This study examines the socioeconomic lives of artisans of German descent who worked within Wythe County, Virginia from 1780 to 1830. It is particularly concerned with how a distinct German-American culture manifests over time as seen through these artisans' produced materials and structures. This thesis traces this manifestation through a careful examination of Wythe material culture, wills, probates, inventories, court records, account books, receipts, invoices, census records, personal correspondence, and personal property tax assessments. Scholars of early America and the southern backcountry have often narrated German cultural identity transformations along the lines of language and marriages. This work diverts from those tendencies, thereby complicating prior understanding of German-Americans settlement and development patterns in early America. Beginning in the 1780s entire German families, neighborhoods, and communities left their prior American homes and settled within a relatively unsettled area of southwest Virginia. These predominately second-generation German descendants brought with them to the backcountry a culturally-constructed material culture lexicon passed onto them by their ancestors. This thesis argues that artisans of Wythe County operated as major agents of economic and social development while also providing a hybridized cultural resource for their neighbors and surrounding Great Road communities. These German families and congregations, composed of farmers, hausfrauen (housekeepers), and craftsmen by trade, sought to maintain a familiar and distinct cultural landscape and ethos through the many wares and structures they produced. These German neighborhoods accommodated and diversified their trades to fit within a burgeoning early-American society while still aware of their predominately German community's cultural character and needs. / Master of Arts

By analyzing the language used in tombstone inscriptions, death notices, funeral sermons, and memoirs, this thesis reviews how cultural expectations placed on women during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries impacted the reputation of aged women. Specifically, it demonstrates how the ideology of domesticity contributed to the reputation of aged women as women and how advanced age influenced their exemplary place in society. Ultimately, this thesis argues the concept of gender identity that was influential throughout the life course was magnified in importance during old age. / Master of Arts

Thesis advisor: Owen Stanwood / The values of free trade, decentralized governance, and staunch anti-Catholicism that defined the British Empire in the eighteenth century were the result of decades of struggle between the Stuart monarchy and its subjects over the future direction of the empire. At the heart of this struggle were Scottish Presbyterians, who conceived this vision of empire while in exile as religious refugees in colonial North America. They opposed the Crown’s preference for an exclusionary, mercantilist, and avowedly Anglican (even crypto-Catholic) empire and fought to undermine it following the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660. They succeeded thanks to the religious and trade networks they created to connect their various diasporic communities in the Dutch Republic, northeastern America, and the Caribbean. Their networks also connected them to sympathetic colonial allies who provided the credit and patronage they needed to undermine English restrictions on their work and worship. Between 1660 and 1715, their success as smugglers and religious rabble-rousers, combined with the threat posed by the Darien scheme they financed and supplied, persuaded officials in London that embracing Scottish Presbyterians was a better means of advancing England’s imperial interests than continuing to marginalize them. The success of their networks during their period in exile left many Scots well placed to capitalize on their new status as legitimated Britons after 1707. They quickly filled leading commercial, military, political, and religious offices where they could continue to shape the British Empire in North America according to their vision in the eighteenth century. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

My dissertation argues that paper money created a new regime of value in early America, inscribed on the money itself and expressed in the political ordering of society. The radical ideas about money and value that inspired the colonial currencies originated in Commonwealth England. Those ideas spread to the North American colonies after the Restoration, where they conveyed changing notions about membership in the political community. Paper money, its proponents believed, constituted not only the “sinews” of trade and key to limitless wealth but also the “blood” that nourished the body politic. Ironically, the expansion of paper money in early America after 1710 both reflected and helped kindle broader material and cultural changes throughout the wider English Atlantic world that strained the bonds of the provincial political community. Ultimately, however, it was not these changes, but British attempts to control paper money in the mid-eighteenth century, that became corrosive to the imperial order. Disagreements over the prerogative to create money and value, I contend, occupied a key role in the crisis leading to the American Revolution. / 2020-02-14T00:00:00Z

