During the nineteenth century, Americans began to develop a new relationship with death. Urbanites were less confronted with the constant presence of the dead and dying than they had in the past. A new trend in cemeteries also developed as a result. The Rural Cemetery Movement promoted the idea that the dead should be buried amongst a natural setting that was pleasing and calming to visitors. The first few initial cemeteries were an immediate success, but this was not the case in Richmond, Virginia. Although the developers had grand ideas about their cemetery project, Richmonders opposed the cemetery in the first several years. They feared that the cemetery would stunt the growth of the city or even harm the health of the city’s citizens. Over time, however, Richmonders began to accept the cemetery and with this they formed a new understanding of nature that was pleasing and allowed Americans to value natural settings.

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The effect of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the southern planter elite remains a topic of interest to historians. Did the war ruin the planter class? Or, did they maintain economic, geographic, or social persistence? This study focuses on the persistence from 1850 to 1880 of five East Texas large planter families who owned one hundred or more slaves in 1860. An analysis of data primarily from county, state, and federal records formthe basis of this study. Four families persisted as wealthy influential members of their postbellum communities. One family remained geographically persistent but not wealthy. The experiences of these families suggest that large East Texas planter families found it possible to persist in spite of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

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The American planter has mostly been presented as the epitome of the romantic cavalier legend that could be found in the fiction of John Pendleton Kennedy to Thomas Nelson Page: a man of chivalric manners and good breeding; a man of good social position; a man of wealth and leisure (Concise Oxford Dictionary). A closer scrutiny of the cavalier and genteel ethos of the time, however, reveals the inherent ideological inconsistencies with the idea of the gentleman itself, as the ideal came to be more and more perceived as an illusion and as challenges to traditional gender stereotypes came to redefine the nature and role of the Southern Gentleman. This study hopes to complicate the traditional delineation of hegemonic manhood with the aim to better understand how precisely the Old South’s masculine ideals were constructed and maintained over time, especially in times of crisis, and how southern elite males (re)defined, enacted, and/or maintained a distinctive Southern model of masculinity while others resisted, modified, or flouted those ideals. The work undertaken by this dissertation can thus be situated within the broad rubric of masculinity studies and its central axiom—the interrogation of the structures of power, domination, and hierarchy. Enriching masculinity studies of the Old South, this critical study of Southern American fiction attempts to respond to the invitation of historians like Stephen Berry or Craig Thompson Friend in striking a commendable balance between conceptualizing larger historical questions and narrating the intimacies and complexities of Southern men’s individual lives. Taken collectively, these novels continue to explore this fertile field by moving outside the “confines and confidences of elites” (Peel 1). Because it complicates any simple equation between honor, mastery, and manliness, and because it seeks to revisit traditional conceptualisations of gender, I hope that this study will open new ways of thinking about the privileges and wounds of a masculinity that has been considered by most as the normative, invisible, and unquestioned referent from which to measure marginalized others—foreigners, women, or non-whites.

<p><i>She Will Be: Literary Authorship and the Coming Woman in the Postbellum United States </i>argues that postbellum women writers deployed the figure of the Coming Woman, an archetype for the nation’s improved female future, to articulate expanded sociopolitical opportunities for women, interrogate prevailing standards of literary art, and validate their own literary pursuits. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, the American reading public became increasingly fascinated with identifying who the Coming Woman would be, what qualities she would possess, and how her arrival would alter the nation’s future. Such questions flooded US print culture in the decades between 1865 and 1900, demonstrating that the Coming Woman not only occupied a space between the antebellum True Woman and fin de siècle New Woman but also that she was a major feminine archetype in her own right.</p><p><br></p><p>Even so, existing scholarship on the Coming Woman tends either to identify the Coming Woman anachronistically as an early iteration of the New Woman or, when naming her directly, to overlook her complex function as both a harbinger and manifestation of manifold sociopolitical changes. These limited examinations elide the Coming Woman’s ubiquitous influence on postbellum literary culture, particularly in terms of the complex links Susan Coultrap-McQuin and Lawrence W. Levine have traced between middlebrow culture and postbellum national identity. <i>She Will Be</i> builds on recent scholarship by demonstrating how the American Coming Woman helped reshape notions of women’s literary authorship, modernity, and national identity in the late nineteenth century. By examining her literary life through four key middlebrow genres (<i>Bildungsroman</i>, sentimentality, utopianism, and regionalism), <i>She Will Be</i> reveals how female authors used the Coming Woman figure to imagine—and, indeed, write into being—an expanded vision for the US’s female future.</p>

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My objective with this thesis is to understand how racist stereotypes and myths compounded the sale of fair-skinned black women during and after the slave trade in New Orleans, Louisiana. This commodification of black women's bodies continued well into the twentieth century, notably in New Orleans' vice district of Storyville. Called "quadroons" (a person with ¼ African ancestry) and "octoroons" (1/8 African ancestry), these women were known for their "sexual prowess" and drew in a large number of patrons. The existence of "white passing" black women complicated ideas about race and racial purity in the South. Race as a myth and social construct, or as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham explains in her essay, African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race, a "metalanguage" exposes race not as a genetic fact, but rather a physical appearance through which power relations and status were to be conferred. My methodology uses race and gender theory to analyze primary and secondary sources to understand and contextualize how population demographics, myths, and liberal 18th century colonial laws contributed to the sale of black women's bodies. The works of Emily Clark, Walter Johnson, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and other historians who utilize Atlantic history have been paramount in my research. Emily Clark has transformed the "white-black" women from a tragic, sexualized trope into a fully actualized human being, while Hall has tackled the racist underpinnings inherent in the neglect of black women's history. The writings of bell hooks, particularly her essay Eating the Other, establishes the modern day commodification of black women vis-à -vis their representation in media, as well as through the fetishism of their bodies by a white patriarchal system. During slavery plantation owners could do virtually anything they wanted with their property, including engaging in sexual intercourse. By depicting black women as hypersexual jezebels, they could justify their rape, while establishing their dominance and place in the white male hegemony of that time period. For the right price a white male of a lesser class could achieve the same thing at a brothel down in Storyville at the turn of the twentieth century, for as Emily Clark argues in her book, The Strange History of the American Quadroon, these brothels were a great equalizer, allowing all white men to experience "…sexual mastery enjoyed only by elite planters before the Civil War." By democratizing white supremacy, the quadroon and others like her forged solidarity that bridge across all classes, while upholding whiteness and oppressing people of color at the same time.