This dissertation examines the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Lincolnshire rebellion. Both rebellions occurred in England in 1536 during the reign of Henry VIII. The rebellions were primarily risings of the commons and occurred as the result of several causes. Much of the recent historiography has focused primarily on the causes of the rebellions and the motives of those involved. Most contemporary interpretations of the Pilgrimage of Grace have cast it primarily as either an economic rebellion or a result of social conflict between the commons and gentry. Practically no analysis of the role of the clergy exists, although it is clear that the religious reforms instituted by Henry VIII beginning in 1534 caused widespread disaffection. These reforms attacked traditional religious practice and worship, affecting the entire clergy and laity. The argument put forth in this dissertation is that the clergypriests, friars, and monkssupported, stirred, and spread the rebellion throughout Lincolnshire and the North Country of England. In addition, this dissertation supports the argument that both the Lincolnshire rebellion and the Pilgrimage of Grace were essentially religious rebellions. Research makes it clear that a significant number of the clergy of northern England had the means, motives, and opportunity to incite the commons to rebel against the Henrician Reformation. Many of the available sources indicate that a significant number of priests, friars, and monks offered stiff resistance to the Henrician reforms. It is also clear that many members of the clergy opposed the royal supremacy as well as the reforms that attacked traditional practice and worship. Evidence also exists that members of the clergy initiated and spread a series of rumors throughout England. These rumors are important because they played a significant role in causing both the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Lincolnshire rebellion. Extant sources also indicate that many clergymen supported the rebels with words, money, and food. There is also evidence that several priests, friars, and monks stirred and spread rebellion. By addressing the role of the clergy in stirring, this dissertation adds a new approach to the historiography of the Pilgrimage of Grace.

British identity evolved through conscious comparisons with foreigners as well as through the cultivation of indigenous social, economic and political institutions. The German other in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, like the French other in previous centuries, provided a psychological path toward unity against a perceived common enemy. Because German stereotypes brought into sharp focus what the British believed themselves not to be, they provided a framework for defining Britishness beyond Britains own internal divisions of race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender and politics. Post-World War II devolution and European integration have since revived British internal national divisions. The image of innocuous Old Germany as Englands poor relation, a backward cluster of feudal states, gave way during the nineteenth century to the stereotype of New Germany, Britains archenemy and imperial rival. After unification in 1871, German economic growth and imperial ambitions became hot topics for commentary in British journals. But the stereotypical German Michael, or rustic simpleton, and other images of passive Old Germany lingered on as a straw man for alarmists to dispel with New German stereotypes of aggressive militarism and Anglophobic nationalism. Some Germanophobes, however, and many Germanophiles, clung to older stereotypes as a form of escapism or wishful thinking, the former believing that national character deficiencies would foil German ambitions, the latter that German idealism and good sense would eventually resolve Anglo-German disputes. The British entente with France in 1904, and Russia in 1907, ended more than a decade of Anglo-German alliance attempts. These missed opportunities were thwarted by mutual distrust, opposing geopolitical strategies, diplomatic maneuvering and, ultimately, naval rivalry. But national stereotypes in public media also contributed a cultural aspect to Anglo-German diplomatic antagonism. British journalists drew upon a rich heritage of German stereotypes, both for polemical argument and for entertaining a national self-image at the expense of the German other. Stereotypes also gained currency through pseudoscientific racial theories and ethnological hierarchies that constituted the nineteenth-century paradigm of innate national character. Because they encapsulate assumed national difference so effectively, stereotypes in print provide a useful perspective on the interface between national identity, public opinion and policy.

This thesis will explore the relationship between the rise of the Know Nothing Party and the modernization of St. Louis, the first Western metropolis. By the mid-1850s, two distinct visions of St. Louis existed. On one side of the ideological aisle, Democrats and conservative Whigs cautiously pursued an economic policy that advocated a slow but steady growth in St. Louis city infrastructure. But by 1850, a new faction of wealthy Yankee merchants, stirred by dreams of empire and western supremacy, challenged the traditional approach and strategically joined the national Know Nothing movement. Influenced by the intellectual currents of the American Revolution, Nativists engendered a new form of republicanism termed pure Americanism, which incorporated notions of honor and civic virtue that served as a foundation for a myriad of intellectual and social systems they privately funded across the city. These institutions defined their vision of a modern city, where order and class distinctions were respected and private domains served as models for masculine conceptions of behavior and public propriety. Recasting the character of St. Louis ultimately moved beyond the borders of Missouri as Nativists explored how St. Louis and the pure Americanism paradigm could serve as a remedy for the rancorous spirit that had threatened national unity by 1857. The modern city, the group poignantly argued, would save the country. Ultimately, this thesis will tell an altogether different story of St. Louis, through the successes and dilemmas of the Know Nothing Party as it engineered contemporary social reform. Utilizing the interplay of class and republican ideology, I will demonstrate the relationship between conceptions of modernity and westward expansion in antebellum America.

