The relationship between imperialism and nationalism has often been portrayed by theorists of nationalism and post colonial discourse theorists as antagonistic. Anti-democratic, aggressive empires impose their will on subject peoples who, in response, form nationalist movements in opposition to this imperialism. These movements, it is claimed, assert the nation’s right to self-determination and independence. Whilst this was undoubtedly the case in a number of anti-colonial movements, examples can be found that refute the apparently antagonistic relationship between nationalism and imperialism. Nationalism does not always advocate independence from states or empires. Imperialism can be a vehicle for a national mission or can strengthen minority nations. In certain contexts, these two anti-thetical concepts can be reconciled. The thesis investigates the reconciliation of nationalism and imperialism using the concept of imperial nationalism. This concept is used to denote a variety of nationalism that proposes reform of the state/imperial government for the benefit of the nation whilst simultaneously emphasising the benefits of the reform of the empire. An important element of the nationalist discourse will be the maintenance of the imperial connection as beneficial for the nation. A comparative historical analysis of nationalist groups in nineteenth century Scotland and Canada is used to highlight the relationship between nationalism and imperialism in the discourse of nationalist groups. Both Scotland and Canada held relatively privileged positions within the British Empire. Yet Scottish and British Canadian nationalist groups argued the existing systems for governing their respective nations were illegitimate. In Scotland, the Scottish Home Rule Association argued for a Scottish Parliament, focusing on the extent to which the United Kingdom state was unable to cope with the work created by the four home nations and the Empire. An important aspect of home rule for Scotland, however, was its extension to the other home nations and the opportunity it would present of reforming the Imperial Parliament for the benefit of the Empire, and by association Scotland. In Canada, the focus of Canada First and the Imperial Federation League in Canada was on reform of the system of Imperial governance. Canada had not been given control over relations with the United States under the British North America Act and British Canadian nationalists felt Canadian interests had not been taken into account in British dealings with the United States. The answer was to provide Canada with a voice in treaties in the short term and, in the longer term, to reform Imperial government in order to provide Canada with a voice in the affairs of the Empire as whole. The thesis investigates the extent to which these movements were nationalist, imperialist and, finally, how these two concepts were reconciled.

This thesis analyses stunts in the public life of late nineteenth-century New York, where 'stunt' developed as a slang term. Addressing stunts as a performative and discursive practice, I investigate stunts in popular newspapers, sports, politics and protest and, to a lesser extent, theatre and film. Each chapter focuses on one form of stunt: bridge jumping, extreme walking contests, a new genre of reporting called 'stunt journalism', and cycling feats. Joseph Pulitzer's popular newspaper, the World, is the primary research archive, supported by analysis of other newspapers and periodicals, vaudeville scripts, films, manuals and works of fiction. The driving question is: how did stunts in public life enact conceptions of value? I contextualise stunts in a 'crisis of value' concerning industrialisation, secularisation, recessions, the currency crisis, increased entry of women into remunerative work, immigration, and racialised anxieties about consumption and degeneration. I examine the ways in which 'stunt' connotes devaluation, suggesting a degraded form of politics, art or sport, and examine how such cultural hierarchies intersect with gender, race and class. The critical framework draws on Theatre and Performance Studies theorisations of precarity and liveness. I argue that stunts aestheticised everyday precarity and made it visible, raising ethical questions about the value of human life and death, and the increasingly interdependent nature of urban society. Stunts took entrepreneurial idealisations of risk and autoproduction to extreme, constructing identity as commodity. By aestheticising precarity and endangering lives, stunts explored a symbolic and material connection between liveness and aliveness, which provokes questions about current conceptualisations of liveness and mediatisation. I argue that while stunts were framed as exceptional, frivolous acts, they adopted the logic of increasingly major industries, such as the popular press, advertising and financial markets. Stunts became a focal point for anxiety regarding the abstract and unstable nature of value itself.

