In 1962, historian Michael Harrington published The Other America, the inaugural work in the field of the history of poverty. Part history and part call to action, Harrington argued that the poor have largely remained invisible in American society. He endeavored to make America's poor visible as the first step towards addressing the tragedy of poverty. Today, 40 million Americans live in poverty, indicating that it is as much a societal issue in need of solution in the twenty-first century as it was in Harrington's time. Although the field is small, a few scholars have taken up Harrington's call and written histories of the poor and poor relief. This work seeks to complicate and expand upon the conclusions reached by these historians by studying poor relief at the local level of one singular community in the rural South. This research asks how the residents of nineteenth-century Montgomery County, Virginia understood the county's responsibility for providing poor relief, and what underlying values and beliefs informed that understanding. Using local government records and state legislative and administrative records, this research will argue that, largely because the county had not yet industrialized, poor relief in nineteenth-century Montgomery County diverged from national and regional trends in three significant respects.: attitudes towards the poor in Montgomery County tended to remain more benign than national attitudes well into the postbellum era; poor relief in Montgomery County was available to black residents, both before and after the Civil War; and Montgomery County continued to offer outdoor relief well into the postbellum era. An analysis of why poor relief differed to such a degree in a rural, Southern community, as opposed to more urban, Northern, or Midwestern locales, illuminates the effects of economy, geography, and demography on societal conceptions of the poor. / Master of Arts / In 2017, the number of Americans living in poverty stood at just under 40 million, or approximately 12% of the total population. For these Americans, daily life presents not only a material struggle, but a psychological battle as well. For in addition to facing the hardships inherent in poverty, they must also contend with societal scorn and condemnation. In modern America, popular culture frequently blames the poor for their own condition, characterizing them as lazy, criminal, or unintelligent. This research explores the historical roots of these negative attitudes towards the poor. Specifically, this research asks how the residents of nineteenth-century Montgomery County, Virginia understood the county’s responsibility for providing poor relief, and what underlying values and beliefs informed that understanding. Using local government records and state legislative and administrative records, this research will argue that, largely because the county had not yet industrialized, poor relief in nineteenth-century Montgomery County diverged from national and regional trends in three significant respects.: attitudes towards the poor in Montgomery County tended to remain more benign than national attitudes well into the postbellum era; poor relief in Montgomery County was available to black residents, both before and after the Civil War; and Montgomery County continued to offer outdoor relief well into the postbellum era. An analysis of why poor relief differed to such a degree in a rural, Southern community, as opposed to more urban, Northern, or Midwestern locales, illuminates the effects of economy, geography, and demography on societal conceptions of the poor.

John D. Wagg was a native of Ashe County, North Carolina and a Southern Methodist circuit minister active immediately before and during the Civil War. His surviving journal, sermons, and received letters allow us to employ him as a window into a particular time, place, and set of conditions. To facilitate this, selections from the Wagg documents have been transcribed, edited, and presented as a Web-based digital edition, the Digital John D. Wagg Papers. This edition is designed to work with many other editions of similarly narrow historical and geographical scope as one historical witness in a network of witnesses. We must draw from several varieties of documents in the John Wagg collection and from contextualizing historical scholarship to construct a history of Wagg as a product of and participant in his times. Born 8 July 1835, Wagg began keeping a journal in 1854 as he worked toward a degree in medicine at Jefferson, North Carolina, the Wagg family hometown. As a diarist he often explored the place of humanity in a God-made world, a theme that foreshadows his turn from medicine and entry into the itinerant ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in October 1858. Wagg spent the Civil War years preaching throughout western North Carolina and southwest Virginia, generally striving to keep his heavily Confederate-leaning politics from the pulpit. This lifestyle allows the Wagg Papers to bring an alternate point of view to any archive of Civil War documents consisting primarily of the letters of combatants. / Master of Arts

