Abstract Annie Heloise Abel (1873–1947) was one of only thirty American women to earn a PhD in history prior to the First World War. She was the first academically trained historian in the United States to consider the development of Indian–white relations and, although her focus was narrowly political and her methodology almost entirely archival-based, in this she was a pioneer. Raised in the bucolic atmosphere of a late-Victorian Sussex village, at the age of twelve she became an actual pioneer when her parents moved to the Kansas frontier in the 1880s. She was the third child and eldest daughter among seven remarkable siblings, children of a Scottish gardener, each of whom obtained a college education and fulfilled the American dream of financial stability and status. Annie Abel’s academic career was one of rare success for a woman of the period and she studied at Kansas, Cornell, Yale, and Johns Hopkins universities. She was the first woman to win a Bulkley scholarship to Yale, where her doctoral thesis won her an American Historical Association award and was published in its annual report. As well as college teaching, for a short time she was historian at the Office (now Bureau) of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC, and was also involved in women’s suffrage issues. She reached the peak of her academic teaching career as a history professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, one of the country’s most prestigious women’s institutions of higher learning. She combined her teaching with research and wrote some minor pieces prior to her major work, a three-volume political history of the Indian Territory during the American Civil War, which was published between 1915 and 1925. Her life took an unexpected turn while on a research sabbatical in Australia when, aged nearly fifty, she found romance and then experienced a disastrous, short-lived marriage. Undeterred, she returned to America and continued to pursue her primary professional interest as an independent researcher, winning grants that took her to England and Canada, until her retirement to Aberdeen, Washington, in the 1930s. During this latter period of her life Annie Abel-Henderson (as she now styled herself) produced no original works but continued to publish editions of historically important manuscripts, work she had begun early in her career. Her research interests also covered early North American exploration narratives and, as an extension of her work on Indian–white relations, she had planned an ambitious, comparative study of United States and British Dominion policy towards colonised peoples. As a reviewer, her historical expertise was long sought by the leading academic history journals of the day. Before her death at seventy four from carcinoma, her final years were busy with war relief work and occasional writing. No full-length work has yet appeared on this pioneer historian and this dissertation seeks to evaluate Annie Heloise Abel’s work by a close reading of her textual legacy—original, editorial and commentarial—and to assess her importance in American historiography.

This thesis examines historical writing and use of history among women within the Swedish nobility during the early modern period. The study has shown that political history in several cases was transmitted for the purpose of protecting or asserting collective, family-related aswell as individual status and positions, within the framework of women's informal exercise of power. Consequently, it can also be understood as expressions of emotion and political agendas in one – in other words as emotives. Sources conveying political history often express political diplomacy, which for example shows in how they separate content in different categories, support power or omit politically sensitive information. It can be explained by that the authors and their relatives were actors during the strengthening of the early modern state apparatus, and also victims of an ongoing power struggle within and between the nobility and the crown. The thesis also shows examples of internalized conflicts or possible cognitive dissonances relating to simultaneously fearing and depending on power, most clearly for the later investigation period. The study also exemplifies how material produced in this field could be viewed after the establishment of modern genre conventions, when it was often categorized into privately coded genres. Furthermore it shows that the private characteristics of rhetoric enabling this may have been a strategic choice in order to enable a political narrative.

The acquisition of the home of George Washington by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association in 1858 was probably the first preservation project led by women in the United States. During the following decades, elite Philadelphia and Montgomery County women continued the construction of historical memory through the organization and popularization of exhibitions, fundraising galas, preservation of historical sites, publication of historical writings, and the erection of patriotic monuments. Drawing from a wide variety of sources, including annual organizations' reports, minutes of committees and of a DAR chapter, correspondence, reminiscences, newspapers, circulars, and ephemera, the dissertation argues that privileged women constructed a classed and gendered historical memory, which aimed to write women into the national historical narrative and present themselves as custodians of history. They constructed a subversive historical account that placed women on equal footing with male historical figures and argued that women played a significant role in shaping the nation's history. During the first three decades, privileged women advanced an idealized memory of Martha and George Washington with an intention to reconcile the sectional rift caused by the Civil War. From the early 1890s, with the formation of the Daughters of the American Revolution, elite women of colonial and revolutionary war ancestry constructed a more inclusive memory of revolutionary soldiers that aimed to inculcate the public, particularly recent immigrants, in patriotic and civic values. An introductory chapter demonstrates the social, political, and economic vulnerability of the elites and the institutions and historical memory they forged to shore up their privileged status from the colonial period to the Civil War. Through the organization of the Great Central Fair held in Philadelphia in 1864, the fundraising campaign on behalf of the Centennial Exposition, the preservation of George Washington's Headquarters at Valley Forge, the formation of the Historical Society of Montgomery County, and the activities of the Valley Forge Chapter DAR the dissertation demonstrates that women employed their experience to expand their activities beyond regional boundaries while also tending to local history. The dissertation contributes to the discussion regarding the construction of memory by adding gender and class as categories of analysis. It also adds to the historical debate regarding the professionalization of history by exploring women's historical writings during the period of institutionalization of history. / History