Although historians have long understood the importance of France to the institutional development of the Catholic Church in British North America, this portfolio is an attempt to demonstrate the significant role played by the Francophone world in shaping a distinctly American Catholicism in the United States. It does so by looking at two moments in the history of the American republic. The first is the attitude of the Continental Congress toward Quebec, which culminated in the invasion of Canada in 1775. In their attempt to sway Canada to the Patriot cause, Congress slowly reconciled themselves to guarantee religious liberty to the Roman Catholic Quebecois. Congress also included two Catholic Marylanders, John Carroll and Charles Carroll of Carrollton, in its Commission to Canada, which sought in vain to gain Quebecois’ support for the invasion. Although the Commission failed in its goals, it was nevertheless an important moment in trajectory of religious toleration in the emerging American republic and it opened opportunities for Roman Catholics such as the Carrolls to gain greater participation in civil government. The second paper adds to the scholarship on the significance of the French Revolution on American Catholicism. Whereas most of the literature on this topic focuses on the immigration of priests, women religious, and devout laypersons from France to the United States, this essay argues that the French Revolution was central to Bishop John Carroll’s evolving understanding of republicanism, secular government, church-state relations, and, crucially, his beliefs about the direction of providential history at the moment in which Carroll was organizing his see.

“There is No Such Thing as Natural Beauty”: Dolly Parton’s Cinematic Performances and Concepts of Southern Womanhood Despite the influx of scholarship surrounding popular film and gender in recent years, little to no studies focus on one star’s impact on concepts of identity. The existing scholarship tends to investigate how types of films influence spectators’ understanding of the identities represented on screen. For instance, a study of female friendship films would argue that the spectators’ concepts of relationships and female to female interaction would be influenced. This paper aims to study one actress whose multiple representations of the same identity, both on and off screen, then influenced viewer’s perceptions of that identity’s power, sexuality, and place in society. The actress, Dolly Parton, starred in three major films throughout the 1980s that told the stories of southern women. The first of these movies, 9 to 5, conveys a feminist message regarding women in the workplace and this paper argues that Dolly’s personal life and reputation influenced how southern women reacted to that message. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Parton’s comments in the press provide contradicting and racialized images of female sexuality which this paper analyses and investigates viewer reception. Finally, this paper discusses the questions raised about the value of female life, reproduction and the boundaries of the domestic sphere in Steel Magnolias. “A Southerner Talking”: The Intersections of Race, Respectability, and Sexuality in the Mid-Century South as Revealed by the Content and Reception of Lillian Smith’s Novel Strange Fruit Lillian Smith was a controversial author and social activist whose work and life have long been studied. However, the mountain of academic work done about Smith seems to consistently overlook several important factors about her first novel Strange Fruit. For instance, the bulk of the existing scholarship limits the thematic importance of the novel’s content and Smith’s life to her arguments against racism and segregation. The novel also conveys Mid-Century perceptions of female sexuality and homosexuality. Drawing on Siobhan Somerville’s theory of the parallel development of categories of difference, this paper analyzes the ways in which Smith used discussions of miscegenation to subliminally discuss same sex love. Furthermore, this paper explores the critical receptions of this novel to demonstrate the racialized views of respectability that existed at the time of its release in 1944.

This dissertation uses bound labor as a lens for understanding the development of law, identity, and imperialism in the early seventeenth-century Caribbean. The Spanish, English, and French depended on bound labor, especially for their Caribbean possessions. However, the geographic proximity of their colonies and frequent warfare forced Europeans to negotiate across imperial boundaries to develop regional slave systems. at the heart of these negotiations, and the law of nations that they drew from, was the issue of reciprocity. I argue that Europeans in the Caribbean, especially the English and the French, created a transnational legal understanding that protected their ability to hold people in bondage. In order to create recognizable parameters around bound labor, Europeans referred to themselves as nations in their negotiations with one another. In other words, Europeans in the Caribbean negotiated over who could be forced into what kind of labor arrangement as nations, thereby leaving individuals seen as outside of the state, especially people of Indian and African descent, vulnerable to enslavement – no matter their legal status as subjects of European crowns. The construction and maintenance of regional slave systems depended on the development of international law in the seventeenth-century Caribbean.

