In 1902, Virginia's revised constitution was proclaimed by the all-male, all-white delegates who had met in Richmond, the state capitol, for over a year. While they reviewed and revised the entire document, their main goal was to disfranchise black males. For the next seven decades, most black men, and, after 1920, black women found it difficult, if not impossible, to participate in the electoral process.;This dissertation looks at the effect of this event on blacks living in Hanover County, Virginia. Black Hanoverians steadily chipped away at the walls that enclosed them and limited their opportunities for success. First, they worked to determine their paths to freedom, and in doing so, set patterns of survival for their descendants. When their rights were being eroded, black Hanoverians, along with their compatriots in Richmond, deemphasized political involvement as the path to full citizenship and instead focused on self-help. Third, they responded to Jim Crow by fostering lives that ran parallel to those of whites. Fourth, in spite of the hardships of living in a racist system, black Hanoverians moved to play their part in overcoming the pressures placed on the country by the Depression and war. Finally, African Americans in Hanover drew on various traditions established by their ancestors to regain their civil rights.;In the end, black Hanoverians resisted the strictures of their "place" as defined by white people. Following Emancipation, the amendments to the federal Constitution, and the Reconstruction Acts, they had reason to believe that they would finally be accepted as citizens in the United States, a country that they and their ancestors had helped to build. They soon found that this would not be the case. Instead, they would have to seek citizenship via avenues of their own making. In the end, they have taught their descendants that citizenship asserts itself from within, and that it has proved to be something that no one can take away.

This dissertation examines the phenomenon of labor espionage from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1930s. Trade unionists coined the term to describe the use of undercover agents posing as workers to collect information for employers about their employees' opinions and activities. Labor spies sometimes identified union supporters and blocked organizing drives; other spies functioned more like surrogate supervisors checking on job performance.;I explore the origins of labor espionage in "spotting," undercover surveillance of railway workers by private detectives to catch theft. I argue that spotting began as a management technology to cope with large dispersed railway workforces, but managers soon saw that secret agents could also monitor workers' behavior and subvert collective action. Rail workers' unions were hamstrung by shame over worker theft and unable to exploit public sympathy to limit employers' use of undercover agents. Next, I examine the difficulties encountered by the American Federation of Hosiery Workers when they tried to systematically counter labor spies in their industry and find that the Hosiery Workers' campaign showed that no union could effectively counter labor spies, and that the union was further hampered by its inability to acknowledge that many spies came from its own ranks. Finally, I compare labor spies to Communists as undercover agents deploying similar strategies in attempts to infiltrate American unions. Unionists developed narratives of infiltration to denounce both labor spies and Communists but deployed them to different ends in the 1930s; progressives used the labor spy narrative to lobby for federal oversight of labor relations, and conservatives used the Communist narrative to attach progressives and fight expanded federal authority. Labor conservatives helped drive early American anticommunism and the rise of McCarthyism.;Trade unionists and historians have avoided a critical fact about labor espionage, that workers performed most secret surveillance. Labor espionage should be seen not just as a management tool, but as a manifestation of worker antiunionism. Rather than asking how labor espionage impaired the growth of American unions, we should ask why some workers chose to subvert collective action, and integrate worker antiunionism into our understanding of American working-class formation.

Throughout the early years of the American republic and the first half of the nineteenth century, people journeyed from across the nation and Europe to the bubbling mineral springs of upstate New York and western Virginia in search of a medical cure and pleasant company. Promoters lauded the springs for their restorative powers, fashionable clientele, and picturesque scenery. These dubious attributes combined with the profit motive to create one of the earliest and most successful components of the American tourism and leisure industry. Marketing and producing the mineral waters, as well as the spa experience itself, involved innovation, business acumen, and substantial amounts of capital. Proprietors of these health resorts stood at the forefront of American social and commercial change.;Just as the business of the spas changed, so too did its social setting. While at the springs visitors formed a distinctive culture. They performed complicated rituals of health and leisure that created, reinforced, and projected the aspirations of the national elite. In the process, they exposed the excesses of American culture. With contemporary society divided by the forces of economic and social change, the refined world of the springs seemed a refuge from daily pressures and anxieties. Yet few found peace there. Visitors to the spas negotiated gender roles and social position in an effort to separate the genteel from the crude, and sift the natural elite from social pretenders. at the spas, Americans wrestled with basic tensions between mobility and stability, morality and behavior, gender and social roles, and wealth and status that divided American culture in the first century after independence. Saratoga Springs, New York and the Virginia springs resembled each other more than they differed. Even on the eve of the Civil War, filling hotels and convincing people to drink the waters followed a similar pattern in both North and South. But sectional rivalries strained the easy-going sociability of life at the springs. Attempts to coalesce a national aristocracy in this climate of social change and anxiety proved futile, especially with the advent of sectional conflict in the late 1850s.

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No description available.

