This study investigates the form and function of early, mass-produced visual representations of British society in Calcutta during the last two decades of the eighteenth-century, a time when the English East India Company's power was expanding in South Asia. In particular, this essay examines the aquatint streetscapes of the white town of Calcutta produced by Thomas and William Daniell between 1786 and 1788. The relationships between European aesthetic theories and Indian ecology, anxieties of colonial rule and difference, projects of colonial knowledge and representation, and metropolitan controversies of imperial rule informed the Daniells Views of Calcutta. Their picturesque prints depicted this sector of Calcutta as a neoclassical locus of colonial development and European civilization, differentiating a largely South Asian urban population from the white ruling elite. This paper reveals how these images of British and Indian life in Calcutta served multiple functions when circulating in the subcontinent. The Daniells streetscapes argued against metropolitan criticism of Company misrule by challenging assumptions that Britons in the subcontinent had succumbed to oriental corruption. I argue that by depicting the British as a necessarily distinct social sector that acted as a civilizing force and proper ruler over the Indian peasantry, these images mystified cultural borrowings and the fragility of European life in India.

The othering of Welsh persons was a recurrent feature of English home tour travelogues throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet, in the eighteenth-century English popular imaginary, the Welsh landscape acquired new meanings as a locus of picturesque topographical beauty. Against this background of anterior travel accounts proclaiming Welsh social otherness and visual praise of Waless ecological picturesque beauty, William Daniell and Richard Ayton defined the objectives of their travels around the entire coast of Great Britain culminating in their 1814 travelogue, Voyage Round Great Britain. While few scholars have given more than a passing glance to Ayton and Daniells first travelogue, there has been consensus that it was a romanticist hymn to the insularity of a nation following the tumult and tribulations of the Napoleonic Wars. I argue that Aytons text and Daniells accompanying aquatints did not delineate the margins of the Island in order to reveal coastal Britons as a metonym for the social variation of a single, homogenizing British populace. They located social difference, the sublime horrors of the coast, and neglected spaces in Britains wildest parts in order to illuminate that there was little coherence to Britishness. Aytons text identified two antithetical definitions of coastal Britain: the pristine, neglected sublime coast of deadly rocks and unadulterated Welsh villages, as opposed to the terrain-blighting metal works and picturesque pleasure spaces frequented by metropolitan holidaymakers.

By illuminating the complexities of 1920s American society, college football serves as a remarkably insightful cultural device. At the commencement of the decade, a national business community one that had been developing since the late nineteenth century appeared to have come to fruition. The more connected nature of the country served to homogenize the United States economically, politically, and even socially. Citizens who had once lived autonomously found themselves more interconnected with neighboring regions of the country, and thus increasingly defined by national characteristics. This served as an internal crisis of sorts because regional identity operated as a unique and crucial component of individual Americans personal identities. In this atmosphere, it makes sense that when college football nationalized in the 1920s the sport would follow the same pattern a diminishment of regionalism as the sport expanded. However, the opposite occurred as supporters ties with their regional football communities strengthened when encountered with competition from outside teams. This study utilizes the Walter Camp All-American football team, the Southern Methodist University football team, and the 1929 Carnegie Report on college athletics to explore the growth and nationalization of the game during the decade. This thesis concludes that, by the end of the 1920s, changes in college football and American society allowed for a more connected national football community as opposed to the regional disassociation that existed prior to the decade, while at the same time reinforcing and even strengthening regional identity by placing it within a competitive national context. What the growth of college football illustrates is not just a simple transition from isolated communities to a homogenous nation, but rather, how regions became more important as the nation unified. This study complicates the traditional notion that diverse localities easily eroded in the face of a more structured and nationalized 1920s American society. Furthermore, by examining a variety of crucial personal actions associated with 1920s college football, this study demonstrates that individual supporters, not an uncontrollable environment or institutions connected to the game, made regional football communities an integral component of the sport.

