I am submitting two theses. "Progressive Scientism" provides an intellectual biography of labor economist Paul Schuster Taylor, author of one of the first studies of Mexican life and labor in the United States. I examine Taylors eleven-volume Mexican Labor in the United States as well as his personal papers housed in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley in order to investigate how social scientists trained by Progressives adapted to the social scientific culture of the 1920s and 1930s that emphasized objectivity and the researchers distance from the practical application of research. I argue that Taylors work exemplifies the coexistence of Progressive thought with the new scientism that engaged the American social scientific academy. I also explore how the social sciences began to understand Mexican Americans as a group meriting scholarly research. Though Taylor himself was sympathetic to the plight of Mexican Americans, his insistence upon objectivity elided his goal of engaging federal attention. Mexican Americans continued to be ignored by both the American academy and the federal government until both rediscovered Mexican Americans in the 1960s, largely as the result of Mexican American political mobilization. In "Out-Imagining the Other," I analyze Inquisition records, correspondence, letters from Spanish officials stationed throughout the Iberian Atlantic World, maps, and printed pamphlets in order to understand Spanish views of the Dutch in the seventeenth century. The Dutch are often marginalized in Atlantic history because it is traditionally believed that Dutch Atlantic commercial and shipping activities paled in comparison to their endeavors in East Asia. Comparison with the Spanish, furthermore, is not typical because, from the perspective of the historian, the Dutch Atlantic Empire never rivaled the Spanish in terms of size or population. In the documents I examine in this thesis, descriptions of the Dutch as enemies looming just beyond Spanish ports stood in tandem with representations of the Spanish monarchy as invincible, while desperate pleas for assistance from the Spanish crown contrasted assertions that divine providence was on the side of the Catholic Spanish. These representations testify to what Kris Lane has termed the out imagining of the other that often occurred in the Atlantic world, a region in which claims to power over native peoples, the landscape, and other Europeans were tenuous at best.

This dissertation examines the shifts that took place in the cultural and political meanings American citizens attached to their own citizenship at the dawn of urban modernity. Using Chicago as a case study, the dissertation looks at the construction of national identity from both the top down perspective of urban intellectuals, reformers and policy makers and the bottom up perspective of ordinary Chicagoans. It explores the ways in which both residents in and migrants to Chicago black and white, native and foreign, plebeian and intellectual altered their perceptions about the nature of the relationship of the individual citizen to the state and society during the tumultuous Progressive era. At a time of unprecedented industrial development, Chicagos population expanded dramatically as African American migrants from the South, native whites from the small towns of the East and Mid-West and immigrants from across Europe, poured into the city. Through an analysis of events such as the Pullman Strike of 1894, the First World War, and the 1919 Race Riot, this dissertation charts the ways in which Progressive reformers and urban intellectuals responded to the challenges posed to democratic citizenship by the new social composition of the city. It also demonstrates the ways in which ordinary Chicagoans worked to define their own identities with reference to the political traditions of the nation. Ultimately, Progressive thinkers and reformers like philosopher John Dewey, social worker Jane Addams and sociologist Robert Park defined a modern American citizenship that worked, at best, as a pragmatic accommodation to urban living. Unfortunately, and despite the resistance of ordinary Chicagoans, Progressives replaced citizenship as the active, freely-chosen political status of individuals with a passive and essentialized cultural identity based upon membership of social groups. Thus, this dissertation locates the origin of modern identity politics in the sociology of the 1920s. It uncovers a trajectory of national redefinition begun by Progressives that was well-intentioned but which followed a course both fragmentary and destructive into the twentieth century.

