"American Languages: Indians, Ethnology, and the Empire for Liberty" is a study of knowledge and power, as it relates to Indian affairs, in the early republic. It details the interactions, exchanges, and networks through which linguistic and racial ideas were produced and it examines the effect of those ideas on Indian administration. First etymology, then philology, guided the study of human descent, migrations, and physical and mental traits, then called ethnology. It would answer questions of Indian origins and the possibility of Indian incorporation into the United States. It was crucial to white Americans seeking to define their polity and prove their cultivation by contributing to the republic of letters.;The study of Indian languages was both part of the ongoing ideological construction of the "empire for liberty" and it could serve practical ends for the extension and consolidation of imperial relations with the native groups within and on the borders of the United States. Administrators of Indian affairs simultaneously asserted continental mastery and implicitly admitted that it was yet incomplete. Language could be used to illustrate Indian "civilization" and Indian "savagery," the openness of the U.S. nation and its exclusivity, Indian affinities to "Anglo-Saxons" and their utter difference. Language was a race science frequently opposed to understandings of race defined through the body alone.;The War Department repeatedly sought linguistic information that it could use as the basis of policy, but philology was not a discourse of scientific control imposed upon helpless Indians. On the contrary, Indians lay at the heart of almost all that was known of Indian languages. This was especially true once European scientific interest shifted from the study isolated words to grammatical forms, which happened to coincide with debates over Indian removal in the United States. This meant that Indians were in an unprecedented position to shape the most authoritative scientific knowledge of "the Indian" at the moment that U.S. Indian policy was most uncertain. Native tutoring, often mediated through white missionaries, led Peter S. Du Ponceau to refute the notion, shared alike by apologists for removal (e.g. Lewis Cass) and European philosophers (e.g. Wilhelm von Humboldt) that the American languages indicated Indian "savagery.";Yet in attempting to prove that Native American languages were not "savage," Du Ponceau defined Indian grammatical forms as unchanging "plans of ideas" that all Indians, and only Indians, possessed. Henry R. Schoolcraft, Indian agent, protege of Cass, and husband to the Ojibwa-Irish Jane Johnston, extended this line of thought and defined a rigid "Indian mind" that refused "civilization." Such conclusions suggested that Indians possessed fixed mental traits. This conclusion largely agreed with those that ethnologists of the "American school" would advance years later, but those scientists argued that language could offer no information on physical race. The rapid (but brief) rise of the American school undermined the ethnological authority of the philological knowledge that Indians, such as David Brown (Cherokee) and Eleazer Williams (Mohawk) had produced in the preceding decades.;After decades of debate over Indian "plans of ideas," "patterns of thought," and whether Indian languages were a suitable medium for teaching the concepts of Christianity and republican government---debates intensified by the invention of the Cherokee alphabet and the understanding that Sequoyah, its author, intended it to insulate Cherokee society from white interference---the federal government began moving toward a policy of English-only instruction. Even after the strident opposition of the American school, language remained a key marker of civilization and nationhood.

The history of the Lloyd family at Wye Plantation in Talbot County, Maryland, from the 1650s to the early 1770s refines and complicates the dominant historical narrative of the rise of a native-born Protestant planter elite in colonial Chesapeake scholarship. First, the Lloyds were a wealthy and politically prominent Protestant family that benefited from close ties to Catholics up to the end of the colonial period. Second, in contrast to traditional histories of the colonial Chesapeake that emphasize the raising and marketing of tobacco, Wye Plantation's history attests to the importance of grain and livestock farming on a commercial scale, in addition to tobacco production, on the upper Eastern Shore since the seventeenth century.;This study examines the strategies of the Lloyd family to build their wealth and influence in Maryland in the context of the colony's political, economic, and social development. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Lloyds forged kinship ties to Maryland's Catholic gentry, to Quakers, and to the Bennetts of Virginia and Maryland. With these connections, the plantation's trade with London and the West Indies expanded. In the mid- eighteenth century, Edward Lloyd III used his status as a trusted client within Lord Baltimore's patronage network to develop Wye Plantation as a locus of power. Upon his death in 1770, his son moved aggressively to preserve assets that would be the basis of his own independence.;This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach to document Wye Plantation's history. Sources include probate records, government proceedings, the Lloyd Papers and the Calvert Papers at the Maryland Historical Society, the Cadwalader Collection at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and portraits by Charles Willson Peale.;While plantation ownership remained the basis of social and political authority in the colony, each generation of the Lloyd family made use of the home plantation in context- specific ways. This thesis examines change in the uses of a Chesapeake plantation, and the meanings attached to plantation ownership, from the point of view of each generation of the Lloyd family during the colonial period.

