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In 1767 David Zeisberger began his Moravian mission to the Delaware Indians in Ohio. He led this mission until his death in 1808. While Zeisberger and his assistants required conformity in matters religious, the converts did not have to make enormous changes in their traditional beliefs. The Delaware converts also did not have to alter their traditional economic, medical, housing, and diplomatic practices.;The goal of this study is to understand why hundreds of Delawares chose to convert, and why as many more chose to live at the mission. Many Delawares hoped to return to the peaceful life they had previously enjoyed. Many chiefs joined the mission and maintained their influence within the mission structure, and many followed these important men to the mission, believing that the latter must "know something right." Others joined the mission because family members had converted. Many came to live at the mission to escape the destruction and danger of the revolutionary war, while others came to find an escape from the increasing disruption of drunkenness and witchcraft.;Previous studies have failed either to study the full chronological scope of the mission or have made serious errors in their conclusions. Unlike previous studies, it analyzes the structure and operations of the mission and the changes that were required of the converts.;Zeisberger's success lay not only in the numbers of converts he gained but also in the relationships he forged with the Delaware and other Indian nations of Ohio. Even in the worst of circumstances, the Delaware converts chose to remain with or rejoin the mission. at all times Zeisberger managed to maintain friendly relations with most nations, even during times of war. Because of his leadership and tolerance, the converts continued to identify themselves as Delaware Indians; altering their religion did not remove their primary identity nor their sense of loyalty to their people. The converts, although now Moravian in faith, remained Delawares.

The farmers of piedmont Virginia's Tye River Valley adapted agriculture to a commercial frontier during the eighteenth century. This 'frontier agroecosystem' optimized labor returns by exploiting the stored fertility of mature ecosystems at the expense of conservation, but proved vulnerable to population growth and soil exhaustion. Out-migration increased after the Revolution, and economic growth was stymied by limited capital and consumer formation. The frontier agroecosystem could not provide the reliable commercial returns needed to promote development or stable neighborhoods.;During the early 1800s, prominent planters demanded that Virginia farming be intensified---that land productivity be maximized, rather than labor productivity. This strategy, many claimed, would anchor farm families while promoting economic independence. Those among the Tye Valley's ordinary farmers who practiced traditional intensification---increased land productivity through increased labor investment---found it led to declining labor productivity and lower profits, declining consumer opportunities, and diminished political influence. Practical planters turned to entrepreneurial intensification---enhancing per-acre productivity by importing improved seed, livestock, fertilizers, and machinery. This would also increase labor productivity. to attract the capital to purchase these imports, the Valley's leaders had to abandon colonial for capitalist politics, and practice the natural resource conservation necessary to use farmland to insure investments. The self-sufficiency idealized by republican 'high farmers' was compromised.;Many Tye Valley farmers, however, resisted the dependence of capitalist agriculture through a republicanism that accepted lower living standards and curtailed opportunity in return for agrarian independence. Middle and lower class farmers pursued traditional intensification on their land while trying to maintain common access to 'free' resources left over from the frontier property system. They also resisted attempts by the district's entrepreneurial planter-politicians to modernize Virginia's political economy and force the state into a capitalist economy.;High crop prices during the 1850s, however, helped the Valley's capitalist farmers reinvest profits in modernized cultivation. By 1860, they had gone far toward incorporating the landscape of the Tye River Valley into a capitalist agroecosystem. Popular resistance, however, slowed the development of capital needed for a full transformation. Valley farmers found entrepreneurial farming, elite republicanism, and traditional intensification in jeopardy in 1860.

