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"Ambiguous Alliances" examines the revolutionary era in the Ohio Valley from a Native American perspective. Rather than simply considering them as British pawns or troublesome mischief-makers, this account describes how Wyandots, Shawnees, Ottawas, Delawares, Miamis, and their native neighbors made decisions about war and peace, established alliances with Europeans, Americans, and distant Indian nations, and charted specific strategies for their political and cultural survival. They also suffered devastating personal and property loss and encountered significant disruption to their societal routines. Yet much about their daily lives remained unchanged, and their communities continued to foster a strong Indian identity.;This dissertation explores native objectives for the period 1768--1795, specifically looking at what the various nations were hoping to accomplish in their relationships with the British and the Americans. While preserving land and sovereignty were the Indians' clearest aims, this study also emphasizes that the underlying goal of protecting their rights and property was to retain their cultural distinctiveness. Furthermore, these twin objectives were inextricably linked. The Indians' ability to remain viable diplomatic partners with the Europeans depended on the maintenance of their landed independence.;Along with analyzing native objectives, this dissertation discusses Indian strategies to attain these goals and looks at how the Revolution assisted or hampered their execution. Some tribes actively recruited British or American allies; some attempted to remain neutral; others endeavored to form a united Indian front; and still others alternately extended their allegiance to both parties in an effort to secure both autonomy and protection.;Despite its heavy emphasis on native alliances and military maneuvers, this work also examines the Revolution's challenges to the rhythms of daily life. In addition to physical destruction, wartime agendas altered native.economic patterns and sometimes even invaded cultural practices, threatening to constrict gender roles for women or to prevent nations from adopting captives to replace their deceased relatives. Although the era's disruptions brought emotional distress, physical displacement, and political ambiguity, the tribes persisted in sustaining both their daily existence and their national identities.

"A Common Thread" is an analysis of the relocation of the New England textile industry to the states of the Piedmont South between 1880 and 1934. Competition from textile mills operating in the South became a serious challenge for New England textile manufacturers as early as the 1890s. as they watched their profits turn into losses while output and sales of southern goods continued apace during the 1893 depression, owners of northern textile corporations felt unfairly constrained by state legislation that established age and hours standards for mill employees, and by actual and potential labor militancy in their mills. Several New England textile manufacturers, therefore, opened southern subsidiary factories as a way to effectively meet southern competition. In 1896, the Dwight Manufacturing Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts was one of the first New England cotton textile companies to open a southern branch mill. Within a thirty-year period, many of the largest textile corporations in Massachusetts would move part or all of their operations to North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama where textile production took place in mills that cost less to fuel, was done by workers whose wages were lower than those paid in New England, and occurred in a region where textile unions and state regulations were virtually non-existent.;Through the lens of the Dwight Manufacturing Company, "A Common Thread" examines this process of regional transfer within the U.S. textile industry. The specific goals of the study are to explain (1) why and how Massachusetts cotton manufacturing companies pursued relocation to the South as a key strategy for economic survival, (2) why and how southern states attracted northern textile capital, and (3) how textile mill owners, the state, manufacturers' associations, labor unions, and reform groups shaped the North-to-South movement of cotton mill money, machinery, and jobs. "A Common Thread" provides a historic reference point for and helps inform on-going discussions and debates about capital mobility and corporate responsibility as the industrial relocation from region to region that occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continues from nation to nation within the context of economic globalization.

Previous interpretations of Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia (1676-1677) have focused on either the competition between the two major participants, Governor William Berkeley or Councilor Nathaniel Bacon, or the social and economic causes of the uprising. This study presents a collective description of the participants from both sides of the rebellion: Loyalists and Baconians. Participant characteristics such as wealth, social status, officeholding, family life, and standard of living were compared in an attempt to distinguish individual reasons for rebellion or loyal service.;This research demonstrates that although all segments of colonial society were represented in the rebellion, both the Baconians and the Loyalists were primarily comprised of middling and elite Virginians. The study shows that the Baconians were well established farmers and were not poor farmers or ex-indentured servants. For individuals, participation in Bacon's Rebellion was influenced by three factors: a general frustration with the nature of colonial society; specific and personal grievances against the government of Sir William Berkeley; and accidents of family relations and geography. Bacon's Rebellion was thus a comprehensive, planned, personally and politically motivated upheaval that was well within the pattern of revolts established in the colonial Chesapeake.

"In Praise of Bishop Valentine" is a cultural history of Valentine's Day in the American antebellum Northeast. By the middle of the nineteenth century, residents of England and North America had been observing February 14th with various folk customs for centuries. In the early 1840s, however, Northern businessmen and women discovered an enthusiastic and consumptive market for their ready-made valentines. Within a matter of years these merchants' efforts to sell printed cards fundamentally changed the way saint's day was marked. Valentine's Day had become one of the most celebrated holidays of the year and an occasion, specifically, for buying and exchanging manufactured sentiments.;New media and businesses helped to popularize February 14th, in the process taking a novel form of urban youth culture and rapidly dispersing it throughout the region. as it spread, Valentine's Day helped to define a new social category, youth, by working to guide young men and women through premarital sexual temptations and to accustom them to the emotional expressiveness that would soon define the Victorian marriage. The new holiday tradition of exchanging numerous missives riveted antebellum youthful interest for two basic reasons. By intentionally obscuring their mass-produced qualities in order to accentuate individual distinctiveness and convey a personal aura, ready-made cards provided young men and women with a way to use commercial goods to convey authentic, individual sentiments. Furthermore, so-called comic valentines, which soon rivaled sentimental notes in sales, vented youthful exasperation with middle-class sentimentalism, while simultaneously familiarizing individuals with certain middle-class values. Much of this unique, early-industrial February 14th commercial culture did not survive past the Civil War. But for more than a decade it remained an important product of and force in an increasingly industrial, market-oriented, and mobile Northern society.

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No description available.

No description available.

No description available.