As chief justice of the United States for thirty-five years, John Marshall molded the Supreme Court into a co-equal branch of government. His efforts to fashion a powerful and independent federal court often ran counter to popular sentiment in his home state of Virginia. There, Marshalls ideological and political opponent, Thomas Jefferson, dominated the political landscape. The adversarial narrative of Marshall and Jeffersons national political battles is the subject of much scholarship. Rarely considered, however, is the common legal culture from which they both emerged. Understanding the personalities and the decisions that populated Virginias legal culture from the American Revolution through the age of the Marshall court provides a deeper understanding not only of Marshall and his motivations, but also of how he continued to shape the legal and political environment of Virginia -his lifelong home - and how, in turn, that culture continued to influence him even after he abandoned local affairs for the national stage. If the Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800 produced a Virginia dynasty of leadership, John Marshall can be considered a part of it. When he took on the role that defined his place in American history, he had spent more than half his life as a Virginian attorney and popularly elected local politician. Yet he was more than just a Virginian who became a nationalist, leaving the politics and legal culture of his home state behind. The Marshall court retained a Virginian cast, and this explains many aspects of how the chief justice negotiated the boundaries between republican political economy and republican law. What emerges is a story of an intertwined legal and political culture, infused with classical republican idealism by the American Revolution, whose optimistic principles were sorely tested in the courts of the early republic. And as local figures failed to effectively address the significant legal contradiction of slavery, the responsibility fell to a federal government dominated largely by Virginians Marshall included who were consistent in their failure to prevent the transition from republic to democracy and in their inability to solve the sectional dilemma that ultimately led to Civil War.

The United States Cadet Nurse Corps, a student-nurse recruitment program administered by the United States Public Health Service, provided federal funding for nursing education during World War II. The subject of nursing on the American home front has largely been ignored, though nursing scholarship has focused, on occasion, on the more exciting battlefield experiences of the Army Nurse Corps. World War II launched a social revolution and set America on its path to a postwar consensus. Although a few historians have briefly mentioned the Corps successful media recruitment campaign, its role in the social revolution remains unacknowledged. This thesis examines the ways in which the Cadet Nurse Corps actively demonstrated and reinforced the social changes that took place in America during World War II. The Cadet Nurse Corps legislation of 1943 appeared safe and conventional, even offering a no-nonsense title, but proved to be a progressive and visionary student-nurse program. A safe product, the American nurse, was funded by a program with a radical premise. The Corps promoted equal rights for racial minorities, the professionalization of the nursing career, and the opportunity for women to work outside of the home. The Cadet Nurse Corps provided women with greater educational, financial, professional, and social benefits for a lifetime career. The Cadet Nurse Corps promoted social change by using a traditional profession to create a vision of what was appropriate for women.

In the decades following the Second World War, historians writing about militarism and politics during the German Empire have often mentioned Count Alfred von Waldersee (1832-1904), the armys Quartermaster-General (1882-1888) then Chief of the General Staff (1888-1891), portraying him as a stereotypical warmongering Prussian political general who sought to enhance his own influence, especially by aspiring to the chancellorship. They have typically viewed Alfred von Waldersee within the contexts of civil versus military relations and the era and entourage of Wilhelm II (r. 1888-1918), but these frameworks do not help accurately explain the man, his motivations, how he saw himself, and his relationship to power. Using archival material that has never before been utilized judiciously and extensively by a professional historian, this study seeks to question, reevaluate, and revise the traditional interpretation of Waldersee by analyzing his private life, public image, and the limits of his ambition. This thesis argues that Alfred von Waldersee needs to be understood as a man formed by his experiences in the age of Wilhelm I; this was the era in which his opinions about domestic and international affairs solidified and he became a political partisan in Berlin. He was a monarchist, but one whose conception of the Prusso-German monarchy was based on the rule of Wilhelm I, his friend and ideal sovereign. In his actions throughout the 1880s, Waldersee sought to defend the traditional power of the Kaiser against what he considered the sovereigns enemies: threatening foreign powers, constitutionalism, democracy, socialism, Jews, and Catholics. This project also focuses on his relationship with his American-born wife, his anti-Semitism, his views on preventive war, and his relationship with the press. During his life, but especially from 1882 to 1891, Waldersee did not aspire to gain political power for himself; he never wanted to become Chancellor. As an intimate and aide-de-camp to the Kaisers, Waldersee did not operate outside the convoluted power structure of the German Empire. In the colorful, modernizing Europe of the late nineteenth century, Waldersee saw the world in black and white and represented one of the last gasps of an earlier age.

