In this dissertation, I argue that many of Louisianas founding administrative and military elite relied on French social norms to ground their own social authority in the New World. For these colonists, France represented the height of intellectual and cultural achievement in the world and they wanted this greatness to assure their status in colonial America. They used French court standards to organize and stabilize their New World lives as they asserted elite privilege and status in America. Consequently, even though manyif not mostof these individuals were not born aristocrats, they recreated themselves in America as representatives of crown authority and adherents to the standards of French high society. This loyalty maintained elite ties to the French court and provided them authority to discipline French Louisiana, particularly New Orleans. They employed the urban planning and engineering developed under Louis XIV to design New Orleans. They also used his Parisian laws to discipline the marketplace and morals of the colonys majority. They promoted these standards even when they did not seem practical or reasonable in the bayous of the lower Mississippi or in Louisianas precarious placement among Native and European enemies. Remaining focused on French standards hampered elites abilities to understand or engage with the vast majority of European, Native, and African inhabitants who comprised Louisianas productive population. Consequently, when Louis XV severed their ties to France by dismantling pre-existing patronage networks, Louisianas elites found themselves a frustrated minority amongst a creative and adaptive majority.

In 1754, young George Washington, accompanied by Virginian soldiers and Indian allies, ambushed a French camp in the woods of the Ohio Country. Joseph Coulon de Villiers, sieur de Jumonville, the leader of the French party, died in the skirmish. The Affair and its aftermath provided an impetus for the French and Indian War. Primarily, scholars interpret the Affair as a milestone that helped to mold Washington into the hero of the Revolutionary War and the father of the American nation. This interpretation minimizes Jumonvilles side of the story. My project re-contextualizes the Affair by examining Jumonville and his family in New France. This dissertation argues that Jumonville and his family members, as diplomats, soldiers, and slaveholders, had complex relations with a diverse array of native people and that these interactions played a significant role in their professional and personal lives. Within this context, the Jumonville Affair appears as a commonplace event and Washington appears as simply a soldier who became embroiled in the dangerous world of early America.

On 21 April 1960 President Juscelino Kubitschek oversaw the inauguration of Brasília as the capital of Brazil. While construction of the city was far from complete at that moment, Kubitschek rightly laid claim to a tremendous administrative and political victory by having overseen the construction of a city ex nihilo in the remote Center-West to become the seat of the federal government during his five years in office. As the centerpiece and most conspicuous symbol of Kubitscheks program for national development, Brasília provided a focus for debates about the nations present and future. Virtually all aspects of the construction were intensely controversial and occurred during a time of relatively little government censorship. The debates about Brasília provide rare and valuable insight into how Brazilians from a variety of perspectives conceived of modernity and their place in it. This dissertation explores the campaign to build Brasília and its reception by various contemporaries through an analysis of the public debates as documented in newspapers and other media, official documents, the recollections of participants, and published primary sources related to the construction of Brasília. Brasília's inauguration marked the triumph of a particular vision of modernity, one that privileged socioeconomic modernization and investment in large-scale infrastructural improvements. It provided the framework, in both material and intellectual terms, for the developmental policies pursued by the military regime that governed the nation from the new capital from 1964 to 1985. Exhibiting an unwavering focus on the future, the planners of Brasília appeared to ignore the present, failing to address the problems that plagued existing cities and populations. Rather than an emblem of progress and development, with time, Brasília came to epitomize the continuation of politics as usualit was a top-down, forced effort at development that brought considerable economic growth, but that did not reach the majority of Brazilians. Nearly fifty years on, Brasília is neither the utopia nor failure imagined by proponents or detractors, but a living city that embodies the complex and contradictory nature of modernity in contemporary Brazil.

