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The purpose of this study was to compare a traditional biography, Burke A. Hinsdale's Horace Mann and the Common School Revival in the United States (1900), and a revisionist biography, Jonathan Messerli's Horace Mann: a Biography (1972), within a "neutral" frame of reference to determine which author made the more logical use of evidence to support his argument.;David H. Fischer's Historians' Fallacies (1970) and Richard E. Neustadt & Ernest R. May's Thinking in Time (1986) were used to formulate a "neutral" frame of reference within which to analyze the two biographies.;Hinsdale's explanation was found to consist of a series of generalizations few of which were supported by credible relevant evidence. Thus, while Messerli's explanation in part relied on the assumption that such evidence as has survived is adequate to justify using psychological and sociological theory to explain the formation of Mann's personality, his explanation otherwise generally uses credible relevant evidence to support the generalizations he makes. Therefore, it was concluded that Messerli made the more logical use of evidence to support his argument.;Since making generalizations about the traditional and the revisionist genres based on a single sample of each is tenuous, additional studies are needed to justify extending the conclusions of this study to the genres.

Advances in photography and conceptions of national identity proceeded side by side during the nineteenth century. The introduction of halftone reproductions marks the beginning of an information revolution and is an important moment not only in media history, but in studies of nineteenth and twentieth century cultural history and studies of national identity. Visual representation of differences between people and places was one means by which people identified and validated Americans' belonging because photographs were infused with authority: they seemed to be truthful, to provide infallible evidence of events and of people. as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, and technological advances made the halftone process quick and inexpensive, men and women of the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, Jazz Age, and the Great Depression used photographs for visual storytelling in the pages of newspapers, books, journals, and magazines. Editors embraced the seeming realism of photography in their publications; halftones in print helped Americans see each other in new ways and themselves for the first time on a regular, mass-circulating basis.;"The Spectacle of Citizenship" examines how three publications and their strong-willed editors used halftones to display and distribute their views of nationhood and belonging in a period when the United States was undergoing significant changes as a consequence of industrialization, immigration, urbanization, and international military and economic crisis. Paul Kellogg, editor of "Charities and the Commons," and his brood of social justice progressives used halftones to display and include/exclude immigrants, racial minorities, and workers belying reform-minded middle class Americans claims of sympathy, understanding, and acceptance and instead riddling the journal with images that construct a sense of belonging for white, middle class Americans by explicitly identifying who did and did not belong. Joseph Medill Patterson, blue-blooded founder the "Daily News," took a British idea for photograph-based newspapers aimed at the working class and reinvented it as the nation's first tabloid. The newspaper captured Jazz Age New York City with splashy photographs emphasizing crime, scandal, celebrity, politics, and world events and invented a vision of America rooted in popular culture, patriotism, and American "values". Patterson's newspaper reinforced the hegemony of white, upper and middle class Americans, but it did so with an acceptance of rapidly changing social and cultural values in the country and the recognition of the importance of the urban working class population. C.K. McClatchy, long-time editor and publisher of the "Sacramento Bee," used photographs to reinforce the suffering and make morally-loaded pleas for federal help during the Great Depression, to demonstrate the success of New Deal Programs, and to recast almost all Californians, regardless of their origin, as representative of America and Americans. Yet McClatchy s inclusive vision was problematic: he remained fervently anticommunist; he continued to believe Asian Americans, particularly Japanese Americas, could not be assimilated; and he virtually ignored the plight of Mexican Americans in the pages of the "Sacramento Bee" during the Great Depression, despite the fact that they were a significant part of the state's population.;"The Spectacle of Citizenship" is a study of the interplay of technology, society, and culture that offers a new understanding of how notions of national identity were understood, produced, and disseminated and consumed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This study analyzes the importance innovative editors placed on visual representations while at the same time demonstrating the necessity of contemporary scholars' understanding those images.

This study explores how late colonial Virginians used clothing to control, enforce, and negotiate gender. Gender, both as a system of power and as a category of social identity, became linked with the material forms of clothing that Virginians wore in their everyday lives. The identification of clothing with the body enabled Virginians to actively make choices about how to perform themselves to the wider culture of observation and perception present in the colony. Dress was ubiquitous, but its meanings were variable, changing, and unstable. In eighteenth-century Virginia, Anglo-descended colonists imported ideals from Britain, which then produced Chesapeake-specific gender relationships, facilitated by slavery and networks of perception. These relations became entangled in the sartorial embodiment of gender, as Anglo-Virginian women and men dictated acceptable forms of femininity and masculinity. Yet enslaved Afro-Virginians could and did negotiate gender on their own terms by fashioning new meanings about their clothing when they ran away. Bringing together documentary, visual, and material sources enables a material perspective on the importance of colonial appearances and the centrality of gender to colonial life. Embodiment theory, the method of reading "along the bias grain," and discussions of agency further augment histories that deal primarily with embodied social status or race and refine gender scholarship concerned with colonies besides Virginia.