Yes / In AD 1836, the General Register Office (GRO) was established to oversee the national system of civil registration in England and Wales, recording all births, deaths and marriages. Additional data regarding population size, division size and patterns of occupation within each division permit urban and rural areas (and those with both urban and rural characteristics, described here as ‘mixed’) to be directly compared to each other. The annual Reports of the Registrar General summarize the collected data, including cause of and age at death, which is of particular value to historical demographers and bioarcheologists, allowing us to investigate demographic patterns in urban and rural districts in the nineteenth century. Overall, this paper aims to highlight how this documentary evidence can supplement osteological and paleopathological data to investigate how urbanization affected the health of past populations. It examines the data contained within the first Registrar General report (for 1837-8), in order to assess patterns of mortality of diverse rural, urban, and mixed populations within England and Wales at a point in time during a period of rapid urbanization. It shows that urban and mixed districts typically had lower life expectancy and different patterns in cause of death compared to rural areas. The paper briefly compares how the documentary data differs from information regarding health from skeletal populations, focusing on the city of London, highlighting that certain age groups (the very young and very old) are typically underrepresented in archeological assemblages and reminding us that, while the paleopathological record offers much in terms of chronic health, evidence of acute disease and importantly cause of death can rarely be ascertained from skeletal remains. / This research was funded by the Royal Society of London (Grant Reference IES\R1\180138) and supported by the University of Bradford and SUNY Plattsburgh.

It is the purpose of this work to compile and organize available material dealing with children's magazines published in the nineteenth century in America, and present it in a usable form.

This thesis explores the representation of conspiracy in the literature of the July Monarchy (1830-1848) and its engagement with conspiracy thinking, with particular reference to the work of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and George Sand (1804-1876). In providing the first sustained scholarly exploration of conspiracy and cultural production in nineteenth-century France, it situates the novel within wider discourses on European political history in the years leading up to the upheaval of 1848. Through close readings of Balzac and Sand's common investment in conspiracist modes of explanation, this study makes the case for a new generic category, the novel of conspiracy, around which literary poetics, historical imagination and political fantasy come to coalesce. Chapter one proposes a re-evaluation of the dialectic between models of surface and depth reading in Balzac's Une ténébreuse affaire (1841), arguing that the conspiratorial landscape of this proto-detective novel belies Balzac's fraught relationship to the severed referentiality of his narrative. As illustration of a Balzacian poetics of conspiracy, Une ténébreuse affaire, it is suggested, points forward in literary history towards the Flaubertian aesthetic of platitude. Chapter two looks to the political criticisms Jacques Rancière makes of Sand's patrician benevolence to inform its reading of Le Compagnon du Tour de France (1840), which depicts workers' secret societies and the underground networks of Restoration liberalism. Accusations of misguided idealism, this thesis shows, align Rancière's critique and the literary-critical narrative informing Sand's twentieth-century aesthetic devaluation with the reproach that she herself levels at the Carbonarist conspirators of her novel. Chapter three, finally, turns to the alternative origin myth of 1789 that Sand elaborates in Consuelo-La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1842-44). Her engagement with the founding text of the conspiracist tradition of explanation, it argues, provides the cornerstone for the interrogation of the tensions of a pre-Revolutionary Europe torn between Enlightenment and Illuminism. Framing the Balzacian and Sandian novel as emblematic of a wider discourse on the conspiratorial origins of 1789 has a two-fold advantage. On an immediate level, it nuances received critical ideas on these authors' relationships to history and literary genre (a realist Balzac incapable of looking back further than the Restoration whose demise he so lamented; an idealist Sand too caught up in a utopian future to envisage the historical past). In doing so, this study seeks to problematize the narrative of oppositionality behind the Balzac-Sand binary in terms of which the literary history of nineteenth-century France is habitually couched. Yet, more significantly, it also gestures towards the importance of the conspiratorial as a prism through which to approach the porosity of the very categories of 'literature' and 'history' in the nineteenth-century French context.