In 1697 Massachusetts settler Hannah Duston was taken captive by a group of Abenaki Indians. Duston and her companions escaped captivity by using a tomahawk to kill ten of her captors. Within her captivity narrative, Duston inhabits the role of captor rather than captive, providing a literary framework for reading and understanding the process of Indian Removal in the nineteenth century. Like white captives in the early colonial period, Native Americans in the nineteenth century faced pressure to assimilate, forced marches through unfamiliar territory, and acts of shocking violence like the Wounded Knee Massacre. During this time period, the United States government and army as well as white settlers took on the role of captors, keeping Indian tribes in captivity with these tactics. Understanding the period of Indian Removal as a type of captivity narrative increases our understanding of the shocking violence that accompanied the Indian Removal Policy. As a literary genre, captivity narratives created a national narrative of violence between white settlers and Indian tribes. The struggle for domination in the genre thus became the central struggle of the United States as white Americans embraced and advanced the fight against Native Americans for land and cultural supremacy in North America.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Miami University, Dept. of English, 2004. / Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 140-165).

This dissertation uncovers women healers' vital role in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century healthcare marketplace. Euro-American women healers participated in networks of health information sharing that reached across lines of class and gender, and included female practitioners in American Indian and African American communities. Although their contributions to the healthcare labor force are relatively invisible in the historical record, women healers in the Delaware Valley provided the bulk of healthcare for their families and communities. Nonetheless, apart from a few notable monographs, women healers' practices and authority remain understudied. My project complicates a medical historiography that marginalizes female practitioners and narrates their declining healthcare authority after the mid-eighteenth century due to the emergence of a consumer society, a culture of domesticity, the professionalization of medicine, and the rise of enlightened science, which generated discourses of women's innate irrationality. Using the Philadelphia area as a case study, I argue that women healers were not merely static traditional practitioners destined to fall victim to the march of science, medicine, and capitalism as this older narrative suggests. Instead, I assert that women healers of various classes and ethnicities adapted their practices as they found new sources of healthcare authority through female education in the sciences, manuscript authorship, access to medical print media, the culture of sensibility, and the alternative gender norms of religious groups like the Quakers. Building on a longstanding foundation of recognized female practitioners, medically skilled women continued to fashion healing authority by participating in mutually affirming webs of medical information exchanges that reflected new ideas about science, health, and the body. In addition, women doctresses, herbalists, apothecaries, and druggists empowered themselves by participating in an increasingly commercialized and consumer-oriented healthcare marketplace. Within this unregulated environment, women healers in the colonies and early republic challenged physicians' claims to a monopoly on medical knowledge and practice. The practitioners analyzed in this study represent a bridge between the recognized and skilled women healers of the seventeenth century and the female healthcare professionals of the nineteenth century. / History

Rape had an indelible effect on the American Revolutionary era. Using trial testimonies and depositions, newspapers, and literary sources, this thesis argues that there was a level of continuity between peacetime and wartime rape characterized by the assaulters’ modus operandi and rape’s ideological exploitation. Eighteenth-century Anglo-American society dictated that rape, or “carnal knowledge of a woman forcibly against her will,” was only a crime against virtuous white women. The gendered and racialized ways pre-revolutionary society identified and prosecuted rape influenced how rapists conducted their assaults. Women had to prove their sexual morality, that penile penetration and male ejaculation occurred, and that they sought help immediately after the assault to prosecute their attackers. During the war, rape became an important metaphor. Wartime publishers and propagandists used reports and victim testimonies as evidence of British immorality and to justify political independence. The rape of America subsumed individual atrocities. The nationalization of women’s sexual virtue continued into the new Republic. Artists and writers memorialized the Revolution through explicitly sexualized narratives and sentimental novels that emphasized female sexual morality. Women’s sexual virtue was linked with the stability of the Republic. This thesis utilizes a diverse historiography to highlight the intersectional correlations between rape and eighteenth-century patriarchal power in America. / Graduate / 2022-08-26