Forging the Masculine and Modern Nation: Race, Identity, and the Public Sphere in Cuba and Mexico, 1890s - 1930s David C. LaFevor This dissertation explores the gendered, nationalist, and racial ideas around the introduction of boxing in Cuba and Mexico in the early twentieth century. This transnational history traces the movement of cultural ideas and the appropriation of novel conceptualizations of the body, modernity, and masculinity against the backdrop of the enormous social and cultural upheavals of Cuban Independence and the Mexican Revolution. Advances in media technology brought paragons of transnational virility in the form of modern athletes increasingly within reach of Latin Americans from across the class spectrum; governments were forced to legalize the once barbaric sport of boxing. In the nineteenth century pugilism was outlawed and interpreted as the detritus of American culture. By the 1920s, influential media, the popularity of masculine role-models, and the success of Cubans and Mexicans in the prize ring against foreign opponents transformed boxing from a raffish preserve of cosmopolitan elites into a means to express working-class masculinity and national pride.

Dissertation under the direction of Professor David L. Carlton This project deals with political violence involving white southerners in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the circumstances through which the political significance of said violence was obscured or erased in the public memory. For decades after the American Civil War, Breathitt County, Kentucky seemed to be an unusually violent place. During the war it was the battlefield for a series of guerilla skirmishes and, after the war was officially over, the same sort of political and racial discord seen in other areas of the Reconstruction-era South was rampant there as well. As violence continued there after it had subsided elsewhere, Breathitt Countyâs historical similarities to the rest of the South were confounded, often intentionally, by the term âfeudâ and its apolitical connotations of kinship and antiquity. The varieties of violence used there, and the political situations that caused them, reveal similarities to larger trends in American and World history. While âfeudâ suggested a peculiar sui generis occurrence, evidence suggests that Breathitt Countyâs violent history reflected problems also experienced in the outside world.

In the 1950s, the conservative New Right experienced its initial stirrings in a grassroots level movement dedicated to routing out communism and perceived socialism in the United States. At the forefront of this movement were various women-led groups, including the American Public Relations Forum (APRF) of Southern California. Concurrent with the rise of the New Right was the rise of the New Left, which opposed the nuclear arms race, the Vietnam War, and, later, racism and sexism. One particular group (though really a decentralized movement), Women Strike for Peace (WSP), was particularly active in these campaigns. Both the APRF and WSP utilized maternalist rhetoric and politics to not only recruit new members and mobilize existing members, but also to attract the attention of male politicians in an era when women were expected to remain in the domestic sphere. This thesis speaks to the larger trends in U.S. history of womens political collectivism, Red Scares and xenophobia, and the rise and fall of political parties from power. Most importantly, this thesis reveals the versatility of maternalist rhetoric in political campaigns by tracing its utilization by these two groups from different ends of the political spectrum through the end of the twentieth century.

Although Spain acquired Louisiana in 1762 to serve as a strategic border against British expansion, Spanish officials faced challenges in their attempt to establish the Mississippi River as an imperial boundary. These challenges included resistance of Acadians immigrating to the colony as well as the expansion of British trade networks into the Lower Mississippi Valley. Acadians settling in Louisiana between 1765 and 1770 resisted Spanish commercial and defense policies, particularly that of forced settlement, as reflected by their participation in local trade networks, and by their interaction with colonial officials, local Indians, and colonists. The disparity between official policy and colonial relations on the ground reveals the ability of groups such as the Acadians to negotiate their place in the colony and eventually influence policy. Contraband trade represented another challenge to Spanish authority during this era of transition. In spite of Spanish commercial policy, Louisiana colonists eagerly engaged in the British and later American trade networks, which gave them access to manufactured goods, flour, and slaves. Between 1765 and 1790, the frequent geopolitical shifts affecting the Lower Mississippi Valley forced nearly constant re-evaluation of Spanish commercial and defense policies at the same time as these shifts created a very fluid moment for residents of the region to negotiate their own balance of power.