This study challenges current historical assumptions about the nature, scope, and timeframe of the 1641 Irish Rebellion in Kerry, Clare, and Limerick counties in western Munster. Placing the start of the popular rebellion in these counties around 1 January 1642, the beginning of unrest is set several months further back. In the process of analyzing the actions of popular and organized rebels alike, the motivations for rebellion are characterized as political and social rather than religious. In turn, seventeenth-century Irish society was transformed from the traditional narrative of a rigid, religiously-divided society into something far more complex and amorphous, with emphasis placed on the importance of local situations, in particular the successes or failures of plantation policy and the existence of substantial Protestant populations. Though the rebellion would later coalesce along confessional lines after the October 1642 Confederation of Kilkenny, the initial period of rebellion demonstrates that certain areas of Ireland by 1641 had produced religiously heterogeneous societies that served to slightly soften attitudes between rebels and their Protestant neighbors.

This dissertation examines the economic opportunities that free women of color could derive from slaveholding, their motivations, and their impact on New Orleans antebellum society and economy. Another aim is to find out the role and impact of free women of color from Saint Domingue (later Haiti), whose arrival in New Orleans doubled the number of free women of color in the city. Finally, the analysis of relationships between free women of color and their slaves and with the diverse population of New Orleans plays an important part in this study. Notarial deeds (sales and purchases of slaves, mortgages of slaves, property inventories, powers of attorney, and wills), court records (lawsuits, Supreme Court records, and criminal records), and other public records (federal, state, county and city document, city directories, census data, and church sacramental registers) provide invaluable sources for this study. I use two major research strategies: (1) a statistical analysis of slave ownership among free women of color and (2) case studies. Such methodology allows me to consider slave ownership among these women in an exhaustive manner, including important parameters such as gender, race, and ethnicity. For free women of color, slaves were definitely a source of personal and commercial speculation, which was inherent in the relationship between master and slave. Free women of color did not and could not deny their slaves humanity, yet this knowledge, which gleams through the records on certain occasions, did not inhibit them from engaging in the exploitation and trading of slaves of all ages, which, in turn allowed them to acquire significant amounts of property. The data suggests that these aspirations were shared among the large community of free women of color in the urban center of New Orleans. There, they found a sense of community, tied together by a shared heritage, friendship, kinship, religion, education, and above all economic opportunities, creating thriving social and financial networks among themselves and with others throughout the city.

This dissertation explores the politics and imagery in the anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution in Moscow and Leningrad from 1918 to 1927. Central to Bolshevik efforts to take political and symbolic control of society, these early celebrations not only provided a vehicle for agitation on behalf of the Soviet regime, but also reflected changing popular and official perceptions of the meanings and goals of October. This study argues that politicians, cultural producers, and the urban public contributed to the design and meaning of the political anniversaries, engendering a negotiation of culture between the new Soviet state and its participants. Like the Revolution they sought to commemorate, the October celebrations unleashed and were shaped by both constructive and destructive forces. A combination of variable party and administrative controls, harsh economic realities, competing cultural strategies, and limitations of the existing mass media also influenced the Bolshevik commemorative projects. Approaching political culture through a study of civic ritual and revolutionary symbolism, this work examines the official mass parades, street art, mass media, popular entertainment, and workers' club campaigns in the holidays during this turbulent era of civil war, reconstruction, and political consolidation. The study concludes by looking at Moscow's Decennial of the October Revolution in 1927 and explores how the Bolsheviks ultimately mobilized the population and harnessed cultural forces to project legitimacy and the image of national consensus as the regime embarked on the Stalinist path of rapid societal and industrial transformation.

This dissertation analyzes capital punishment from 1750 to 1800 in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. All were important Atlantic ports with bustling waterfront and diverse populations. Capital punishment was an integral part of eighteenth-century city life with the execution day as its pinnacle. As hangings were public and often attended by thousands of people, civil and religious authorities used the high drama of the gallows to build community consensus, shape the social order, and legitimize their power. A quantitative analysis of executions reveals patterns of punishment over time. The number of executions was relatively low in the colonial period, varied greatly during the Revolution, rose sharply in the mid- to late-1780s, and then declined during the 1790s in Boston and Philadelphia but remained high in Charleston. There were also important differences between the cities which influenced the death penalty: the fusion of civil and religious authority in Boston, most visible in execution sermons; a penal reform movement and opposition to capital punishment in Quaker-influenced Philadelphia; and the relations between masters and slaves as well as the question of dual sovereignty over life by the state and the master in Charleston. This study argues that capital punishment was an important tool of social control in early urban America. Executions were especially frequent in moments of real or perceived crisis. The mindset of juries was therefore essential in determining the punishment of a crime. More importantly, the death penalty was especially deployed to control the lower classes, as the majority of the condemned were young, male, and poor. Executions were correlated to forced labor. Boston, the city with the lowest percentage of forced labor, experienced the lowest rate of executions. Charleston, the city with the highest percentage, also witnessed the highest rate. Philadelphia fell between. The 1780s, a time when contemporaries believed that they experienced an unprecedented crime wave, saw the highest numbers of executions in all three cities with a peak late in the decade. By then the protection of property had become the primary agenda of the death penalty in urban areas.