This dissertation re-conceptualizes the scandals that engulfed the intelligence community in the mid-1970s. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) confronted an unprecedented crisis during these years: the Pike hearings in the House of Representatives, the Church Committee in the Senate, and an executive branch commission led by then Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Historians and political scientists have studied these events before, but I present a nuanced interpretation of the intelligence investigations by placing them in a broader political and cultural context. to fully understand the impact of the so-called "Year of Intelligence," I argue that scholars need to focus on what was happening outside of Congress. The CIA encountered a backlash from both ends of the political spectrum. I provide the first history of Counter-Spy, a left wing magazine founded in 1973 that called for the abolition of covert action. The magazine's editors directly challenged the "culture of secrecy" at the CIA by publishing the names of Agency operatives. at the same time, conservatives embarked on a very different confrontation with the Agency. Like Counter-Spy, they charged that the CIA was keeping secrets from the American people, but their concern was with Agency analysis of the Soviet Union, not covert action. I also examine Hollywood portrayals of the CIA in this tumultuous era; rather than simply responding to the Congressional investigations and the Rockefeller Commission, filmmakers actually anticipated the widespread concerns about the complex relationship between espionage and democracy. The events of the mid-1970s badly tarnished the CIA's image. In response to this rapid decline in popular support, the Agency developed an aggressive public relations campaign designed to restore confidence in government secrecy and covert operations. This dissertation contains the first systematic history of CIA public relations. The public relations staff has consistently portrayed the CIA as the most open intelligence agency in the world, heroically protecting national security while accepting the necessity of Congressional oversight. But despite these public statements, Agency officials worked to revitalize the "culture of secrecy." They have dramatically restricted the ability of former employees to write critically about CIA activities; they have successfully lobbied Congress for exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA); and they have repeatedly broken promises to de-classify historical records. Agency officials have been obsessed with protecting their image, and this obsession has frequently undermined historical research. Robert M. Gates launched an openness initiative in February 1992, but the culture at the Agency was not fundamentally changed. In fact, George Tenet shut down the voluntary de-classification program at the CIA in 1998. A key conclusion of this study is that the "culture of secrecy" at the Agency remains firmly entrenched. Since the CIA cannot be reformed from within, I argue that outside intervention is required.

“Marketing Agencies for Science: Nonprofits, Public Science Education, and Capitalism in Modern America” explores how the manmade environment of capitalism generated and transformed nonprofit public science education from the nineteenth century to today. Each chapter considers four untold histories of public-serving organizations—including the Smithsonian Institution and the Science Museum of Virginia—across nearly 200 years to identify common trends in, and unique transformations to, the ways that Americans teach each other about science. Ultimately, nonprofit institutions taught Americans more than lessons in physics or chemistry; they communicated the practical value of scientific knowledge to attract visitors and financial support. For-profit aspects of capitalism, including mass production and the accumulation of capital, were integral to the ways that philanthropic and public-serving organizations—typically designated as nonprofits today—first created and continued to offer science education. The public that nonprofits targeted varied over time, and immigrants, African Americans, and women of all backgrounds demanded affordable access to science instruction, effectively forging a gateway into scientific professions that are still in need of greater diversity today. Furthermore, nonprofit institutions blurred the boundary between accessible science information and profit in the United States as they developed profit-seeking forms and strategies to support public-serving ventures. As such, this project, unlike others that examine public science education, emphasizes how people reproduce and change the conditions of capitalism while embracing its underlying assumptions. Research institutions sold accessible science books to survive economic depressions; curators designed exhibitions to communicate an intimate relationship between scientific discoveries and economic progress; and for-profit corporations funded groundbreaking innovations that redefined, and increased the cost of, science education. As capitalism changed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, so too did the lessons that nonprofits communicated to Americans about science.

This digital thesis seeks to evaluate the impact of the digitization of analog record archives in environmental justice activities for the Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune Community. The details of the Camp Lejeune contaminated drinking water issue are firmly rooted in the analog era of record keeping and were all but forgotten by the affected community when the base was listed as a National Priority site in 1989. However, government public health activities at the Agency of Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in the late 1990s and early 2000s resulted in the digitization of records from the military and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency onto CD-ROM discs and made available to the community and public. The conversion of the data from an analog paper format, restricted to onsite archives, into a digital medium provided the community an opportunity to independently assess the historical facts free from government interpretation and challenge the official Marine Corps narrative. My role as the community's informal public historian allowed for the organization and utilization of these historical documents to create a community-based narrative using digital timelines. This work led to several congressional investigations into the drinking water contamination which were ultimately instrumental in the passage of legislative relief for the service personnel and their families who were exposed to the contaminated drinking water aboard the base.