HISTORY VEJA AND BRAZILIAN RACE RELATIONS THE GAZETA DA TARDE AND THE CASE OF TIRA-COURO NICOLETTE M. WILHIDE Thesis under the direction of Dr. Marshall Eakin and Dr. Jane Landers The first paper examines representations of race in the advertisements of the popular Brazilian magazine Veja from the 1970s through the 1990s. As the self-proclaimed mouthpiece for the middle class, Veja magazine offers a unique window into shifting concepts of race and national identity during a tumultuous period in history. The second paper examines the murder of Escrava Maria on Christmas Day 1883 as seen in the abolitionist newspaper, the Gazeta da Tarde. When newspaper accounts of the murder are compared to the case file and autopsy reports compiled by the local law enforcement, a very different story is revealed. Analysis of the discrepancies between the two versions of the death of Maria, offer a greater understanding of the nature of Brazilian slavery. Additionally, Brazils political and economic transition into abolition forms a critical backdrop to this tragic account.

Throughout its history, the rhetoric of religion, specifically, in this case of Protestant Christianity, has shaped and influenced America. From missions societies to itinerant preachers, Protestants leaders have sought to spread the gospel throughout the nation, including to racially and ethnically diverse citizens. While George Whitefield travelled through the colonies in the mid18th-century preaching to all he met, black and white, slaves and free, a hundred years later, the women of the Protestant Home Missions Movement echoed his thundering prose, seeking to convert and Americanize incoming Catholic immigrants. Though much had changed between these two eras, including not insignificantly, the American Revolution, the Civil War and a nascent U.S. nationalism, some elements remain the same. While Whitefield emerges as a truly Atlantic figure, floating in a world loosely bound by goods and labor markets, the 20th-century American women are deeply attached to the notion of nation, and, in fact, often conflate Protestantism and true Americanism. But the message of grace in Christ does not change, from Whitefields thunderous sermons to womens illustrated home monthlies. Also consistently present is an underlying tension within these Protestant missionsthat of exclusion and even racism on one hand and love and equality before God on the other. Using the rhetoric and activity of Protestant missions as a barometer, a fascinating portrait of religion in America emerges, one that is ever shifting and ever the same.

1. This study provides an analysis of attempts by the Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiros (ISEB Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies) to interpret and/or defend Brazilian culture as written by Nelson Werneck Sodré, Roland Corbisier, Roberto Campos, Álvaro Vieira Pinto and Guerreiro Ramos. In 1955, the administration of the Brazilian President João Café Filho created ISEB to construct an ideology of national development. Intellectuals associated with this institute taught and published profusely on such topics as Brazilian development, culture and imperialism. While United States cultural influence in Brazil escalated during the Cold War, ISEB literature on this influence is nearly absent. For these ISEB intellectuals, the need was not to defend existing Brazilian culture from American influence, but rather to create or find the authentic (and liberating) Brazilian culture that other imperial powers had previously suppressed and alienated. Hence, while a dialogue existed among ISEB intellectuals on the subject of Brazilian culture and imperialism, this dialogue developed independently of United States influence. 2. In this paper, company and legal documents, newspaper articles, and diplomatic and personal correspondence unite to establish a richer understanding of the interaction between British and Brazilian abolitionists in this case against British subjects residing in Brazil. This study presents brief descriptions of the St. John d'el Rey Mining Company, the Cata Branca slaves and the Morro Velho case, before analyzing Joaquim Nabuco's role, both domestically and abroad, and the press coverage inspired by his actions. While Nabuco's actions brought the case into domestically published newspapers, generating greater publicity and pressure abroad and within Brazil's borders. Interaction between Nabuco and the British and Foreign Antislavery Society strengthened the case and provoked a backlash against the St. John d'el Rey Mining Company from the Brazilian Parliament, Brazilian courts, Brazilian and international media and members of both the Brazilian and British public. In addition, newspapers like The Rio News continued to provide greater space to slavery and abolitionism after the resolution of the Morro Velho case and Nabuco carried the attention that this case gained into future antislavery debates.