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The creation of a new political culture, comprised of the Democratic and Whig parties, in Rutherford County, Tennessee, resulted from a community division over the desirability of both political and economic change. Before the early 1830s, Rutherford County had been a Democratic party stronghold. But when, in light of the community's own economic stagnation, those who doubted the Democrats' wisdom in opposing a national bank, joined John Bell and Hugh Lawson White's political revolt in 1835, a new way of politics soon appeared in Rutherford County. The Depression of 1837, which severely rocked Rutherford Countians, turned more "true" Jackson men toward the ranks of the opposition. Once the financial policies of the Jackson and Van Buren administrations wre discredited, a consistent majority of Rutherford Countians became loyal members of the Whig party. Parties, therefore, had crystallized by 1839. Despite Democratic efforts at regaining the state capital for Rutherford County and maintaining the traditional character of the community, most Rutherford Countians opted for the Whig view of the world, even if that meant significant economic changes would occur.;The Whigs and Democrats of Rutherford County were different men. A majority of Whigs lived in the Garden of the community, while most Democrats lived in the Barrens. Whigs, therefore, were wealthier men. They also held different occupations, with one-fourth of the Whig party leaders engaged in commerce and/or manufacturing.;Quite possibly, the author suggests, the concept of modernization is a good explanation of the changes that Rutherford Countians experienced from 1800 to 1850. They did construct a recognizably modern political system and the issue of modern finance--the central banking system of Nicholas Biddle's Bank of the United States--was the major issue undermining the county's Democratic consensus.

The purpose of this study is threefold. First, it explores the complex religious, social, political, and intellectual changes that coursed through Massachusetts society from 1630 to 1763. Second, it assesses the validity of sociological modernization theory as a means of studying colonial society. Finally, it develops a psychological theory of modernization. Sources include public records, books, pamphlets, and documents from the period, and standard secondary works.;Modernization involves the evolution of western society from a traditional life style reflecting predominantly local, family, and religious concerns, to patterns of existence characterized by centralized political forms, modern economic structures and values, and secular and ideological modes of thought. Psychologically, it is characterized by concerns with self-esteem and by attempts to regain the lost gratifications of traditionalism.;Chapter one explores the traditional nature of early Massachusetts society and its transformation in the face of political and economic events of the seventeenth century. Chapters two and three follow the growth of the House of Representatives into an eighteenth-century modern, centralized political body, representative of both middle-class goals and popular thought and the most important regulatory force within the colony. Chapter four examines the emergence of the whig ideology, focusing on its secular roots, its function as a unifying agent, and its reflection of social and economic discontent.;The fifth chapter analyzes the ambivalent emotional and intellectual reactions of colonists to nascent, modern economic structures. Chapter six analyzes the Great Awakening as a crisis of generativity and cultural transference, a symptom of the inability of the colonists to bridge the gap between traditional and modern social structures. The final chapter is an overview of Massachusetts society from 1743 to 1763, stressing the alternating feelings of despair and hope in a society increasingly torn by political factionalism and economic discontent.;These changes resulted in a society that was, in 1763, more secular and more materialistically oriented than its seventeenth-century counterpart. But the earlier society continued to exert its hold on the later one, constraining and directing its development in directions that reflected the search for traditional social and emotional gratifications.

Between May 1763 and the fall of 1764, Indians living west of the Appalachian Mountains wage a war they hoped would rid them of the growing menace posed by English military forces and colonial traders and settlers. These Anglo-Americans had begun to occupy the trans-Appalachian region in 1758 as French power in North America declined during the last years of the Great War for the Empire.;Historians since Francis Parkman have tended to deal with this Anglo-Indian war in two ways. First, the conflict has been interpreted in terms of a pan-Indian conspiracy led by a single visionary figure, Pontiac. This interpretation tends to ignore causation in favor of assumptions about Anglo-Indian relations rooted in concepts of civilization versus savagery and directs attention to the military conflict itself A second interpretation, represented in studies of British imperial politics during the eighteenth century, deals with the dynamics of Anglo-Indian relations only insofar as they relate directly to larger issues of imperial policies and administration. This London-Centered perspective precludes any understanding of events in America on their own terms. Neither of these general interpretations has placed the events of 1763-1764 in a context of on-going Anglo-Indian relations nor satisfactorily explores the reasons why these relations degenerated into a war that had ramifications both for those directly involved and the larger pattern of English and colonial frontier policies.;By looking at the conflict as the result of efforts by colonists, royal officials, and western Indians to deal with each other on several levels, a new interpretation based on an ethnohistorical approach to largely traditional sources emerges. In the wake of the French defeat, both Indians and Englishmen faced a number of pressing security problems generated by the radically altered political and economic balance of power. Far from being immediately hostile to the on-coming English, western Indians displayed a variety of strategies in their efforts to deal with the new invaders, strategies rooted in cultural values as well as past experience. Difficulties arose when English military leaders increasingly defined their solution to an expanded American empire in terms of reducing Indians to a level of impotence and manageability through trade regulation and armed force. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of author.) UMI.