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This dissertation is a study of nonspeech communication and its significance for mutual acculturation and colonial power dynamics in the context of French-Indian contacts across the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most scholars have considered sign-language, pantomime, and other nonverbal means of communication (visual, sonorous, tactile, etc), as temporary, imperfect, and insignificant solutions to the lack of mutual linguistic understanding during early colonial encounters. It is also often assumed that these means of communication, combined with seemingly insurmountable cultural differences, inevitably promoted misunderstandings, incomprehension, and violent conflicts between early colonists and native populations. Seeking to challenge these assumptions, this work closely analyzes the nature, origins, change overtime, and cultural implications of nonverbal and paralinguistic forms of communication, which I argue importantly contributed to the accommodation process and the emergence of cultural hybridity in the early French-Indian Atlantic.;This dissertation offers to expand and refine our understanding of cross-cultural communication and miscommunication in various colonial settings. to do so, it brings in a comparative perspective the experiences of a wide range of French explorers, missionaries, colonial officials, mariners, soldiers, and settlers with a variety of native peoples, cultures, and societies in Brazil, Florida, the Caribbean, Canada, and the Upper Mississippi Valley, from 1500 to the conclusion of the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701. Research for this project was conducted in both published and archival sources, using the original French language versions of the sources, for which I provide new or first translations. The comparative scope of this work brings into question the predominant Canadian-centered chronology that has lead past studies of French America, and seeks to put greater emphasis on the influence that local indigenous cultures and contexts had on colonial developments and in shaping the alliance.;Through five thematic/chronological chapters, my work traces the emergence of a culturally-syncretic repertoire for communication in the early French Atlantic, in which non-linguistic elements were at least as important as spoken words to mediate relations between individuals and groups. Starting with the emergence of shared nonverbal codes during first contacts, the project then explores the process of acculturation as a sensory journey through otherness, then demonstrates the permanence of nonverbal means of communication during and after the mutual acquisition of language by French and Indians. It provides an in-depth look at the role of nonverbal performances in ceremonial oratory in seventeenth-century New France with particular attention to the contest between Jesuit and Indian orators. The dissertation ends with a comparison of nonverbal dimensions of diplomacy in New France and the Caribbean, until the eve of the eighteenth century.

This study analyzes the entrepreneurial estate-building activities of three generations of the Tayloe family of Virginia from the 1710s to the 1820s. The three John Tayloes were model planter-businessmen---that is, they combined mixed commercial agriculture with a variety of business enterprises in an effort to secure long-term financial security and social status for themselves and their heirs. This diversified approach to plantation management characterized early Virginia's "culture of progress"---an early American business culture interpreted in many different ways throughout the colonies (and later the states) that had the pursuit of a better life as its organizing premise.;The Tayloes were not alone in their ironmaking, shipbuilding, land speculation, investing, and craft-service activities. Instead, the three generations of Tayloe planter-businessmen represent the activities, approaches, and values of the elite planter class of early Virginia.;For each of the Tayloes, slave labor served as the fundamental resource for successful enterprise. The presence of large populations of enslaved African Americans enabled the Tayloes and other planters to branch out from staple agriculture and ultimately necessitated that they continue to do so. Slaves demonstrated their abilities, became central to the daily operations of the South's business culture, and made the enterprises planters founded profitable.;Planter-businessmen as individuals founded businesses that were usually complementary in some way to their holdings in land and slaves. Recognizing the potentially dangerous fluctuations of the tobacco market, planters were apt to attempt new endeavors in good times and bad and rarely abandoned new businesses simply because the tobacco market rebounded. They kept their finger on the pulse of the market, braved risk, and attempted to keep up with the latest technology. Planters' non-tobacco activities provided an important buffer between the uncontrollable weather, shipping, and prices associated with tobacco agriculture and their family's future security. The institution of slavery certainly placed some structural limits on planters' entrepreneurial imaginations. However, whether compared against northern farmer-businessmen prior to the antebellum period or set against the definitions of Virginia's own slave society, early southern planter-businessmen exhibited rational and progressive economic behavior.

Promoting Tourism, Selling a Nation: The Politics of Representing National Identity in the United States 1930-1960, focuses on tourism and public culture in the United States, examining how institutions and public sites interpret their history, and the impact these representations have on community and national identity. The project centers on the United States Travel Bureau, the first federal agency tasked with promoting U.S. tourism on a national scale. Through its publicity campaigns, the Bureau attempted to distill the diversity of communities and traditions in the United States into a cohesive vision of American identity and heritage---one it promoted both at home and abroad---as the United States became a major player in world affairs and redefined its place in an international context. Balancing analysis of federal campaigns with case studies of two commemorative events, the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco and the 350th Anniversary of Jamestown, Virginia in 1957, the project explores this process of cultural representation, examining how federal, state, and different groups at the local level vied to assert their visions, and the politics that shaped which voices were included and which left out.;Though a critical period in tourism history for the United States, the mid-twentieth century has largely fallen into a historiographical gap, between studies that focus on early developments from the nineteenth century into the 1920s, and those that examine the era of mass tourism beginning in the 1950s. New Deal projects and programs are most often treated in literature confined to the years of the Great Depression. By tracing the development and influence of national tourism promotion from the late New Deal through the early Cold War era, this project bridges that gap, and considers how elements of 1920s business culture and community advertising, New Deal government programs, and developments in historic preservation and the interpretation of heritage sites all combined to shape representations of national culture.

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