This dissertation examines how Zimbabwe achieved independence under majority rule in April 1980. Drawing on recently-declassified archival materials from South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, this dissertation highlights the underappreciated role that successive US administrations played in facilitating Zimbabwes transition from white minority rule to black majority rule. In particular, this dissertation highlights the connection between the global Cold War and the decolonization process in sub-Saharan Africa, arguing that the Ford and Carter administrations saw facilitating Zimbabwes transition to majority rule as a strategy to improve US-African relations at a moment when the Soviet Union and its allies seemed to be gaining ground in Africa. While this dissertation highlights Americas contribution to the Zimbabwean cause, it also contextualizes the US role by showing that the United States was just one of the actors that helped to facilitate Zimbabwes transition to majority rule. Moreover, the US was far from the most important player in this process. As this dissertation demonstrates, it took the combined efforts of the Frontline States, the Organization of African Unity, the Commonwealth, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Patriotic Front to compel Rhodesias white minority to hand over the reins of power. This dissertation also argues that the settlement which paved the way for Zimbabwean independence was a diplomatic success despite the fact that it enabled Robert Mugabe to come to power. It argues that foreign diplomats could not have foreseen Mugabes presidency extending more than three decades, nor could they have predicted the Zimbabwean meltdown of the early 21st century. Moreover, this dissertation maintains that the Zimbabwean settlement is significant because it marked the beginning of the end of white rule in southern Africa.

This dissertation challenges a widely held piece of conventional historical wisdom: that conservative, white, evangelical Protestants stopped participating in American politics after achieving notoriety during the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the 1920s, and that this loss of interest marked a decisive, decades-long evangelical retreat from the public sphere. The power of this argument has meant that evangelicals have often been seen as curious truants from the national political scene immediately following a period when as H. L. Mencken famously quipped one could heave an egg out of a Pullman window andhit a fundamentalist almost anywhere in the United States. I argue instead that scholars have been simply unable to see them; with the help of a trio of concepts first suggested by the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci cultural hegemony, the war of maneuver, and the war of position I try to keep them in view. In the first chapter, I explore the cultural and intellectual revolution that called evangelical fundamentalism into existence. In the second chapter I survey the political and popular culture of the 1930s looking particularly at what one scholar has called the Old Christian Right and at the early country music industry for evidence of fundamentalism's disappearance before suggesting another way to think about that most unconventional of decades. In the third chapter, I point out an obvious example of continued fundamentalist interest in American politics in the 1930s and 1940s, the National Committee for Christian Leadership sponsor of the annual Congressional Prayer Breakfast. In the fourth chapter, I consider fundamentalist attempts to win back some of the intellectual respectability they had once enjoyed by examining the work of fundamentalist scholars like J. Gresham Machen, Cornelius Van Til, Gordon Clark, and Carl Henry within the context of the history of American higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally, in the fifth chapter, I examine the National Association of Evangelicals' efforts to abandon the censoriousness of the earlier movement and then rebrand itself an organization of all-American Cold Warriors.

This project examines representations of women in German advertising posters from the 1870s to 1914. I focus on the connection of these gendered images to two spaces at the forefront of social and cultural change in Wilhelmine Germany: the home and the street, the spaces of domesticity and urban discovery. My research confirms the importance of womens roles in the home in this period, but suggests that these roles should not be narrowly conceived of as old-fashioned and out-of-sync with other developments in German economic and cultural life. Instead, I argue that through consumer imagery, womens roles in the home were connected to modern innovations in very direct ways. In addition, consumer imagery fostered a female identity constituted by the more liminal space of the modern urban street, one that was intimately connected with transformations in retailing and urban mobility.

This project examines attempts to study and define public opinion in postwar Germany by two institutions: the Frankfurt School and the Allensbach Institute. I show how opinion researchers responded to theoretical frameworks developed during World War II and the empirical work begun by occupation authorities in Germany in order to quantify and study the lives of their countrymen. These researchers also linked their findings to the political and economic process in new ways, helping to envision and make sense of the West German transition to democracy from dictatorship. The Frankfurt School researchers attempted to problematize the notion of public opinion itself, while the Allensbach Institute claimed to offer an unbiased, scientific view of the German public. By the 1970s, the concept of public opinion had become indispensable to any attempt to address the past, present, and future of the German nation.

Depiction of nature in the sculptural art

Sikh society in Punjab

Anti-zamindari struggles

Factories and ports in India