-era newspapers) were translated and appropriated by Saur in his widely-circulated newspaper, we see how Saur was able to propagate an alternative political vision for the nation in the tumultuous decades leading up to the Seven Years’ War. Saur as printer could speak politically in ways that his English-speaking counterparts in the Colonies could not until much later (e.g., from the 1760s). More broadly, this paper meditates on the importance of language within the British Empire, and how non-English-speakers navigated life within the imperial boundaries of a foreign power.

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"Heathen Men and Publicans" looks at the ways in which freedom of conscience and association intertwined in from the early colonial through the early national eras of American history, by examining the arguments which excommunicated Protestants leveled in an effort to protest the church discipline with which they were faced, as well as the reforms they endeavored to enact within the church bodies they joined and created following their excisions from religious societies. Likewise, the dissertation asks how conceptions of church discipline bled over into the civil sphere to influence politics and political culture in the years following the American Revolution. From 1730-1840, alternative conceptions of liberty of conscience and association dueled for preeminence in the chapels and meetinghouses of American Protestants. Where ecclesiastical leaders and many laymen described the liberties in question in corporate terms--as the property of religious bodies duly established--those faced with church discipline increasingly argued that individual conceptions of freedom of conscience and association deserved to be protected within associated societies. to this end, excommunicates following the Revolution embarked on a number of novel experiments in church government, minimizing the importance of church ordinances, disputing the existence of heresy, arguing for the liberty of excommunicates to employ the property of the religious meetings to which they had once belonged, and insisting that members, not church bodies, held the right to decide if and when they would exit a religious association. Even as many excommunicates sought to subject themselves to new religious communities following their excisions, they nonetheless contributed to the rise of an increasingly atomized sense of individual conscience in the early American Republic.

Inside and Out: The Culture and Politics of the Wampanoag Language and its ReclamationIndigenous communities like the Wampanoag have historically used language both internally as an affirmation of culture and identity, and externally as a political display of sovereignty. The modern Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project is an extension of this use of language as a tool of power to both strengthen communal bonds and assert sovereignty. Coopting the concept of literacy from English settlers in the seventeenth century, the Wampanoag combined this new instrument with their own language to maintain their autonomy in the face of Euroamerican colonization efforts. In doing so, they established a precedent of resistance and assertions of communal autonomy through language. And, in the wake of the Red Power movement and federal acknowledgements in the twentieth century, the Wampanoag are once again using language to assert their power. Dawnland Power: The Wabanaki Confederacy and Indigenous Exploitation of Imperial Competition in King William’s WarRather than experiencing a slow decline of their autonomy and power after King Philip’s War, the Indigenous nations of the Dawnland continued to exert control over the regions of Maine and southern Canada throughout the seventeenth century. King William’s War is the culmination of this situation, with the Wabanaki Confederacy using imperial competition to fortify their position as the dominant group in the region, waging war against the English for their transgressions and using the French as avenues of material gain. By the end of the conflict, the Wabanaki had once again subjugated English colonists and their governments, as they had decades earlier, forcing them to submit to continued Indigenous regional control in Maine, and dictating how the relationship proceeded from there. Additionally, they continued to play the English and French against one another to ensure they their access to the material wealth of empires remained. King William’s War and its aftermath show that Indigenous power ruled the Dawnland, and that groups like the Wabanaki Confederacy recognized their place within the Atlantic world and exploited European competition accordingly.

Farming people in the Midwestern United States and in Ontario began using new machines throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. These included machines related to the production of grain crops—including threshers, reapers, and drills—as well as machines related to the production of the farm household— such as sewing and washing machines. In their use, maintenance, and alteration of machines within the natural and social contexts of their farms, rural people produced new technological systems of industrial agriculture. They also struggled with machine manufacturers and their agents for control of those systems—both as individuals and through farmer’s organizations. This dissertation contributes to historiographies of capitalism, technology, and agriculture as it demonstrates the importance of knowledge, maintenance, and tinkering on the farm to the mechanization of grain agriculture. This dissertation follows the production and maintenance of, as well as the struggle over, the technological systems of mechanized grain farming from the introduction of horse-powered machines in the middle decades of the century to the end of the century, when those machines had become indispensable and central parts of farms themselves. Over that time, farming people became more dependent on the large-scale production of wheat and turned to further mechanization to sustain their operations. Their dependence on wheat production, the increased complexity of machines, farmers’ reliance on replacement parts, and the efforts of manufacturers and their agents to assert themselves as authorities over industrial agriculture left the technological agency of farming people diminished.

