Deviants of Great Potential analyzes the 1924 Leopold-Loeb case as a cultural narrative with important effects on the marginalization of same-sex sexuality in men throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. After Chicago teenagers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were arrested for the United States' first nationally recognized "thrill killing," the apparently motiveless murder of fourteen-year-old Robert Franks, the Leopold-Loeb case became an instant cause celebre. The popular fixation on the case continued in the decades after 1924, as journalists and behavioral scientists treated it as a precedent for understanding a certain type of crime and criminal. Meanwhile---especially after World War II---a slew of novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers offered their own interpretations.;Through the intertwining representations of the case in fiction and nonfiction, the Leopold-Loeb case became a cautionary tale about the dangers of "abnormal" sexuality in men. Narratives of the case portrayed Leopold and Loeb's sexual relationship as the sine qua non of Robert Franks's murder, and the case thereby came to represent same-sex sexuality as a threat to moral order and public safety, and to serve as a counterexample of the traits "normal" men should or should not exhibit.

This dissertation is a biography of James McGready (c.1760-1817), a Presbyterian revivalist minister who lived and worked primarily in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Indiana. He is best known as the Father of the Great Revival, an evangelical revival that spread throughout the southeastern United States between 1800 and 1805, and the creator of the camp meeting, which soon became an institutional part of American revivalism. Historians have generally described McGready as an innovator in matters of doctrine and revivalist methodology. This study argues that McGready is better understood as a traditionalist. This interpretation follows several recent works that have outlined a Scottish and Scotch-Irish Presbyterian revivalist tradition dating from the 1620s.;The study traces McGready's educational background, outlines a variety of his theological positions, describes his intense homiletical style, and details his professional career. Research revealed that McGready was educated in several small Presbyterian-run schools that had direct links to the Presbyterian revivalism mentioned above. In doctrine, an examination of such varied topics as the process of conversion, limited atonement and predestination, and millennialism, showed McGready to be a firm Presbyterian Calvinist at every turn. In his homiletical style McGready followed a one hundred and fifty year old pattern of preaching known as the plain style and avoided the unstructured, extemporaneous preaching increasingly favored by revivalists in the nineteenth century. During his professional career, and especially during the Cumberland controversy of 1805-1809, McGready sided with the mainline church and eschewed those with schismatic inclinations.;The reinterpretation of McGready as a traditionalist casts doubt on much of the historiography of American revivalism. Historians have generally argued that revivalism arose in America and especially on the frontier. Understanding McGready, one of the foremost revivalists of the period, as a traditionalist tends to undermine that position. Additionally, this work re-emphasizes the transference of European forms to the New World, even past the American Revolution. Finally, McGready's professional struggles point up the remarkable fluidity in American religion during the early national period.

This study examines the settlement of the British colony of Bermuda in 1612 and its development to 1800. Drawing heavily on primary sources, it is the first social and economic history of the island and an exploration of trade and migration within a pan-colonial network. The purpose of this dissertation is to bring Bermuda's history to the attention of colonial historians and to map connections between Europe's colonies within the Atlantic world.;Part I examines Bermuda's initial settlement and its development under the Somers Island Company. The first English colony to successfully cultivate tobacco and to import slave labor, Bermudian society was demographically successful, Puritan in character, agrarian in focus, and economically self-sufficient. During the English Civil War, the colony enjoyed considerable autonomy, and trade with the Caribbean grew to rival tobacco in economic importance. Tensions between Bermudian planters and London investors led to the abolition of the company's charter in 1684.;Parts II and III document Bermuda's "maritime revolution," the rapid and pervasive economic shift from tobacco agriculture to shipbuilding and commerce which prompted a radical restructuring of the island's landscape and society. Bermuda's multi-faceted maritime economy flexibly drew upon shipbuilding, transoceanic commerce, smuggling, privateering, salt raking, and wrecking throughout the Atlantic and Caribbean. Slaves built and sailed the island's merchant fleet, laboring in racially integrated workplaces that altered earlier, agrarian slave-master relationships. Bermudian women raised families, ran farms, and supervised businesses while their husbands were away at sea. Within the Atlantic world, Bermuda was transformed from an isolated company enclave to an entrepot at the crossroads between two continents, through which information, material goods, and a variety of cultural influences flowed.;Part IV addressed Bermuda and American Revolution, during which the island's fleet actively aided the American cause through smuggling. After the war, the British military garrisoned and fortified the island, which became a vital link between Canada and the British West Indies for the Royal Navy. This work raises larger questions about the relationships between economic activity and social structure, and the malleability of gender roles and the institution of slavery.

