History

Between 1919 and the establishment of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Kensington's American Federation of Hosiery Workers (AFHW) built a remarkable movement for social justice in Philadelphia, that played an important role in the establishment of the CIO, the New Deal, and labor-based feminism. Most historical accounts have portrayed the years following World War I through the early 1930s as a period of reversals and apathy for both the labor and women's movements. Fractured by factionalism, racial and ethnic conflict, and government repression, it would not be until the Great Depression, and within the "culture of unity" of the CIO and New Deal, that this "doldrums" would be overcome enough to spark a revived labor movement and a "labor" feminism that emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s. The roots of the social movements of the 1930s and beyond are, however, longer and much more complex. In several places, working-class men and women continued to advance throughout the period of perceived "doldrums." In fact, the 1920s and early 1930s were a period of organizing, education, and network building that laid the groundwork for the later movements. This dissertation uses the AFHW and Kensington as a lens to examine these developments. A left-wing-Socialist-led union, the hosiery workers developed a subculture of radicalism that drew on the long working-class traditions of the textile unions of the community of Kensington. Representing an industry whose very product, silk full-fashioned hosiery, epitomized the "flapper," the union developed a movement that celebrated – and subverted – the 1920s "New Woman" and the culture of the Jazz Age youth rebellion. Hosiery workers developed a romantic, rights-based movement that promoted class solidarity across differences of age, ethnicity, race, and gender. Over the course of a campaign to organize the industry and rebuild labor, the AFHW developed a heroic movement that utilized pathbreaking female-centered imagery and propelled women and the union onto the national consciousness. Their activities put them in the forefront of a movement for social democracy and led in direct ways to the CIO, the New Deal, and labor feminism.

Temple University – Theses

History

The Arctic has long held power over the American imagination as a place of otherworldly beauty, life-threatening elements, and dangerous wildlife. Nearing the end of the nineteenth century, in a time of great anxiety about the direction of American society, the region took on new significance. As a new frontier, the Arctic was a place where explorers could establish a vigorous and aggressive type of American manhood through their exploits. Publications, lectures, newspaper accounts, and other media brought the stories of these explorers to those at home. Through such accounts, the stories of brave explorers counteracted the perceived softening of men and American society in general. Women played a crucial role in this process. They challenged the perceived male-only nature of the Arctic while their depiction in publications and the press contradictorily claimed that they retained their femininity. American perceptions of the Arctic were inextricably intertwined with their perceptions of the Inuit, the indigenous peoples that called the region home. In the late-nineteenth-century, Americans generally admired the Inuit as an exceptional race that embodied characteristics that were accepted in American Society as representing ideal manhood. Over time the image of the Arctic in American society shifted from a terrifying yet conquerable place to an accessible and open place by the 1920s. This "friendly Arctic" - a term coined by anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson - appeared to be a less threatening and intimidating place. Due to new technologies and geographical accomplishments, the Arctic appeared to become more accessible and useable. As the Arctic's depiction in American society gradually shifted towards a more "friendly Arctic," the role of women in the Arctic shifted as well. Women increasingly participated in this new friendly Arctic. While still claiming that their femininity remained, both fictional and non-fictional female explorers participated in a wide array of Arctic activities. The image of the Inuit, too, underwent a transformation. Americans viewed the Inuit with less respect than in prior decades. Open Arctic theories and rising technological advancements contributed to this change. The decline in respect also stemmed from beliefs that the indigenous northerners were set on a course of extinction or assimilation. Ultimately, the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century relationship between Americans and the Arctic laid the foundation for present-day views of the region and the Inuit.