Este trabalho propõe a investigação da interface entre as identidades políticas e raciais envolvidas na revolta liberal da Sabinada (Bahia, 1837-1838). A análise basear-se-á na documentação produzida pelos próprios envolvidos e também nas fontes referentes à repressão do movimento, de modo que se ofereça um panorama comparativo entre a autoidentificação dos rebeldes e a identificação destes pelos seus adversários. A investigação proposta se insere no amplo debate a respeito da formação da identidade nacional brasileira, dada a partir do reordenamento das múltiplas identidades engendradas no processo de formação e desagregação do Império Português na América. / This work proposes to investigate the interface between political and racial identities involved in the liberal rebellion called Sabinada (Bahia, 1837-1838). The analysis will be based on the documentation produced by the people involved in it and also by the sources regarding the repression of it. The identities of rebels and legalists as seen by themselves and by their opponents will be compared. The proposed investigation becomes part of a broad debate concerning the Brazilian national identity, given after the rearrangement of multiple identities generated in the formation processes and the disintegration of the Portuguese Empire in America.

This project considers ways mid-Victorian fictional autobiographies created new models for women's spiritual formation, testing Nancy Armstrong's theory that novels are antecedent to the cultural conditions they describe. I pair three mid-Victorian fictional texts Jane Eyre, Aurora Leigh, and The Mill on the Floss with three later non-fictional autobiographies written by women near the end of the Victorian Era: Annie Besant (1847- 1933), Mary Anne Hearn (1834-1909) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904). These women came to spiritual maturity during the same time period in which the fictional heroines Jane Eyre, Aurora Leigh and Maggie Tulliver became prominent in the popular imagination and informed the cultural dialogue about women's roles and spirituality. With the advantage of hindsight, Besant, Hearn and Cobbe are able to offer perspective on cultural and religious trends that these novelists predicted, and they are also able to show how the models presented in novels did or did not correspond with the realities of women's spiritual lives in Victorian England. To draw attention to ways that both the fictional and non-fictional autobiographies use the genre to convert readers to new beliefs about how and what women believe, I focus on the persuasive elements of the conversion narrative and read these texts through the lens of classical rhetorical appeals. By identifying the conversion experience as the common denominator in these diverse texts, I bring these examples of fictional and non-fictional autobiographies onto a level playing and demonstrate both the flexibility of the conversion narrative and the artistry of the non-fictional autobiographers in revising it. I find that the fictional autobiographers employ models of private introspection and substitute scenes of domestic reconciliation for traditional reconciliation with God; however, the three real-life autobiographers must reconcile their personal spiritual transformations with their public personae. Hence they replace the novels' domestic allegories of reconciliation with accounts appropriate to their own new spiritual identities, ranging from Evangelical Christian, to Theist, to Theosophist.

Este trabalho propõe a investigação da interface entre as identidades políticas e raciais envolvidas na revolta liberal da Sabinada (Bahia, 1837-1838). A análise basear-se-á na documentação produzida pelos próprios envolvidos e também nas fontes referentes à repressão do movimento, de modo que se ofereça um panorama comparativo entre a autoidentificação dos rebeldes e a identificação destes pelos seus adversários. A investigação proposta se insere no amplo debate a respeito da formação da identidade nacional brasileira, dada a partir do reordenamento das múltiplas identidades engendradas no processo de formação e desagregação do Império Português na América. / This work proposes to investigate the interface between political and racial identities involved in the liberal rebellion called Sabinada (Bahia, 1837-1838). The analysis will be based on the documentation produced by the people involved in it and also by the sources regarding the repression of it. The identities of rebels and legalists as seen by themselves and by their opponents will be compared. The proposed investigation becomes part of a broad debate concerning the Brazilian national identity, given after the rearrangement of multiple identities generated in the formation processes and the disintegration of the Portuguese Empire in America.

No description available.

Despite the recent scholarship that has been performed on Margaret Fuller, very little has focused on the varied body of poetry she composed during her brief life. By dividing her poetic works into three categories – those written to an early “lover,” those focusing on the theme of androgyny, and those written during her “mature period” of 1844 – one is better able to follow Fuller on the emotional and intellectual journey that served as the foundation for all of her writings. In addition, the study of Fuller’s poetry provides a clearer understanding of how this erudite woman transcended gender boundaries in her writings, as well as in the choices she made in her daily life, further emphasizing her reputation as a revolutionary woman of nineteenth century.