During the political squabbles in Virginia that alienated royal governors, burgesses, councilors, and freeholders from one another between 1680 and 1740, middling planters displayed a tendency to ignore the wisdom of their social and economic betters and swayed the colony toward a new political style. When it suited their aspirations, governors, councilors, and burgesses plunged into the business of wooing the freeholders and thus encouraged the electoral ascendancy of the colony's middling men, but at other times they viewed the changes in Virginia's political etiquette suspiciously and objected to what they interpreted as a dangerous trend toward too much popular participation in politics. Politically embattled gentlemen feared any decline in the deference they and their fathers had come to expect from their constituents, and they looked for ways to consolidate, legitimize, and sometimes regain their claims to deference and thus power.;In the seventeenth century the fiat of wealth was accepted as sufficient proof of political legitimacy, but in the context of the profound reordering of social relationships that accompanied the rise of black slavery in the Chesapeake, material things emerged as an important, even essential, prop to any claim to political or social leadership. Virginians and their English cousins had always used material things as a device by which they could measure, compare, and classify each other and gain some sense of whether another household's links to their own were fragile and unconnected or knit with the knot of collateral concern. Material possessions had long served as an essential measure of a man's political "worthiness," but in the 1720s the gentry feared that the traditional instruments of prestige--generous holdings in land, labor, and livestock--had lost much of their clout and that the distinctions between rich and poor had grown too thin. In the absence of any persuasive distinctions between the social origins of the colony's emerging native-born elite and the "middling sorts," and as blacks emerged by about 1720 as the colony's permanent poor, the gentry sought new ways to distinguish inferiors from superiors. New material possessions filled that need, and new distinctions in dress, housing, diet, and burial customs began to re-clarify the boundaries between the colony's humbler residents and its nascent elite. The effect of the distinctions between the new, elite culture and the older, traditional culture shared by everyone else was the legitimization of the gentry's claim to exercise political power over their fellows and the preservation of their social and political hegemony.

Historic preservation movements and their philosophies generally have been overlooked by historians as particular reflections of their periods. This is a cultural history, therefore, of two organizations--the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA, 1889) and the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA, 1910)--from their establishment through the Progressive era. Since both organizations mirrored the perspectives, class, and culture of their organizers and leaders, this study relies upon the published and unpublished writings of the leading preservationists. Fearing that society had abandoned the traditions associated with their ancestors, they preached a Gospel of Preservation, a message that the future stability of society was inextricably linked to the citizen's loyalty to traditionalism. Striving to regenerate the older values, ethics, and discipline, preservationists used historic buildings and sites as symbols for the old order and as devices to influence the course of modern society. The two associations, however, employed different means to implement their gospels. While the APVA concentrated its efforts on a romantic reinterpretation of Virginia history, the SPNEA emphasized a scientific preservation of New England's built environment.;Both organizations were integral parts of traditionalist resurgences in their respective regions. After two decades of chaos, the APVA used history to help restore the conservatives' order, identity, and philosophy of traditionalism. The SPNEA, on the other hand, reacted to changes resulting from immigration and industrial capitalism. It worked to professionalize the movement, establish scientific methods, protect the Yankee's material culture, and thereby insure the Anglo-Saxon's imprint upon the region. Hoping to influence modern society, the two associations therefore used different tactics to popularize their inherited cultures. In the process preservationists helped to regenerate earlier traditions, secure Anglo-Saxon cultural hegemony, institutionalize a civil religion, and inspire traditionalist leaders through the lessons embodied in the preserved past. The societal perspectives of these preservationists, like those of many progressives, were limited, however, by their class interests and ethnocentrism. The Gospel of Preservation accordingly represented a prologue premised upon the class and cultural values of the preservationists.