The Louisiana Creole community in New Orleans went through profound changes in the first half of the 20th-century. This work examines Creole ethnic identity, focusing particularly on the transition from Creole to American. In "becoming American," Creoles adapted to a binary, racialized caste system prevalent in the Jim Crow American South, and transformed from a primarily Francophone/Creolophone community (where a tripartite although permissive caste system long existed) to a primarily Anglophone community (marked by stricter black-white binaries). These adaptations and transformations were facilitated through Creole participation in fraternal societies, the organized labor movement and public and parochial schools that provided English-only instruction. The "Americanization of Creole New Orleans" has been a common theme in Creole studies since the early 1990's, but no prior study has seriously examined the cultural and social transformation of Creole New Orleans by addressing the place and role of public and private institutions as instruments and facilitators of Americanization. By understanding the transformation of Creole New Orleans, this thesis demonstrates how an historically mixed-race community was ultimately divided by the segregationist culture of the early-twentieth century U.S. South. In addition to an extensive body of secondary research, this work draws upon archival research at the University of New Orleans' Special Collections, Tulane University Special Collections, the Amistad Research Center, The Archdiocese of New Orleans, and Xavier University Special Collections. This thesis makes considerable use of census data, draws upon press reports, and brings to bear a wide assortment of oral histories conducted by the author and others. Most scholars have viewed New Orleans Creoles simply as Francophone African Americans, but this view is limited. This doctoral thesis engages the Creole community in New Orleans on its own terms, and in its own idioms, to understand what "becoming American" meant for New Orleans Creoles between 1896-1949.

The current historiography on Mexican immigration from 1850 through 1920, has neglected to seriously study the forgotten migration of American citizens, not big capitalists as those have been well documented, seeking their American Dream in Mexico. Thus, my work seeks to understand how a very unstable international border dominated by constant Indian raids and filibuster attempts, led to transnational migration. A direct consequence of transnationalism is that it created a xenophobia mentality among the masses, and in some instances, a fetishism for anything foreign, especially among elites and the new breed of young politicians under President Diaz. I focus my analysis on the wave of American citizens, mostly former Civil War veterans, who in the 1860s decided to go to Mexico because President Benito Juarez offered them generous incentives such as tax exemptions and large land grants for colonization purposes, if they decided to join his military efforts to rid his country of the French invaders. Beyond just those white American immigrants, the dissertation also looks at the experience that black colonists encountered in a country that proudly boasted that it welcomed anyone, regardless of their skin color, so long as they adhered to the law. So I argue, that after analyzing the experience of several ethnic groups, such as the Italian immigrants in Cordoba, Veracruz, or the colonies of those immigrants seeking religious freedom such as the Mormons and Mennonites in northern Mexico, that indeed, Mexico was the Land of God and Liberty. This was the popular term used by runaway slaves from Texas in the 1850s and by many African Americans from Alabama who sold everything they had in 1895 to pay for their transportation cost to Mexico in search of a better life not found in the United States.

This thesis places the Democratic party at the centre of the Reconstruction narrative and investigates the transformation of the antebellum Democracy into its postbellum form. In doing so, it addresses the relative scarcity of scholarship on the postwar Democrats, and provides an original contribution to knowledge by (a) explaining how the party survived the Civil War and (b) providing a comprehensive analysis of an extended process of internal conflict over the Democracy's future. This research concludes that while the Civil War caused a crisis in partisanship that lasted until the mid-1870s, it was Democrats' underlying devotion to their party, and flexibility over party principle that allowed the Democracy to survive and reestablish itself as a strong national party. Rather than extensively investigating state-level or grassroots politics, this thesis focuses on the party's national leadership. It finds that public memories of the party's wartime course constituted the most significant barrier to rebuilding the Democratic national coalition. Following an overview of the fractures exposed by civil war, the extent of these splits is assessed through an investigation of sectional reconciliation during Presidential and Radical Reconstruction. The analysis then shifts to explore competing visions of the party's future during the late 1860s and early 1870s when public confidence in the Democracy hit its lowest point. While the early years of Reconstruction opened the party to the possibility of disintegration, by the mid-1870s Democrats had begun to adopt a stronger national party organisation. Through a coherent national strategy that turned national politics away from issues of race and loyalty and towards those of economic development and political reform, while simultaneously appealing to the party's history, national Democratic leaders restored public confidence in the Democracy, silenced advocates of the creation of a new national party, and propelled the party back to power in 1884.