This study focusses on the Kahnawake Iroquois Indians, a collection of individuals who emigrated from the Iroquois homeland to a Jesuit mission community, or reserve, outside of Montreal, starting in 1667.;Their history and development as a people is traced from the beginnings in 1667 up to the end of the French power in Canada, at the end of the Seven Years' War in 1760. Through the topics of diplomacy, warfare, and trade, these Kahnawake Indians are examined and it is determined that they were important players in the power politics and military balance between the English, the French, and the Iroquois proper from the 1680s to 1760.;They became a pivotal group within the French military machine in northeastern North America, but forced the French to meet them on their own terms, refusing to become subject to French authority. They initiated and sustained an illegal but highly important trade in furs and European blankets, defying the mercantilist rules of both the French and the English imperial authorities in New France and New York.;Culturally, the Kahnawake people developed a distinct identity, successfully blending elements of both traditional Iroquois and European Catholic culture. Born in an era of struggle, they thrived and maintained their distinct identity and culture in the face of imperial powers and the designs of their Iroquois relatives.

Richard M. Nixon served as Vice President under Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1961. During this time, he worked to portray himself to the public as an international affairs expert and integral advisor within the Administration. Drawing on experiences as a Congressman and his close relationship with John Foster Dulles, Nixon made every effort to gain a meaningful advisory and decision-making role. His actual success was limited. The Vice President was motivated by his love of international affairs, desire for respect and vision of his position as a possible jump off point to the presidency in 1960. This last goal proved his most enduring accomplishment. Nixon improved public awareness of the vice presidency and added political overtones to the office that previously had not been evident.

This biography of Mary Greenhow Lee of Virginia examines life in the nineteenth century. Born in Richmond in 1819, Lee married a lawyer of modest means in Winchester, became widowed thirteen years later, lived through the Civil War in a border town coveted by both armies, then finally settled in Baltimore where she ran a boarding house to make a living until her death in 1907. The purpose of this study is to use a single personality from the past to examine life in the nineteenth-century South from a woman's perspective, using historic events as a backdrop to the narrative.;Mary Greenhow Lee's life illustrates the role of women in nineteenth-century southern society. Her story is also useful for examining the frustrations and triumphs of women who lived in areas of conflict during the Civil War. Additionally, there are two threads that run throughout this biography. One is the way Lee's character aided her in making decisions and overcoming difficult situations. Mary Greenhow Lee's intelligence, wit, and defiant spirit drove her own history, and explains how she made the myriad choices confronting her through her life. The other element that ties this biography together is Lee's sense of social place, studying the very intimate workings of a network of southerners who felt comfortable with and relied upon each other. The war led many of them, however, to create alliances with other classes for mutual support. Finally, Lee's Civil War journal demands a thematic approach to the war years, examining Mary Greenhow Lee's identity as a southern national, civilian reactions to life in a war zone, and the ways that Lee used her role as a woman to support Confederate soldiers while she manipulated and opposed Union occupiers in Winchester.

Pennsylvania's northeast frontier---a region embraced by the upper reaches of the Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers---was the scene of a bitter and, at times, bloody backwoods dispute. Here Yankees (settlers and speculators holding deeds from Connecticut land companies) fought Pennamites (settlers and landlords who claimed land under Pennsylvania) for land and authority. This contest began in the 1760s and lasted till the first decade of the nineteenth century and, for a time, pitted Connecticut against Pennsylvania in a bitter jurisdictional conflict. This study focuses on the dispute after the revolutionary war when the federal government awarded the contested territory to Pennsylvania and when Connecticut claimants, who became known as Wild Yankees, violently resisted the imposition of Pennsylvania's authority and soil rights.;This study explores agrarian unrest in northeast Pennsylvania and adds to existing backcountry scholarship by demonstrating that the revolutionary frontier was not only the scene of a battle over land and authority but also the locus of a struggle over identity and the definition of local culture. It analyzes how frontier expansion, the Revolution, class conflict, and disputes over property intersected with the daily lives of ordinary men and women by examining the small-scale social networks (family, kin, and neighborhood) that delimitated their lives.;This study makes two closely connected arguments. First, it contends that backcountry inhabitants' local lives---the social relationships, economic networks, and sources of authority that operated on a face-to-face level---framed their aspirations as well as their perceptions of the Revolution and social conflict. This parochial world view, or localism, played an important role in shaping frontier expansion and frontier unrest. Second, it argues that localism, though it had always been present in agrarian society, became a paramount ingredient of identity and ideology in the backcountry between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Rapid frontier expansion combined with the Revolution to create a distinct parochial world view among settlers that can best be described as revolutionary backcountry localism .

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