The Naturalization Act of 1790’s requirements of residency and “good character,” reveal that the First Congress set the limits on the access of immigrants to citizenship to mostly restrict European foreigners, rather than African Americans or Native Americans. These residency and “good character” clauses resulted from a combination of concerns regarding foreigners that came to prominence during the Confederation Period. Among these fears were the perceived abilities of immigrants to the gain control over land in the trans-Appalachian West and control over political influence in the unstable political order after the American Revolution. These worries about national stability were inflamed by long standing concerns over integration of immigrants on the basis of language or tendencies towards “monarchism,” which were seen as contrary to republican values. Using British legal understanding of subjecthood and naturalization, policymakers in the First Congress framed the Naturalization Act of 1790 as a narrower definition of citizenship derived from prejudice against foreign outsiders. The conception of the United States as an asylum for mankind came to ironic demise through the republican principles it sought to uphold. On October 22, 1782, a Westchester County sheriff entered the Crompond, New York headquarters of the French Expeditionary Force to the Americas to arrest General Rochambeau. The shocking treatment of Rochambeau revealed the increasing tensions in the Franco-American relations that began after the Battle of Yorktown and developed through the winter residence of the French Army in Williamsburg, Virginia. Historians of the Franco-American relationship, such as Durand Echeverria and Peter P. Hill, commonly suggest the beginning of the Confederation Period as the start of French disillusionment, relying on French views of confederation politics as “chaos or fears of an “imperial reconciliation” as motivation for the decline. However, a comparison in the rhetoric by the French Expeditionary Force over the winter at Newport in 1780-1781 and the winter in Williamsburg in 1781-1782 revealed that discourteous observations in journals of French officers dramatically increased. Additionally, the claims letters sent by common Virginians to the governor’s office suggest that the quartered French soldiers had worn out their welcome, even as the government officials attempted continuing displays of friendship. The process of Franco-American disillusionment occurred just after General Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown and the loss of a common American and French objective.

In Reading the Gothic at Madame Rivardi’s Seminary, I study the reading patterns of young women in the early American republic using letters exchanged between students who attended Madame Rivardi’s Seminary in Philadelphia. By examining the language employed by young women in their discussions of gothic novels and romantic fiction, I argue that young women’s engagement with these texts defied the expectations of educators and moralists, especially in regards to the practice known today as sympathetic identification. By reading, comparing, and identifying with works from these two genres, young women participated in broader discussions regarding artifice and virtue in the early American republic and established a group-specific vocabulary that facilitated communication within their closed social circle. In Prodigal Sons and Virtuous Daughters, I consider how concerns regarding education, counterfeit identities, and corruption found expression in seduction literature. By focusing on the boarding school as a site of seduction, I argue that this space, and the bodies of the students who inhabited it, provided a focus for the political and social anxieties that plagued the early republic. The most significant of these fears concerned the inability of the young women, and American society as a whole, to distinguish between fiction and reality—a process known by modern scholars as sympathetic identification. I also argue that anxieties regarding seduction influenced the educational opportunities available to young women. Many educators sought to combat seduction within their schools by encouraging the formation of close-knit, female communities that protected students from falling victim to the schemes of opportunistic suitors.

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This dissertation used the development of Fredericksburg, Virginia from the middle of the eighteenth century to 1810 to study urbanization in the South, and tests the usefulness of the staple thesis in explaining the process.;Fredericksburg began as a tobacco town which grew slowly until about 1750 when the opening of new foreign markets for American corn and wheat launched it into a period of growth and prosperity. as grain moved through Fredericksburg to world markets, skilled workers moved to town to service the trade. The needs of this new population were met by other craftsmen who established consumer industries. By the Revolution the local economy had diversified and prominent citizens anticipated additional growth and development.;The Revolution itself stimulated manufacturing in Fredericksburg. Located on the main road between the northern and southern states and on another road between Tidewater and the Piedmont, the town was a major supply point for American troops. A small arms manufactory and iron works were beneficiaries of the wartime market.;After the Revolution wheat exporting continued to attract capital and labor until about 1800. Shoe manufacturers, soap and candle makers, bottlers, rope makers, and others served the consumer needs of the local population. By the early years of the new century, however, the economy stagnated. Other areas more advantageously located to the best grain producing areas drained off Fredericksburg's skilled labor. Apprentices found few opportunities in town, so joined a large floating population at the bottom of the economic scale moving from place to place. The number of poor and the cost of maintaining them increased.;Before the War of 1812 Fredericksburg, like Richmond, Alexandria, and Hampton, had become a regional economic political and cultural center within a developing American national economy.