Despite his participation in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, eventually became royal governor of New York (1770-1771), Virginia (17711783), and the Bahama Islands (1787-1796). His life in the British Empire exposed him to an extraordinary range of political experience, including border disputes, land speculation, frontier warfare and diplomacy, sexual scandal, slave emancipation, naval combat, loyalist advocacy, Amerindian slavery, and trans-imperial filibusters, to say nothing of his proximity to the Haitian Revolution or his role in the defense of the British West Indies during the French Revolutionary Wars. Quick to break with convention on behalf of the system that ensured his privilege, Dunmore was an usually transgressive imperialist whose career can be used to explore the boundaries of what was possible in the political cultures of the Anglo-Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century.;Remarkably, Lord Dunmore has not been the subject of a book-length study in more than seventy years. With a few exceptions (the work of African American historians notable among them), modern scholars have dismissed him as a greedy incompetent. While challenging this characterization, the dissertation makes several arguments about the weakness of royal authority in pre-Revolutionary New York and Virginia, the prominent and problematic role of the land grant as a mechanism of political consent, the importance of Dunmore's proclamation of emancipation, and the endurance of British ambition in North America after 1783. It seeks to make a methodological contribution as well. By positioning Dunmore as the epicenter of a web of interrelations, one reflected in a variety of historical texts and involving people at all levels of the imperial social structure, the dissertation suffuses a host of elements and actors within a single biographical narrative. This integrated approach can serve to counter the excessive compartmentalization that has marked some academic history in recent decades.

This study explores the promotion, population and settlement of the Carolina lowcountry and evaluates the colony's pioneer years, the period before an English-dominated plantation society achieved supremacy. Many designers participated in the construction of proprietary South Carolina's social and geographical landscapes. The explorers and propagandists who first characterized the colony for European audiences developed the region in the minds of potential emigrants. their recruitment campaigns determined in part the people who colonized the province. The Lords Proprietors and their agents, who devised an elaborate settlement program set forth in the Fundamental Constitutions and other land policies, influenced how Carolina evolved physically and socially. The planters and surveyors who lived and worked within this system reshaped it to serve their own ends, thus altering the complexion of the colonial lowcountry landscape. Finally, the European and Indian cartographers who drew maps of the southeastern region created and interpreted the imagined and actual geography of Carolina.;Despite the small number of private papers surviving from the proprietary period, extant records reveal a considerable amount about white Carolinians' approaches to and occupation of lowcountry lands. The sources examined in this study include exploratory narratives and promotional literature, correspondence and journals of colonial officials, land warrants and grants, surveyors' guidebooks and plats, and historical maps of southeastern North America. Indeed, the public records dating from 1670 to 1710 are particularly suited to a geographic interpretation of South Carolina.;In one sense, the story of South Carolina's first settlement and initial development suffers from the tendency of scholars to read history backwards from the fully-evolved plantation societies of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to apply predominately economic interpretations to the colony's earliest years. This dissertation takes another approach and concentrates on the creation of the colony both in perception and practice. as the first comprehensive analysis of the conceptualization, peopling, and construction of social and geographical landscapes in South Carolina, it integrates the history of a single southern colony within the broader contexts of early American and Atlantic world histories.

Colonial Norfolk, Virginia, developed a more diversified economy than much of the rest of the tobacco-growing Chesapeake. Through a vigorous trade to the West Indies in agricultural products, local merchants prospered, and in 1736 a group of the leading local traders received a charter incorporating Norfolk town as a borough. From that time until the Revolution, through the offices of mayor and aldermen, who corresponded to county magistrates elsewhere in Virginia, the founding merchants and their hand-picked successors governed the town.;Norfolk's merchant-magistrates retained their grip on the town's political and economic life until after the Revolution, despite competition from new arrivals who came to Norfolk after 1750. This influx of new men resulted from economic developments in the wider Atlantic trading world which fueled significant local commercial expansion and created tensions resulting in violence in Norfolk in the 1760s.;The turbulence of the 1760s played a role in determining how Norfolk's merchant-magistrates reacted to the growing imperial crisis. While the established leaders formed the core of the area's patriot group during the Revolution, many of the newer arrivals remained loyal to Great Britain. at the beginning of the conflict, Norfolk Borough was almost totally destroyed, and its merchants, patriot and loyalist, became dispersed.;Norfolk's patriot merchants provide much-needed aid in supplying Virginia during the Revolution, and their wartime careers placed them in a favorable position to resume leadership of the borough after the war. In the post-war years, while the merchant-magistrates lost their oligarchic hold on local government with the revision of the borough charter in 1787, Norfolk's commercial vitality resumed. By 1800, Norfolk's leading merchants saw their economic preeminence confirmed through the establishment of the Norfolk branch of the Bank of the United States and the Norfolk Chamber of Commerce in 1800.

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