This study examines the life of Julia Gardiner Tyler (1829-1889) as a means of learning more about elite southern women during the nineteenth-century. It addresses the fundamental question of how an ambitious woman could fulfill personal aspirations without openly defying gender conventions and focuses on a variety of themes affecting American women including: education, domesticity, slavery, politics, and religion.;Julia was a northerner by birth and education who adopted the South when she married President John Tyler in 1844. She enthusiastically embraced and defended southern culture and its definition of womanhood. Slavery shaped the social order and resulted in a system that emphasized female inferiority and limited women's lives to the domestic sphere. From the time John Tyler left the presidency in 1845 until his death in 1862, Julia focused on her household. She was a devoted wife and mother of seven children. A household staff made up of both white and black servants freed enough of Julia's time to permit her to keep abreast of political developments. In 1853 she published a defense of slavery that reaffirmed traditional southern womanhood.;Throughout the sectional crisis, Civil War, and Reconstruction, Julia was a keen observer of political developments in both the North and the South. She was an ardent southern nationalist but was unprepared for the consequences of secession. Access to family members in the North became increasingly difficult as political and military tensions heightened. During the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, Julia and her children faced danger as opposing armies moved through their neighborhood. Unwilling to risk remaining in war torn Virginia, she moved into her mother's New York home in 1863 but did not find peace there. Politics divided her mother's household and resulted in violent arguments and a protracted court battle over the Gardiner estate. During Reconstruction, Julia petitioned the federal government for reimbursement for damages to her Virginia property and a presidential widow's pension, while struggling to leave the bitterness of the war behind.;This study concludes that Julia Tyler achieved personal fulfillment through her marriage to the President of the United States. as a widow, she was a strong independent woman who displayed interest in politics but never lost focus of her role as mother. Sometimes she defied social conventions but always reaffirmed traditional southern womanhood.

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The process of creating the colony of Pennsylvania began with the granting of a charter by King Charles II to William Penn in 1681. However the formation of Pennsylvania was not limited to the words of this or other official documents. Many people formed the province through both everyday actions and extraordinary events. and importantly, people involved in the Pennsyvlania project employed both material "toolkits" and language about the material world to stake a place for the new territory within the Americas, Britain, and the world in the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries.;This dissertation examines how William Penn and his contemporaries used the material world and language about it to promote the province of Pennsylvania. In particular, Penn's use of the built environment and landscapes, foods and other natural resources, and maps and natural philosophy are examined as case studies for the intersection between material life and ideology in forming a new geographic and political entity.;Previous scholarship has often examined William Penn through the lens of politics and religion, resulting in a view of the founder as removed from material interests. But examination fo Penn's own words and documents relating to his life suggests that he not only held a deep interest and involvement with material concerns, he viewed management of the material world as central to his religious, political, and social goals for the province of Pennsylvania and more broadly in his life.;In part, scholarship on the material world of William Penn and early Pennsylvania has been obscured by the fact that almost immediately following the death of Penn, people created a stereotyped figure of him representing idealistic political, social, and religious goals (although this was defined in many different ways and used to promote a host of competing causes). Even later imagery depicting Penn promotes this cartoon-like image rather than the complex and often controversial figure he was in reality. In addition, emphasis on scholarship after the mid-eighteenth century with particular focus on the American Revolution obscures a critical interpretation of the earliest period of settlement in Pennsylvania.;The process of remembering William Penn and early Pennsylvania (or forgetting that history) continues today through management of historic and cultural resources, as well as physical remembrances in the form of public monuments, parks, and visual representations. Creating and remembering Pennsylvania and its founders has always been, and continues to be a series of negotiations through words, images, and the material world.