The Great War (1914-1919) forced society to decide whether cultural heritage institutions, as a whole, had value. An examination of the types of materials gathered during the Great War, the identity of the collectors, and the intended purpose the repositories highlights the shift in the methodological practices of libraries, archives, and museums during this period. This study focuses primarily on three Allied museums created during the conflict: The Imperial War Museum in England, the Bibliothèque-Musée de La Guerre in France, and the Liberty Memorial in the United States. These institutions emphasize how types of repositories were used as they instituted contemporary collecting practices to further education, to create community-based collections for increased public understanding, and to create a social memory about the Great War.

The American Civil War and the Italian Unification occurred simultaneously, and the major parties involved the American government, the Confederacy, the Italian state, and the still-independent Papal States interacted with each other on numerous occasions. The revolutionaries of the Risorgimento served as promising recruits for the Unions armies, especially Garibaldi himself, although only Italians already in America actually fought. Italy would receive ironclad warships from the wartime United States. Those actions, however, alienated the Papal States from the North, presenting the Confederacy a diplomatic opportunity. The positive position of Catholicism in the South permitted the Confederacy to act and the possibility of diplomatic recognition by Catholic countries in Europe, particularly France, provided the Confederacy with the motivation to reach out to the Vatican. While the Confederacy did not receive recognition, it did receive a letter from Pope Pius IX expressing his sympathies, which the Confederacy at times portrayed as a formal recognition. Armed with the argument that the Pope had recognized its sovereignty, the Confederacy tried to dissuade Catholics from enlisting in the Union military. Any successes, however, were too minor to be effective. During the war, a bitter debate developed in the press about the letters meaning, a debate that extended into the postwar period largely as a weapon against Catholicism, especially when coupled with the Popes postwar support for former Confederates. The distortion of the letter as a sign of recognition lived on in anti-Catholic rhetoric, sometimes supported even by members of the U.S. government. The argument, however, was later refuted by Catholic prelates and historians. The Pope and the Presidents contributes to a growing scholarship on the internationalization of the Civil War by revealing the complex relationships between all the parties in the Civil War and the Italian Unification. Taking the analysis a step further, it looks at these relationships in ways that many previous historians, ignoring the interactions of multilateral diplomacy, overlooked. It does so bringing together secondary research from scholars who examined the histories separately and using a wealth of newspaper articles and other documents now accessible though digitalization.

The social question of the Victorian age centered on poverty: the who; the what; and most importantly, the why of poverty. By the end of the nineteenth century, the why had been obscured by a search for the causes of overcrowding, epidemics, starvation, sanitation, and unemployment, all seen as symptoms of poverty but often confused as causes of poverty. Bethnal Green was emblematic of all of these conditions, and many social experiments were conducted to alleviate these symptoms. With the evacuation of London during World War II, as well as the mass destruction of buildings in Bethnal Green, overcrowding was finally alleviated. Bethnal Green fell into worse conditions, however, as war-torn buildings were left to rot, and movement into the area was tightly controlled. The massive social movements which had been enacted in Bethnal Green prior to the war lost steam as national attention was directed elsewhere. The model dwellings, tenements, and philanthropic institutions carried on, but at a considerably reduced volume. This work explores the social, cultural, institutional, and civic efforts made to alleviate overcrowding and sanitation issues in Bethnal Green from 1881 to 1950. Local and national perspectives of these efforts are offered, with the idea of putting a human face to the epidemic of poverty. Many of the civic and philanthropic efforts were misguided, as they destroyed kinship networks, limited movement of the people, and involuntarily displaced residents to locations far from their employment. Local identity, at times a boon and a curse, was destroyed as well. Bethnal Green held a place in history as the epitome of the slums, slum clearance, and the efforts to alleviate poverty. Many aspects of poverty and the efforts to alleviate it have been explored, but in broad terms. This is a study of local effects of these efforts on a designated area of London, with a specific and definable people, with cultural and social aspects which were unique to the area.