This dissertation explores how American representations of Italians and Italian Americans engaged, reflected and helped shape the United States' developing concepts of immigration, ethnicity, race, and national identity from 1880 to 1910, when masses of Italian and other "new immigrants" rigorously tested the country's attitudes and powers of assimilation. In a larger sense, the research examines how the process of constructing the modern Italian/Italian American was part of the process of America constructing for itself a modern national identity for a new century.;The dissertation looks at a variety of "texts," including journalism, travel literature, autobiography, fiction, and photographs and illustrations of the period, but concentrates on a handful of American writers and their works. Chapter 1 compares the reportage and photography of the immigrant journalist Jacob A. Riis with the reporting of the "new" immigrant journalist Edward A. Steiner. Chapter 2 examines Henry James's The American Scene in the context of his other writings on Italy and Italians, including travel essays, short stories, and The Golden Bowl . Chapter 3 focuses on Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad and I. Also part of the discussion are two works by William Dean Howells, Venetian Life and A Hazard of New Fortunes .;The research showed that these writers alternately supported and subverted America's often conflicting and confused attitudes and ideas about Italy and Italians, a tangle of discourses related to the romance of artistic, heroic, picturesque Italy and the reality of the Italian "Other" arriving in the form of masses of immigrants on American shores.

In 1807, Charles Fraser lauded fellow miniature artist Edward Greene Malbone's ability to produce "such striking resemblances, that they will never fail to perpetuate the tenderness of friendship, to divert the cares of absence, and to aid affection in dwelling on those features and that image which death has forever wrested from it." The explanations traditionally given for the commissioning of portraits--the perpetuation of family or institutional memory--correspond with Fraser's comments. Yet these explanations rarely incorporate the social context: the communities in which images were produced and the individual, familial, or group meanings of portraits.;"Facing Philadelphia: The Social Functions of Silhouettes, Miniatures, and Daguerreotypes, 1760-1860" explores some of the forces that shaped a century of portrait patronage in one of America's most prosperous urban centers. My research reveals that different sectors of Philadelphia's elites had decided preferences for specific types of portraits. These patterns suggest that production and patronage were rooted in the meanings that portraits had for certain groups, meanings that were connected to social, economic, religious, and political conditions in Philadelphia.;Whether stark silhouettes for Quakers or individual artists' miniatures for the established mercantile elite, the appeal of small-scale portraits was partially due to their appearance and to their traditional desirability as gifts. Novelty, price, and availability helped create demand for daguerreotypic likenesses. Yet local scientific interest, Quaker mores regarding material life, and the desire for engravings and miniatures based on photographic images also determined daguerreotype patronage. The connections among the different sectors of the art market also suggest ways in which the distinctions between "high" and "low" art become blurred upon closer examination.;In their portrait choices, Philadelphians extended long-term cultural practices and modified others in ways that embodied local needs as well as incorporated broader national and international trends. They used small-scale portraits in particular ways, adapting widely available forms to specific, socially derived needs. Through their commission and use of portraits, Philadelphians simultaneously crafted their identities and shaped art markets.

This dissertation examines the feminized and racialized strategies of women organizers in the struggle for freedom. The lives of Lucy Randolph Mason and Ella Jo Baker suggest much about the ways in which women reject and change traditional leadership roles in order to create, build, and maintain the momentum of mass movements. Both women believed in the fundamental necessity of local people determining the responses to their oppression. This work, therefore, is an attempt to offer a description of Mason and Baker's organizing strategies and leadership styles, a description which can be read as a manual for creating social change.;Each woman functioned from a particular position---of privilege and/or protection---yet both chose to devote their lives to the struggle for racial and economic justice. Mason used her position as a Virginia aristocrat to reform the South, acting as a liaison between those who suffered and those in positions of authority she believed could assist them. Unlike Lucy Mason, Ella Jo Baker used her invisibility to organize working-class people because she was aware that politically active black voters threatened power structures. Each woman offers a glimpse into the contested world of women's activism and leadership---contested because it was largely prohibited by social conventions which privileged white males. Whether white or black, privileged or poor, each woman lived in a culture that proscribed leadership and activism for women. Given these prohibitions, each woman chose a path of leadership and organization that used her life experience as a strategy for social change. They each used tools provided by their specific vantage points for challenging racism, ultimately fashioning complementary archetypes for creating social change. The women were "neither bedecked nor bebosomed," as Ella Baker declared, meaning they both refused to remain constrained by any construction of women's work or identities that limited them to a pedestal, a kitchen, or a bedroom. Instead, they used prescribed roles to help undermine a system of racial supremacy that continues to haunt us. They show concretely that organizers are made, not born. We, too, can learn to change oppressive systems.

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