This thesis examines the promotion of California and Florida from 1869 to 1919, a period when both states were transformed from remote, under-populated locales into two of the most publicised states in America. Using an interdisciplinary approach which analyses cultural representations of the states within a broader socioeconomic context, the thesis traces how railroad and land companies, agriculturists, chambers of commerce, state agencies, and journalists fashioned new identities for California and Florida as Semi- Tropical American lands. As their boosters competed in a bid to attract settlers, tourists, and investors, they played upon republican and colonialist discourses within American society and expansion. Evoking ideas about race, climate, and environment, promoters depicted California and Florida as parts of a benign middle zone between an increasingly urban-industrial North and socially “primitive” tropics. At a time of traumatic industrial change, California and Florida promised American rebirth in nature, through renewing health and leisure, prosperous agriculture, and superior cities. The selling visions were created by and for white Americans, however, and focused on the “semi-tropical” benefits for Anglo visitors and residents. Ethnic and racial minorities were marginalised as romantic, unprogressive peoples who were best suited to manual labour roles which reinforced Anglo-American progress. The thesis thus argues that boosters alloyed republican ideals of independent living to processes of racial hierarchy, creating a seductive, expansionist imagery which sold semi-tropical California and Florida.

This thesis contends that the idea of productive sexual continence - that is, abstinence from sexual activity understood as a constructive practice - significantly shaped a branch of thought within and around the British Aesthetic Movement of the late nineteenth century. Recent critical work has stressed sexual liberation or permissiveness as among the values of Aestheticism, and has read Aesthetic representations of continent states as indications of repressed, sublimated, or coded sexuality. Reading these representations through period-specific sexual discourses, I reveal an alternative discursive tradition within Aestheticism, in which the idea of productive sexual continence formed an important part of thinking about the 'aesthetic life', or the life lived according to aesthetic principles. The enquiry privileges the place of sexual ideas and values in the context of the intellectual culture of the Aesthetic Movement, and of the late-Victorian period generally, rather than focusing (as much scholarship has done) upon the writers' 'real-life' sexual behaviour, desires or identities. Sexual continence was often understood in the period as conducive both to individual health and happiness, and to one's relationship with society. At a time when Aesthetic writers were often accused of endorsing excessive individualism and excessive sensuality, this idea facilitated the elaboration of an aesthetic ethic that could incorporate intense sensuous (but not sensual) pleasure and also responsible sociability. After an Introduction that outlines the scope and method of the thesis, Chapter One illustrates the ubiquity of this idea in medical writing (professional and popular) about the sexual body in the period, and within Classical and Christian intellectual discourses commonly drawn upon by Aesthetic authors. Four chapters follow in which roughly the same idea is shown to take a central role in representations of the 'aesthetic life' in the work of four major writers. Chapter Two posits that there were broadly two traditions of reading Walter Pater in the late nineteenth century: one in which he was taken as an apologist for a radical sensual individualism, and another that emphasized his advocacy of restraint and reserve as both stylistic and ethical principles. Informed by early readings in this latter tradition, I demonstrate the plausibility of an interpretation of Pater as carefully distinguishing between aesthetic sensuousness and sensuality. Pater also, I argue, can viably be read as assessing the ideal aesthetic life in terms of health and love, and representing sexual continence as compatible with both. Chapter Three looks at Lionel Johnson's incorporation of this continent ideal into his Christianized cultural humanism, evolved in his letters, poetry, and criticism. In the poetry resistance to temptation is described as a process by which potentially sensual experience is made safely sensuous, while in the letters and criticism can be found admiration for various continent states that reconcile individual aesthetic experience with social responsibility. In Chapter Four, the pre-1900 essays of Vernon Lee are shown to be consistently anti-sensual, while distinguishing this sensuality from a kind of continent sense experience identified as aesthetic, and associated with Pater. Lee also uses this aesthetic sensuousness as a model for ideal - i.e. disinterested and respectful - relations between people, and between people and things. Chapter Five examines the co-existence of this discourse with other, contradictory models of aesthetic living in the work of George Moore. Moore was generally pro-sensual, and considered 'sex' (in the abstract) to be integral to art; but he also associated the production of art with continent states. An alternative, sexually continent Paterian tradition can, I argue, help to account for these discordant moments. A Conclusion briefly indicates the further relevance of such thinking beyond the bounds of the Aesthetic Movement.