Temple University – Theses

History

The acquisition of the home of George Washington by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association in 1858 was probably the first preservation project led by women in the United States. During the following decades, elite Philadelphia and Montgomery County women continued the construction of historical memory through the organization and popularization of exhibitions, fundraising galas, preservation of historical sites, publication of historical writings, and the erection of patriotic monuments. Drawing from a wide variety of sources, including annual organizations' reports, minutes of committees and of a DAR chapter, correspondence, reminiscences, newspapers, circulars, and ephemera, the dissertation argues that privileged women constructed a classed and gendered historical memory, which aimed to write women into the national historical narrative and present themselves as custodians of history. They constructed a subversive historical account that placed women on equal footing with male historical figures and argued that women played a significant role in shaping the nation's history. During the first three decades, privileged women advanced an idealized memory of Martha and George Washington with an intention to reconcile the sectional rift caused by the Civil War. From the early 1890s, with the formation of the Daughters of the American Revolution, elite women of colonial and revolutionary war ancestry constructed a more inclusive memory of revolutionary soldiers that aimed to inculcate the public, particularly recent immigrants, in patriotic and civic values. An introductory chapter demonstrates the social, political, and economic vulnerability of the elites and the institutions and historical memory they forged to shore up their privileged status from the colonial period to the Civil War. Through the organization of the Great Central Fair held in Philadelphia in 1864, the fundraising campaign on behalf of the Centennial Exposition, the preservation of George Washington's Headquarters at Valley Forge, the formation of the Historical Society of Montgomery County, and the activities of the Valley Forge Chapter DAR the dissertation demonstrates that women employed their experience to expand their activities beyond regional boundaries while also tending to local history. The dissertation contributes to the discussion regarding the construction of memory by adding gender and class as categories of analysis. It also adds to the historical debate regarding the professionalization of history by exploring women's historical writings during the period of institutionalization of history.

Temple University – Theses

Art History

Since Roland Barthes published Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography in 1982, the prevailing theory about photography has revolved around its primary role as a manifestation of transience, death, and mortality. Whether one promotes the philosophy that the photographic image steals away the soul and promotes death, or that it simply captures images of those that have died or will die, the photograph has been commonly interpreted as a visual reminder of the finality of human life. At no time does such an interpretation appear to be more tangibly true than during the mid-nineteenth century when the photograph was commonly used to preserve the actual visage of death in post- mortem portraiture. Here, death is not suggested or implied, but is vividly present. However, the theoretical emphasis that Barthes placed on death has limited our understanding of such images by eliding other meanings historically associated with them. As an addendum to Barthes, I propose that post-mortem images - particularly those of children - represent a more complex relationship between life and death as it pertained to nineteenth-century American culture. Moreover, I believe that it is important to consider post-mortem photography in tandem with painted mourning portraiture, and to contemplate both within a larger visual and cultural context in order to gain a more holistic understanding of these images in antebellum America. My dissertation will re-situate post-mortem representations of children within the material and religious culture of antebellum America, amid evolving historical beliefs about the life of children, the concept of childhood, and ideas about child-rearing, not just postmodern theoretical notions of death. My particular focus on children responds to the poignancy of childhood death in antebellum America and the way in which these images particularly embody the belief in continued existence through the afterlife. By placing such images within the wider context of nineteenth-century culture, I will demonstrate that life existed in death for antebellum Americans through the physical or material presence of the photograph along with Christian spiritual associations regarding the soul and the afterlife. In other words, belief in an ongoing relationship between material and immaterial "bodies" was exteriorized in the painted or photographic representation of the physical corpse, enabling antebellum Americans to interpret the image as both the icon and physical residue of the soul. I will demonstrate that the materiality of the post- mortem image allowed antebellum Americans to preserve that sense of life within death. While the material presence of the image acted as a reflection of "being," spiritual beliefs in a heavenly afterlife permitted nineteenth-century viewers to meditate on the perpetuation, rather than the impermanence, of existence. While this complex historical dimension of post-mortem imagery - a dimension largely ignored by Barthes - provides the central focus of my…