Clear-cut Blues: Violence, Culture, and Labor in the Jim Crow Piney Woods, 1870-1925, addresses a severe lack of scholarship on southern forests and the people who lived and worked in them during the South’s transition to industrial capitalism. This examination of the Piney Woods’ working class seeks to explain how the environment, business, and culture of the Deep South’s lumber industry helped shape this class as well as the physical environment in which it existed during the early decades of the twentieth century. Understanding the South’s lumber industry during the early decades of the twentieth century is central to comprehending the large processes that shaped American society in the twentieth century, including the Great Migration, industrial capitalism, race relations, environmental degradation, Progressivism, and even cultural movements such as the Blues. More than an accounting of the past, this work seeks to provide useful examples of how ecological tumult shapes societies and how the responses of the public, business, and government can either further or limit the consequences of ecological devastation. The timber industry is crucial to our understanding of the South in the post-Reconstruction period through the mid-1920s. Much like the people I study, this dissertation is not limited to one field of history. I made a decision to stay with the land, but to follow the people and sources. This study argues that it is necessary to uncover the world in which the Piney Woods working class labored, lived, laughed, loved, fought, and died in order to understand the decisions these workers and farmers made, decisions that led to the rare circumstance of an interracial union with many thousands of members and supporters in the Deep South during the Jim Crow Era. Central to this analysis is the theory that the violence surrounding these workers’ daily lives—from the destruction of the surrounding forests, to the racialized violence of Jim Crow, the intraclass violence of the sawmill towns as well as the bosses’ violent opposition to organized labor, and the bombing campaign that followed deforestation—was a central feature in motivating those who could not leave, to align themselves against the mill owners and timber companies. This is not a glorification of violence, rather an acknowledgment of the processes of violence unleashed by deforestation.

My dissertation examines how social relationships of kinship, co-residence, and nationhood structured the Indigenous politics of alliance that was at the center of diplomacy in the Great Lakes during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The project traces how the diverse array of Native people living between Green Bay and the Mississippi River made and remade alliances, founded on many overlapping and intersecting relationships that structured their social world, between the arrival of European colonizers in the region in the mid seventeenth century and the 1750s, when many of the region’s Native peoples began to migrate further west and the French shifted focus to the Ohio Country with the beginnings of the Seven Years War. Examining English- and French-language historical documents in U.S. and Canadian archives, I argue that the diversity of Native peoples in the Green Bay region and the multiplicity of their social relationships gave Native people a wide array of sometimes-conflicting obligations and alliances that they had to negotiate simultaneously in order to maintain the alliance networks on which their security relied. Alliances therefore had to be actively maintained and constantly renegotiated as Native individuals and communities reevaluated their relationships in response to their changing goals and contexts. In the seventeenth century, these relationships and alliances structured how and where people lived in the Green Bay region, including French colonizers. The character of Indigenous alliances limited French attempts to assert hegemony over the region through alliance. Without a permanent presence, they could not establish the kinds of day-to-day social relationships with Native people that strong alliances depended upon. Because Native people largely sought alliance with the French to gain advantages over other French allies, French officials were required to pick a side. These processes and negotiations reached their zenith with the Fox Wars (1712–33), which saw the violent rearrangement of the region’s Indigenous alliance networks, who in turn pulled their French and Indigenous allies into the conflict. At every stage, the interests and actions of Native people in the context of the Indigenous politics of alliance drove the Fox Wars. Their aftermath saw the human geography of the Green Bay region reshaped in line with the changes the wars had wrought to its alliance networks. Throughout, the daily priorities of Indigenous people, particularly their relationships with each other, structured the social and diplomatic worlds of Natives and newcomers in the geopolitically critical region between the Mississippi and St. Lawrence Rivers.

Merchant Time and the Horological Revolution in Charleston, 1740-1770 The importance of mechanical timekeeping in consolidating Britain’s Atlantic commercial system grew precipitously between 1740 and 1770. Nowhere was this development more pronounced than in Charleston, South Carolina. This community of watchmakers and merchants was, by the end of the period, selling a broad array of timepieces for an ever-expanding set of timekeeping needs and wants. This paper places their advertisements alongside the enactment of timekeeping legislation within Charleston and the correspondences of Henry Laurens, to reveal middle decades of the eighteenth century as a crucial moment in the formation of a new sense of time articulated towards merchant capitalism. Reckoning with Empire: The Board of Longitude in the Eighteenth Century This paper seeks to recast Britain’s Board of Longitude as an instrument of empire building in the years following 1763. While the Board’s initial mandate was understood as a narrow set of navigational and technical questions regarding how to reckon a ship’s longitude at sea, the necessities of empire could no longer be ignored as the size and scope of Britain’s Atlantic empire grew during the mid-eighteenth century. By reading the subtle shifts in language employed by commissioners in their deliberations and resolutions, I show how the Board of Longitude actively sought to refashion itself to meet the navigational demands of the British Empire.

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The task of this paper is to both describe and explain the evolving relations between sociology and economics in the US. The first generation of American sociology was immersed in economic questions, and its establishment in the university system was largely sponsored by economics. After the formation of the American Sociological Society, relations came to be more characterized by professionally autonomous collaboration. Joint professional gatherings of economists and sociologists - including regular joint presidential addresses - were the norm until the early 1940s. The era of collaboration ended in disciplinarily rivalry between sociologists and institutional economists, with the sociologists (notably Talcott Parsons) claiming the institutions of capitalism as the proper subject matter of sociology. This conflict fed into the ultimate failure of institutional economics and encouraged the retreat of the discipline into the technical study of prices. At the same time, sociologists never went on to seriously occupy the field of economic institutions; rather, it became a vacant lot between the disciplines, abandoned in the post-war disengagement of economics and sociology.