The Indian wars of early New England were traumatic events. During King Philip's, King William's, and Queen Anne's Wars (1675 to 1715) dozens of towns sustained attacks, and English communities and their inhabitants were buffeted and challenged by the experience. The scholarship on colonial warfare and New England as a whole has focused on change and development that occurred as a result of these wars. War places great stress on individuals and societies, forcing them to act in new ways and often to reevaluate and abandon old habits. New Englanders and their communities did change dramatically as a result of repeated wars with the region's natives and their French allies. Yet New Englanders were also resistant to change, and this persistence of core culture ideals is often as historians analyze the transformation of New England from colonies to provinces.;Beyond the extensive physical damage, the conflicts challenged the identities and values of English colonists in myriad ways. In the midst of battle, many men failed to live up to the expectations of their gender, while some women stepped beyond theirs to act in a manly fashion. Despite the troubling behavior of cowardly men and manly women, gender norms and roles in New England did not change under the pressures of Indian wars, in part due to the uncoordinated management by ecclesiastical and political leaders of the narratives of the conflicts. Alternately chastising and praising their constituents, leaders offered examples of "proper" behavior, reasserted control over "amazons" and "viragos," and created larger-than-life heroes.;Indian raids forced hundreds of English settlers from their homes, putting great stress on towns and colonies and creating the dilemma of either aiding refugees (and abandoning the traditional insular nature of towns) or excluding and expelling them (failing John Winthrop's exhortation to bind together). Historians argue that traditional aid through family and towns was incapable of meeting the demand. Instead, New England's governments responded by relieving towns of this responsibility. However, this aid was actually limited and narrowly directed. Towns remained exclusive, gathering in those they were obliged to aid through familial or proprietary connections and allowing outsiders to remain only conditionally. Following the natural hierarchy of their community, refugees sought to support themselves before turning to family and friends, and sought town and colony aid only when traditional sources were exhausted.;Finally, in the midst of Indian wars, New Englanders often had to "dispose of" captured Indians. Having suffered grievously in the wars, New Englanders might have abandoned the law (albeit English law for Englishmen) and exacted revenge. Many prisoners suffered vigilante justice, and others faced servitude or public execution after a formal trial. New Englanders are rightly criticized for their actions, but while the colonists' treatment of prisoners was "uncivil" by modern standards, when viewed through the context of the time, New England's leaders tempered the "rage of the people," and the colonies remained within bounds of tradition and law.;New Englanders resisted changes to the core cultural ideas and institutions of patriarchy, localized community, and morality based in English law. Though these notions of gender, community, and morality were battered by war, they survived and remained central to New England identity.

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No description available.

This study explores the social and economic changes in the mid-Atlantic region generally, and Baltimore City and its hinterlands specifically, between the late colonial period and the dawn of the Jacksonian era. Baltimore foundered as a colonial entrepot until wheat emerged as an important export commodity in the 1740s. Between the mid-1740s and the 1770s, the town grew steadily within the British mercantilist world. its trade was deeply dependent on Atlantic commerce, its social structure reflected the mercantile orientation of the town and the staunchly deferential colonial household economy. The Revolution threatened to overturn this world with the promise of free trade and the possibility that the new republic could remake the Atlantic world, but this promise flickered out with the return of European mercantilist restrictions and hard times in the 1780s. Thereafter, merchants abandoned their revolutionary ambitions and re-established old commercial ties within the British Empire. Artisans sought to strengthen the ties that bound together workers to workshops in the colonial period, and preserve the deferential social order. Thus instead of making a clean break from the colonial to the early national after the war, Baltimore and the mid-Atlantic entered a postcolonial period in which merchants and artisans forged a neomercantilist mentalite to perpetuate much of the traditional social and economic order of colonial America.;The postcolonial period continued until the Bank of England suspended specie payments in 1797. This triggered a financial panic in the Atlantic world, and caused the return of hard times to Baltimore and the mid-Atlantic. Economic misfortune encouraged a reorientation of the town's social and economic life away from the Atlantic world and towards the backcountry and the frontier beyond. America thus moved from the postcolonial to the early national. After 1800, merchants and artisans sought to establish market ties to the backcountry by investing in manufactories, turnpike companies, banks, and western newspapers. These trends were accelerated by the Embargo of 1807, and by 1812, a nascent manufacturing class had emerged. This transformation came at a price. Without technological improvements to augment productivity, manufacturers achieved economies of scale by squeezing more labor from their workers, thus destroying the deferential bonds that held together the household economy and the colonial social order. The urban transition from workshop to manufactory was therefore chaotic, and eventually led to the Baltimore riots of 1812, the largest and most violent the country had ever witnessed.

This architectural history of Montpelier focuses on lives of the people who have lived and worked there between 1723 and 1998. It is not limited to the Madisons and the duPonts. Montpelier's history provides further insight into a range of moments in America's cultural history: plantation slavery in piedmont Virginia, the crisis of authority in the early American republic and the age of Jackson, ante-bellum sectionalism, Reconstruction, lifestyles of industrial magnates in the Gilded Age, and the development of historic preservation in twentieth-century America.;This study traces Montpelier's evolution as a cultural landscape composed of layered historical activity---lives, values, and choices laid in courses and struck by time. The study seeks to reconstruct the form and style of the house and grounds through the archival record. More than a catalog of the events the house and grounds witnessed, the dissertation provides an analysis of various people coming to terms with the political, economic, and social changes of their times and their own personal dilemmas through the built environment. Changes to the house and grounds provide artifactual evidence that speaks to the utilitarian demands, changing ideologies, and symbolic expressions of Montpelier's past inhabitants and present curators.