Thesis advisor: Penelope Ismay / This dissertation traces the changing distributions of social responsibility for fire in Calcutta and London across the long-nineteenth century. While these two cities were the capitals of the British Empire, with similar adoptions of municipal fire brigades, the public trust systems that undergirded these institutions varied greatly, revealing how municipal fire protection required more than municipal authority and technological innovation to be effective and acceptable to urban citizens. This dissertation examines how these cities endeavored to limit the fire danger that went hand in hand with imperial economic growth and in the process created systems by which the social responsibility for fire was divided between urban citizens and newly-instituted municipal fire brigades. Specifically, I ask how did the British Empire approach the destructive force of fire as a social problem in the rapidly modernizing urban environments of the nineteenth century? Other historians have argued that growing municipal authority or technological innovation in the name of efficiency account for the changes in nineteenth-century fire protection, but this dissertation argues instead that expanded municipal control, adopting new technologies, and the creation of municipal firefighting institutions were all a response to breakdowns in trust. Solving the fire problem could not be entirely top-down, nor completely bottom-up, but required a trusting relationship between urban citizens and municipal governments that was rare in the nineteenth-century British Empire. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

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<p>In Canada, as in the United States, cities seemed to many to be in complete disarray in the 1960s. Growing populations and the resultant increased demands for housing fed rapid suburban sprawl, creating a postwar burst of urban and suburban planning as consultants were hired in city after city to address the challenges of the postwar era. During this period expressway proposals sparked controversy in urban centres across the developed world, including every major city in Canada, namely Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montréal and Halifax. Residents objected to postwar autocentric planning designed to encourage and promote the continued growth of city centres. Frustrated by unresponsive politicians and civic officials, citizen activists challenged authorities with an alternate vision for cities that prioritized the safeguarding of the urban environment through the preservation of communities, the prevention of environmental degradation, and the promotion of public transit. As opponents recognized the necessity of moving beyond grassroots activism to established legal and government channels to fight expressways, their protests were buoyed by the rapidly rising costs that plagued the schemes. By the latter half of the 1960s, many politicians and civil servants had joined the objectors. Growing concerns over the many costs of expressways -- financial, social, environmental, and eventually, political -- resulted in the defeat of numerous expressway networks, but most were qualified victories with mixed legacies.</p> <p>Expressway disputes were an instrumental part of a wider struggle to define urban modernity, a struggle that challenged the basis of politicians and civil servants power by questioning their legitimacy as elected leaders and uniquely qualified experts, respectively. The subsequent emergence of urban reform groups that sought to change the direction of city development by challenging the autocratic municipal bureaucracies was the direct legacy of expressway and other development battles. Despite this, autocentric planning continued and demands for greater citizen participation did not result in significant changes to the form and function of municipal governments.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Battle of the Corner: Urban Policing and Rioting in the United States, 1943-1971 provides a national history of police reform and police-citizen conflicts in marginalized urban neighborhoods in the three decades after World War II. Examining more than a dozen cities, the dissertation shows how big-city police brass and downtown-friendly municipal elites in the late 1940s and 1950s attempted to professionalize urban law enforcement and regulate rank-and-file discretion through Police-Community Relations programs and novel stop-and-frisk preventive patrol schemes. These efforts ultimately failed to produce diligent yet impartial street policing. Beginning in the late 1950s, and increasing in severity and frequency until the early 1960s, young black and Latino working-class urban residents surrounded, taunted, and attacked police officers making routine arrests. These crowd rescues garnered national attention and prepared the ground for the urban rebellions of 1964 to 1968, many of which began with a controversial police incident on a crowded street corner. While telling a national story, Battle of the Corner provides deeper local context for postwar changes to street policing through detailed case studies highlighting the various stakeholders in reform efforts. In the 1950s and 1960s, African-American activists, block clubs, residents, and politicians pressured police for effective but fair and accountable tactical policing to check rising criminal violence and street disorder in neighborhoods increasingly blighted by urban renewal. Rank-and-file police unions fought civilian review boards and used new collective bargaining rights to stage job actions to obtain higher wages. They also obtained “bill of rights” contract provisions to shield members from misconduct investigations. Police management took advantage of newly-available federal and local resources after the riots to reorganize their departments into top-down bureaucratic organizations capable of conducting stop-and-frisk on a more systematic scale. By the early 1970s, a rising generation of urban black politicians confronted skyrocketing rates of criminal violence, armed militants intent on waging war on the police, and a politically-empowered rank-and-file angry and combative over the more intense threats and pressures they faced on the job. Battle of the Corner breaks ground in telling a national story of policing that juxtaposes elite decision-making and street confrontations and that analyzes a wide range of actors who held a stake in securing order and justice in urban neighborhoods. In chronicling how urban police departments emerged from the profound institutional crisis of the 1960s with greater power, resources, and authority, Battle of the Corner provides a history and a frame for understanding policing controversies today. / History

In 1972, a flood tore through Rapid City, South Dakota, killing 238 people. Many whose lives and homes were destroyed lived in a predominately Native American neighborhood known as “Osh Kosh Camp.” This dissertation asks: why did those people lived in that neighborhood at that time? The answer lies at the intersection of the histories of race and environment in the American West. In the Black Hills region, white Americans racialized certain spaces under the conceptual framework of Indian Country as part of the process of American conquest on the northern plains beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The American project of racializing Western spaces erased Indians from histories of Rapid City, a process most obviously apparent in the construction of Mount Rushmore as a tourist attraction. Despite this attempted erasure, Indians continued to live and work in the city and throughout the Black Hills. In Rapid City, rampant discrimination forced Native Americans in Rapid City to live in neighborhoods cut off from city services, including Osh Kosh Camp After the flood, activists retook the Indian Country concept as a tool of protest. This dissertation claims that environment and race must be understood together in the American West. / History