America's Vietnam War had profound ramifications beyond its immediate effect on Southeast Asia and the United States. This dissertation utilizes the debate over Vietnam between the United States and its major European allies, Britain, France, and West Germany, as an analytical framework to examine inter-allied relations. The "Vietnam problem" strained the traps-Atlantic alliance and revealed the respective self-interest of the four member nations. The British, French, and West Germans had serious misgivings about the American strategy in Vietnam, based on a differing view of the nature of the conflict and a pessimistic assessment of American chances for success in South Vietnam. Equally important, the Europeans feared that Washington might disengage from Europe and that the fighting in Southeast Asia might develop into a major, perhaps even a world war. European security hence might be dangerously undermined by further American escalation in Vietnam. According to the European powers, the Cold War should be primarily fought in Europe. Although London, Paris, and Bonn were deeply apprehensive about the American engagement in Vietnam, they failed to develop a unified policy to affect American decision-making because they were unable to transcend their nationalistic agendas. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson unsuccessfully attempted to win substantial European support for America's role in Vietnam. to the United States, Vietnam was a prime domino that could not be allowed to fall and Washington viewed European concerns as parochial and counter-productive. The essentially unilateral approach of the United States in Vietnam led to tragic failure. as a result of the Vietnam experience, Washington realized that it could not fulfill all its global obligations without the backing of its European allies. The lack of a cohesive policy toward America's engagement in Vietnam revealed inherent shortcomings in the foreign policy-making of the European nation-states, which were still guided by a nationalistic, self-interested approach. Britain, France, West Germany, and the United States painfully recognized that in order to successfully meet global challenges they needed to listen more closely to each other and develop a mutualistic policy that would better serve their shared interests as allies and friends.

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This thesis seeks to examine the experiences of German POWs in North Carolina in World War II. It examines their activities, thoughts, feelings, and other interesting aspects of their time in the United States. This thesis also provides adequate information on the establishment of the POW program, and examines how this program impacted Americans at home and abroad.

Applying the concepts of mimesis and "third space" to Virginia's early colonial settlements, this study presents a comparative examination of documentary, pictorial, cartographic, and material evidence surrounding City Point's Site 44PG102 and contemporary James River plantations. By considering archaeological site data that are possibly contemporaneous, but previously have been segregated by archaeologists into "prehistoric" (Native Virginian) and "historic" (European) categories, I investigate the evidence for interethnic interactions as well as the social conventions surrounding 17th-century object and landscape use. This thesis argues that people of European, West Central African, West African, and Algonquian-speaking Native Virginian backgrounds endowed shared objects, buildings, and places with different values and social functions, impairing the ability of colonial material culture to convey clear and consistent messages of status and intention across ethnic boundaries. I propose that mimetic landscapes and material culture with precolonial histories of use as signals of prestige became central to socially competent interethnic communication in colonial contexts.

During the seventeenth century, Spanish conquerors established Franciscan missions among the native inhabitants of Florida and New Mexico. The missionaries in the northern frontier doctrinas of Spain's New World empire adapted methods tested in Iberia and Central and South America to conditions among the Guales, Timucuas, Apalaches, and the various Pueblo peoples. The mission Indians of Florida and New Mexico responded to conquest and conversion in myriad ways. They incorporated Spaniards in traditional ways, they attempted to repel the interlopers, they joined the newcomers and accepted novel modes of behavior, they discriminated between which foreign concepts to adopt and which to reject, and they avoided entangling relations with the Spaniards as best they could. By the end of the seventeenth century the frontier missions of Florida and New Mexico collapsed under the weight of violent struggles among Indians, Spanish officials, Franciscan missionaries, and outside invaders. This comparative study will reveal patterns in Spanish frontier colonization and Indian responses to Spanish conquest and missions.

This study explores the central role that a spiritualized friendship played in the thought and writings of antebellum reformers. It identifies a spiritual sensibility that was widely shared by many radical New England activists of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s regardless of their specific denominational beliefs, and argues that this sense of spirituality motivated them to become activists who labored to transform their society.;Specifically, this dissertation analyzes the work and writings of a variety of reformers who believed that spirit or soul could serve as a mechanism for leveling some of the most dominant cultural and institutional power hierarchies of the mid-nineteenth century. Organized around three case studies---Theodore Dwight Weld's and Angelina Grimke's efforts to conceptualize an egalitarian marriage in 1838, white and black abolitionists' debates over the political efficacy of spiritualized friendships in the early 1840s, Elihu Burritt's struggle to destabilize nationalism and foster a sense of global community in the late 1840s---the dissertation explores the ideological centrality of spirit in the period's millennial, utopian struggles against racism and slavery, sexism and patriarchy, and nationalism and war. Believing these hierarchies to be rooted in physical, bodily differences---in race and sex and nation---the reformers of this study saw in the disembodied, immaterial soul a means for unmaking those hierarchies. An ever growing recognition of the primacy of the soul within each and every human being, they believed, could function as a political instrument that would transform society by leading to a correlative appreciation of the inconsequentiality of the body and bodily difference. Together these case studies demonstrate how this spiritual sensibility shaped the political ideology and practical strategies of abolitionists, woman's right activists, and pacifists, investing their efforts to affect revolutionary social change with the zeal and conviction of religious faith.