History

Lord Mansfield is typically remembered for his influence in common law and commercial law, and his decision in Somerset v. Stewart , which granted a slave, brought to England, habeas corpus to refuse his forced transportation out of that nation by his master. Both conditions allowed observers to praise him for what they viewed as very modern notions about economy and society (capitalism and anti-slavery, respectively). Mansfield's primary position as Chief Justice of King's Bench in England, which contributed most of the only published material from him, shielded him from any scrutiny about his wider influence in general British governance in the period of his public career, roughly 1740-1790. Throughout his career, Mansfield played a large role in the general government of the British Empire. Beginning with his role as Solicitor General in 1742 and continuing after he became Chief Justice in 1756, Mansfield interacted and advised the highest members of the British ruling elite, including the monarch. Because the nature of British governance in the 18th Century was very porous, Mansfield partook in the exercise of legislative (through his seats in the House and Commons and Lords), executive (through a formal seat on the Privy Council and later in the King's Closet), and judicial (through his roles as Solicitor and Attorney General, Chief Justice of King's Bench, and temporary positions as Lord Chancellor) power practically simultaneously throughout his career. In these capacities, Mansfield contributed to imperial policy at a critical moment. He was a champion for the British Empire as the beacon of the most perfect society at that time - a perspective he developed through his education and experiences during the crucial formative years of the British nation. He channeled his support for Britain into a seemingly rigid dogma that saw any threat or challenge to British authority or culture as inherently illegitimate. In this regard, Mansfield favored British domination over the other imperial powers, and he immediately rejected the earliest complaints of the Americans over British rule. Because of the nature of his position within British governance, Mansfield's view remained constant in a government that witnessed continual turnover. The potential of Mansfield's influence was not lost upon the public. Many factions from "true Whigs" such as John Wilkes, and American patriots viewed him as the epitome of the problem with the British government-its seemingly arbitrary, unconstitutional, and tyrannical posture toward everything. Mansfield posed a particular challenge for these groups because he was a Chief Justice, and they believed he was supposed to adhere to a strong notion of justice. Instead, they saw him continually leading their repression, and so they questioned the basis of the whole British system. Through pamphlets, newspapers, and visual prints, these groups identified Mansfield as a key conspirator, which they attributed to an anti-British disposition. In these ways, Mansfield and his…

History

A significant number of Pennsylvanians were not, in any meaningful sense, either revolutionaries or loyalists during the American War for Independence. Rather, they were disaffected from both sides in the imperial dispute, preferring, when possible, to avoid engagement with the Revolution altogether. The British Occupation of Philadelphia in 1777 and 1778 laid bare the extent of this popular disengagement and disinterest, as well as the dire lengths to which the Patriots would go to maintain the appearance of popular unity. Driven by a republican ideology that relied on popular consent in order to legitimate their new governments, American Patriots grew increasingly hostile, intolerant, and coercive toward those who refused to express their support for independence. By eliminating the revolutionaries' monopoly on military force in the region, the occupation triggered a crisis for the Patriots as they saw popular support evaporate. The result was a vicious cycle of increasing alienation as the revolutionaries embraced ever more brutal measures in attempts to secure the political acquiescence and material assistance of an increasingly disaffected population. The British withdrawal in 1778, by abandoning the region's few true loyalists and leaving many convinced that American Independence was now inevitable, shattered what little loyalism remained in the region and left the revolutionaries secure in their control of the state. In time, this allowed them to take a more lenient view of disaffection and move toward modern interpretations of silence as acquiescence and consent for the established government.

