Between 1939 and 1946 the number of rapes in the United States increased approximately 45 percent. This project strives to explain the cultural factors the fueled this increase. Existing societal beliefs and the legal system of this period held rape victims responsible for their own victimization. Additionally, the wartime mobilization of the 1940s liberated millions of young men from community and family moral surveillance. Some men experienced this liberation as license to coerce sex from women. Popular culture accepted and even praised sexual aggressiveness in men, especially military men, and linked women's sexuality to their patriotism. The combination of all of these factors contributed to the sharp increase in sexual violence against women that we see for this period.

Inspired by the concept of culture as expressed in the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, this dissertation traces the roots of modern perceptions of slavery and race by analyzing three sites each of which is associated with a distinct cultural pattern and social ideology. The first, Penshurst in Kent England is described as feudal, organic, vernacular, and popular. The second, Westover in tidewater Virginia is classical, rational, and elite. Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in the Virginia piedmont, the third site, is described as romantic, liberal, and bourgeois. It is only at this third site, the locus for a distinctly modern family type, that concepts of race and slavery unique to our age are found. The new ideas about family structure, race and slavery, evident at Monticello, it is argued, have had a vast influence upon the course of American social and political development.

This is a study of the cultural problem of consumerism. It examines the complex, rich, and multi-varied world of consumer goods in eighteenth-century Anglo-America, when traditional notions of hierarchy were increasingly challenged by new patterns of social and geographical mobility and changing measures of human worth. It was also a time when more and more consumer goods came into the lives of average men and women.;Few historians have scrutinized the role of those goods or the means and motives for their acquisition. Objects become an important part of the story of consumerism, however, by examining affordability (commodities and value), availability (local and long-distance access) and desirability (a complex bundle that includes differentiation or solidarity of group, formation of identity, and symbolism). Studying the retail trade of Britain and Virginia further focuses on how goods moved from manufacturer to consumer, and the environment and behavior of shopping.;This study then asks how the world of goods, often defined by elites and the fashion system in England, extended even to the fringe of the empire in backcounty Virginia. Careful examination of the merchant John Hook in Bedford County reveals an intensely competitive retail trade. Hook worked hard to attract and keep customers--middling and poorer men and women, free and enslaved--through his stock of high-quality, fashionable goods.;Everyday purchase choices--a ribbon or nails, rum or tea--demonstrate how men and women responded to larger Anglo-American changes and how local and market economies intertwined through trading home production and personal services for imported goods and groceries. It was the purchase of small, inexpensive items coupled with slowly-changing behaviors within an inherited cultural shell that defined backcountry consumerism. Thus, while many in the middling ranks of Bedford society fought and drank in small log-built structures, they also added small items of household comfort and dressed with an eye to fashion. Ultimately, Virginians below the economic elite and far from the cultural core were part of the hegemony of fashion-makers, but also chose to reject them through locally determined consumer choice.

This study is an attempt to discern what eighteenth-century houses--their forms, dimensions, internal organization, and external settings--have to contribute to scholarly understanding of colonial Virginia's society, economy, and culture.;Historic Virginia houses usually were built more recently than traditional scholars and popular writers have supposed, and standing eighteenth-century houses are, almost without exception, far larger and finer than the dwellings most colonial Virginians inhabited. Yet even lightly constructed and shabbily finished houses stood at the center of a complex of buildings where most of the planter's household and agricultural work was performed. Thus eighteenth-century Virginia houses were more mundane and unpretentious yet more symbolically and functionally dominant components of the landscape than surviving houses and their isolated rural sites can suggest.;This dissertation employs documentary, architectural, and archaeological evidence to address three questions. What can a close reading of written sources convey about the character and context of houses in eighteenth-century Virginia? What can a close inspection of surviving houses, their archaeological remains, and their associated documentary histories convey about the circumstances of their construction and use, the significance of their form and presentation? Finally, what was the economic background and the social significance of a pretentious Virginia house which was built, accoutred, and inhabited during a time and in a place where such structures were exceedingly rare?

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