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This project explores how literary authors used religious discourses in the sociointellectual climates of late nineteenth-century Catholic cultures. It takes its premise from a tacit paradox of Western European modernization: unlike other Western European nations, nations such as France and Spain modernized without adopting Protestantism or doctrines of anti-Catholicism or anticlericalism--and, thus, without a strict break into national secular discourses. Addressing how various religious discourses were used in modernizing France and Spain (respectively, from 1848 and from 1868 to the early twentieth century), I take a cultural-historical approach to representative religiously themed novels and short fiction of the periods. I contend that non-institutionalized traditional Catholic culture (a culture's “religious imaginary” or “Catholic imaginary”) offered authors a plural and, thus, strategic source for making cultural critiques. These critiques would have resonated widely with contemporaneous readerships, and often without overt confrontations (as anticlericalism has historically done). I point to the presence of such critiques specifically in canonical authors’ religious works--works often considered to be aberrational or “too Catholic” to be valued as modern vis-à-vis the landmarks of Western literature. Taking as my key example a novel by the “father of the modern Spanish novel,” Benito Pérez Galdós’s Misericordia or Compassion (1897), I unfold progressive readings of this text based on discourses borrowing historical, thematic, and stylistic elements from the archives of a Catholic imaginary. Thereafter, I broaden my argument by considering how comparable, but distinct, discourses inform social-critical readings of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables or The Underclass (1862), Gustave Flaubert’s “Un Coeur simple” or “A Simple Heart” (1877), and Emilia Pardo Bazán’s “Un destripador de antaño” or “The Heart Lover” (1900). Overall, the project challenges a critical status quo that has chosen to identify canonical literature in reference to a secular aesthetic program, without allowing for the possibility that cultural-religious discourses might also carry weight for cultures that were modernizing. Additionally, it re-characterizes the modernizing intellectual, seen typically as spiritually cynical or atheist, as one acknowledging the populist force of the religious imaginary freed from church limits. / text

Louisiana's Red River region was shaped by and founded on the logic of racial power, the economics of slavery, and white supremacy. The alluvial soil provided wealth for the mobile, market-driven slaveholders but created a cold, brutal world for the commoditized slaves that cleared the land and cultivated cotton. Racial bondage defined the region, and slaveholders' commitment to mastery and Confederate doctrine continued after the Civil War. This work argues that when freedom arrived, this unbroken fidelity to mastery and to the inheritances and ideology of slavery gave rise to a visceral regime of violence. Continuity, not change, characterized the region. The Red River played a significant role in regional settlement and protecting this distorted racial dynamic. Racial bondage grounded the region's economy and formed the heart of white identity and black exploitation. Here, the long arcs of mastery, racial conditioning, and ideological continuities were deeply entrenched even as the nation underwent profound changes from 1820 to 1880. In this thesis, the election of 1860, the Civil War, and emancipation are not viewed as fundamental breaks or compartmentalized epochs in southern history. By contrast, on plantations along the Red River, both racial mastery and power endured after emancipation. Based on extensive archival research, this thesis considers how politics, racial ideologies, and environmental and financial drivers impacted the nature of slavery, Confederate commitment, and the parameters of freedom in this region, and by extension, the nation. Widespread Reconstruction violence climaxed with the Colfax Massacre and firmly cemented white power, vigilantism, and racial dominance within the regional culture. Freedpeople were relegated to the margins as whites reasserted their control over Reconstruction. The violent and contested nature of freedom highlighted the adherence to the power structure and ideological inheritances of slavery. From bondage to freedom, the Red River region remained unreconstructed.