Temple University – Theses

History

Americans view neutrality in the 1790s as the far-seeing wisdom of the Founders and a weak power's common-sense approach to a transatlantic war in which it could not afford to get involved. Far from this benign image of prudence, however, neutrality in the Early Republic was controversial: it was a style and paradigm of foreign policy that grappled with the consequences of a democratic politics exacerbated by diplomatic crises. Far from promoting tranquility, neutrality provoked uproar from the very beginning. Intense print battles erupted over sensational exposés of foreign influence and conspiracy, reverberating through the international, national, and local levels simultaneously. Print exposés of foreign intrigue provoked partisan warfare that raised the larger, unsettled (and unsettling) issues of the national interest, the exercise of federal power, and the relationship between the people and their government. This dynamic reflected and exacerbated preexisting sectional fissures in the union, triggering recourse to the politics of slavery. As a result, the politics of slavery calibrated the competing national visions of the emerging Federalists and Republicans, defining the limits of American independence while challenging the ability of the United States to remain neutral. Drawing on the efforts of diplomatic historians, political historians and literary scholars, this work illustrates the mutually constitutive relationship between print politics, foreign relations, and the politics of slavery in the Early Republic. It argues that neutrality was a style of foreign policy that both political parties used to contain sectionalism and faction, and that print politics and the politics of slavery combined to create a dynamic that made that style malleable.

Temple University – Theses

History

This dissertation uncovers women healers' vital role in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century healthcare marketplace. Euro-American women healers participated in networks of health information sharing that reached across lines of class and gender, and included female practitioners in American Indian and African American communities. Although their contributions to the healthcare labor force are relatively invisible in the historical record, women healers in the Delaware Valley provided the bulk of healthcare for their families and communities. Nonetheless, apart from a few notable monographs, women healers' practices and authority remain understudied. My project complicates a medical historiography that marginalizes female practitioners and narrates their declining healthcare authority after the mid-eighteenth century due to the emergence of a consumer society, a culture of domesticity, the professionalization of medicine, and the rise of enlightened science, which generated discourses of women's innate irrationality. Using the Philadelphia area as a case study, I argue that women healers were not merely static traditional practitioners destined to fall victim to the march of science, medicine, and capitalism as this older narrative suggests. Instead, I assert that women healers of various classes and ethnicities adapted their practices as they found new sources of healthcare authority through female education in the sciences, manuscript authorship, access to medical print media, the culture of sensibility, and the alternative gender norms of religious groups like the Quakers. Building on a longstanding foundation of recognized female practitioners, medically skilled women continued to fashion healing authority by participating in mutually affirming webs of medical information exchanges that reflected new ideas about science, health, and the body. In addition, women doctresses, herbalists, apothecaries, and druggists empowered themselves by participating in an increasingly commercialized and consumer-oriented healthcare marketplace. Within this unregulated environment, women healers in the colonies and early republic challenged physicians' claims to a monopoly on medical knowledge and practice. The practitioners analyzed in this study represent a bridge between the recognized and skilled women healers of the seventeenth century and the female healthcare professionals of the nineteenth century.

Temple University – Theses

History

This dissertation is a cultural biography of merchant banker Stephen Girard that explores the origins of the mythology as well as the mechanics of capitalism as it functioned on the streets and in the homes of early national Philadelphia. By tracing changes in Stephen Girard's family, both traditional and improvisational, from the 1770s to his death in 1831 and beyond, this project examines how Girard repeatedly capitalized on his family to take commercial risks, reinventing what family meant in a transforming economy. Telling overlapping stories of Girard's family and businesses, including trade networks reaching from Europe, the Caribbean, and China to the United States, I argue that an Atlantic-American culture of capitalism developed at the intersection of the family and the market. Episodes that show the salience and limits of familial bonds in a turbulent economy include Girard's risky commercial strategies during the American Revolution that relied on his brother in Saint-Domingue, and tenuous rationalities of the market and marriage that collided when his wife supposedly went insane. After his public involvement in Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s, Girard learned that institutions could do the work of families. Applying this lesson to the national political economy, Girard refashioned the Bank of the United States into the Bank of Stephen Girard and lent the U.S. Treasury over one million dollars to help fund the War of 1812. Well before his death in 1831, Girard was one of the wealthiest men in the nation. His will altered the shape and flow of Philadelphia, with repercussions for inheritance and corporate law through the twentieth century. By juxtaposing Girard's personal and public lives, this dissertation integrates scholarship on the market economy with that on gender and the family to better understand the expansion of a culture of capitalism in the early American Republic. Under capitalism, people and relationships were fungible in new and important ways. In telling the story of Stephen Girard, this dissertation follows a central, but overlooked, player in the early American and Atlantic economy in order to explain the paradoxical relationship between capitalism and liberty.