Henry VIII ruled England from 1509-1547, producing some of the most identifiable and enduring figures and events in English history. This was largely due to the kings skill at image manipulation and communication. This thesis focuses specifically on the period from 1509-1536, during which the whims of the king led to the rise and fall of two queens, the destruction of three ministers, and arguably the most significant religious and political controversies of the sixteenth century. It was the age of humanism, reformation, and the birth of modern political theory and practice. In the midst of this upheaval, the crown used primitive forms of public relations theory to justify the kings divorce from his first wife Catherine of Aragon in favor of his mistress, to break with Catholicism, and to establish supremacy of the newly created Church of England. Henry would have five other wives throughout his reign, but none is more notorious than Anne Boleyn. She was at the heart of the conflict in this period. This thesis examines the rise and fall of Queen Anne as an example of Henry VIIIs use of systematic image communication to destroy those who threatened his image as king. This work argues that the fall of Anne Boleyn was a crisis in gender relations that facilitated a larger-scale public relations crisis. It was this public relations crisis that fundamentally threatened Henrys honor and authority, ultimately leading to Boleyns undoing. This thesis will use Boleyn as a framework for understanding Henry VIIIs championing of his honor and authority above all and his use of public relations to communicate this right to the throne of England.

You cant beat brains, said President John Kennedy of the intellectuals and technicians he assembled in his cabinet. Kennedy was perhaps the greatest political champion for the virtues of expertise. However, all over America during the 1960s and 70s, diverse groups voiced doubts about how much experts, such as social scientists, policy specialists, and others, actually improved life. This dissertation examines how movements on the political left and right, and spiritual ruptures such as the rise of 60s counterculture and of evangelicalism, spoke in different language to express a similar point: human mastery over the world is profoundly limited. Many believed, as a result, that rational planning too should be limited. In this regard, the dissertation is part of the historiography of the decline of American liberalism, and its foundation, expert management. The dissertation is foremost a cultural and intellectual history locating for its sources the artifacts of mass culture and, to a lesser extent, political. A reading of American cinema produced from the 1950s through the 1970s, as well as of songs, sermons, presidential rhetoric, and popular nonfiction, demonstrates the tense relationship Americans had with experts. The study pays especially close attention to several of the films of Henry Fonda, and the symbolic meaning of some of his characters as idealized rational humanists. Through the rhetoric of psychedelic music, presidential speeches, anti-war rallies, and evangelical nonfiction, this dissertation locates the sources of hostility toward those who justify their authority by appealing to expertise.

This dissertation examines the earliest surviving sources on the virgin martyr Agnes. Agnes is significant due to the popularity of her cult and the large number of early sources recounting her martyrdom. This dissertation argues that the fourth-century bishops Damasus and Ambrose, along with the Christian poet Prudentius, helped construct the narrative of Agnes passion in order to help popularize her cult throughout western Christendom. In an effort to promote virgin asceticism to their communities, they endorsed Agnes as the dominant exemplum for female piety in the west. By doing so, they associated themselves with the influential martyr. Since Agnes was a Roman martyr, the role of Damasus, the bishop of Rome, is particularly significant in the formation of the Agnes narrative. This dissertation examines how the Agnes narrative developed from the simple nine-line elogium of Pope Damasus into the complex accounts of Ambrose, Prudentius and the Gesta Martyrum Romanorum. It demonstrates that the account of Pope Damasusalthough short and seemingly less influential than the near contemporary accounts of Ambrosewas the primary motivator for the development of female hagiography. Damasus was the chief Christian administrator in a city coming to terms with its Christian identity. His elogia, which he heavily modeled on Virgilian epic verse, gave Rome a Christian past just as glorious as its pagan heritage. The influence of Damasus can be seen in the works of his younger contemporary Ambrose of Milan, who references the Agnes elogium, and the Christian poet Prudentius, who fervently embraces the elogium when writing his own classicizing Christian epic.

The leaders of the Confederate States of America proved eager and desirous of the power of the federal government. Rather than constituting an anomalous, ironical, or revolutionary episode in American political history, the Confederacy sought to conserve their definition of American liberty and democracy, with its racial grants, privileges, and sanction of slavery, through the power of government. The embrace of federal power was an intentional, central, and desirable feature of government, and one that Confederates embraced in order to sustain and project their nation and its vision of American democracy.