The Spanish Fort San José, located on the St. Joseph Peninsula, was occupied from 1719 until 1723. This site is significant as it preserves key details on Spanish settlement, trade, and ethnic diversity on the northern Gulf Coast and relationships with aboriginal and other European peoples of the region. The first archaeological testing of this site was conducted in the 1960s, but limited information exists on this work, and the fort's structural remains are now gone. My research examines a recently discovered artifact collection from this site and combines the new data with information from extant collections from Florida State University and the University of West Florida. The research aims first, to document the large body of materials from the site, then to provide new insights on the nature of this remote and short-lived colonial outpost and how this settlement compares in material culture and inferred social and economic behavior with other contemporaneous aboriginal and Spanish settlements, including Santa Maria de Galve in Pensacola, approximately 225 km (140 mi) to the west, and Mission San Luis de Talimali in Tallahassee, approximately 127 km (79 mi) to the east. My artifact analysis, coupled with description from historical documents, resulted in the determination that Fort San José was not simply an outpost but is actually very similar to Santa Maria de Galve and Fort San Luis at the Mission San Luis de Talimali in both function and the artifacts that were left behind. Fort San José was intended to be a strong Spanish presence in the Gulf Coast, as evidenced by the number of individuals living here, the interactions they had with other colonial powers, and the remarkable footprint they left in just four short years.

<p>In the decades following the English Civil War, as the Anglophone world began transitioning to a social order structured by market and finance capitalism, the word cultivation, which earlier had referred exclusively to agricultural processes, acquired increasingly figurative meanings referring to the development of an individual's mind, faculties, and manners. This augmentation of meaning reflected the development of new conceptions of property as an essential feature of personhood that had begun to alter the definition of subjectivity. The circulation of such figurative meanings coincides with the rise of print culture, the development of a literary public sphere, and the professionalization of writing in the eighteenth century. These cultural developments suggest the relative ease with which the new conception of property expressed as literary personality coexisted alongside other forms of capital in Britain. Literary criticism of the last forty years, including the work of Raymond Williams, Clifford Siskin, Jerome Christensen, and Thomas Pfau, has accounted for the many ways in which possessing literary cultivation served the development of a middle-class economy and ideology in eighteenth-and-nineteenth century Britain. Though the figurative meaning of cultivation appears throughout American literature of the long nineteenth century, thus attesting to the concept's transatlantic migration and adaptation to the socio-political climates of the New World, no significant studies of American literature have considered the role literary cultivation itself plays in shaping American ideas of personality. My study begins to facilitate an understanding of how modern definitions of property affected and effected early American literary culture.</p><p>By placing American literature of the long nineteenth century in a transatlantic context, I show how five works by De Crevecoeur, Franklin, Equiano, Brockden Brown, and Margaret Fuller model the relationship between real and metaphorical cultivation at the level of both form and narrative content. I argue that within these works literary personality appears as a threat to the American character unless it directly facilitates the acquisition of real property. That in an American context figurative cultivation is at all times subordinated to real cultivation suggests a suspicion of intellectual development at the very foundations of American culture. I draw on new work in early American literature, eighteenth-century studies, British Romanticism, and on a tradition of Marxist critique to read American personality not as an exceptional and isolated development of the revolutionary era, but as a transatlantic migration of cultural forms and conceptions that adapt and mutate upon arriving on New World soil. To understand these migrations and mutations, I map the importation of European aesthetic concepts and literary sources within American productions. My readings make sense of the contradictions within the anti-literary American ideology often articulated in the content of works, whose forms nevertheless reveal a comprehensive engagement with literary history. Doing so allows me to demonstrate the complex ways in which early American authors depicted literary cultivation as either a means of acquiring real property or as a moral redress against the self interest of a speculative economic culture.</p> / Dissertation

The utopian picture of America presented in the first two-thirds of St. John de Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) contrasts sharply with the description of southern slavery and the effects of the American Revolution given in the final third of the book. Critics of Letters often account for this change in tone by attributing the utopian vision to the narrator, James. In this view, the progression of the book results either from James's disillusionment at the failure of his utopian hopes, or from a process of education whereby he alters that vision or unrealistically reaffirms it. However, evidence in the text suggests that James used a utopian vision supplied by his minister as a contrast to his own more realistic vision in order to educate his European correspondent. James provides examples that illustrate the elements of his utopian vision and the threats to it. Letters thus reveals a narrator who is neither naive nor unrealistic. / Department of English