Temple University – Theses

History

"American Monsters: Tabloid Media and the Satanic Panic, 1970-2000," analyzes an episode of national hysteria that dominated the media throughout most of the 1980s. Its origins, however, go back much farther and its consequences for the media would extend into subsequent decades. Rooted in the decade's increasingly influential conservative political ideology, the satanic panic involved hundreds of accusations that devil-worshipping pedophiles were operating America's white middle-class suburban daycare centers. Communities around the country became embroiled in criminal trials against center owners, the most publicized of which was the McMartin Preschool trial in Manhattan Beach, California. The longest and most expensive trial in the nation's history, the McMartin case is an important focal point of this project. In the 1990s, judges overturned the life sentences of defendants in most major cases, and several prominent journalists and lawyers condemned the phenomenon as a witch-hunt. They accurately understood it to be a powerful delusion, or what contemporary cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard termed a "hyperreality," in which audiences confuse the media universe for real life. Presented mainly through tabloid television, or "infotainment," and integral to its development, influence, and success, the panic was a manifestation of the hyperreal. This dissertation explores how the panic both reflected and shaped a cultural climate dominated by the overlapping worldviews of politically active conservatives. In 1980, neoconservatives, libertarians, economic conservatives, and evangelical Christians, who had begun their cultural ascent over the course of the previous decade, were brought together temporarily under the aegis of President Ronald Reagan. With collective strength they implemented their joint agenda, which partly included expanding their influence on the nation's media sources. Coinciding with a backlash against feminism and the gay rights movement, media outlets often represented working women and homosexuals as dangerous to conservative idealized notions of white suburban family life. Such views were incorporated into the panic, which tabloid media reinforced through coverage of alleged sexual abuse of children at day care centers. Infotainment expanded dramatically in the 1980s, selling conservative-defined threats as news. As the satanic panic unfolded through infotainment sub-genres like talk shows and local news programs (first introduced in the late 1940s), its appeal guaranteed the continued presence of the tabloid genre, and reinforced conservative views on gender, race, class, and religion. Although the panic subsided in the early 1990s as journalists and lawyers discredited evidence and judicial decisions turned against accusers, the legacy of the panic continued to influence American culture and politics into the twenty-first century.

Temple University – Theses

History

The United States Centennial was a pivotal event to celebrate the founding of the American nation. People came together to show the unity and progress of the United States, specifically after the division of the Civil War. As the industrial revolution took off in earnest, Americans were keen to show the world that they were united and taking the lead in industrial change. Further, to show that the United States was a force in the world, other nations were invited to participate by displaying their culture at the event. The Women’s Centennial Executive Committee (WCEC) became part of the effort to raise funds early on in the process. A group of thirteen women joined together with Benjamin Franklin’s great-granddaughter selected as their president and they set forth to raise funds and gain publicity for a “Woman’s Section” in the main building. When that prospect was denied them, the women then began to again raise monies, but this time for their own Women’s Pavilion. Determined not to be cut out of the exhibition, the women labored tirelessly to make their ideas reality. To raise funds and to draw attention to women’s contributions to society, the women drew upon the females of the founding generation to gain legitimacy in their efforts as women active in the civic sector. Harkening back to the American Revolution, the WCEC inserted women as active participants in the founding of the nation and they used images of Martha Washington and Sarah Franklin Bache to raise funds and bolster their cause. Women, who had sacrificed as men had for the birth of the nation, were noble members of the republic; in presenting women’s labors and inventions in 1876, the WCEC was making the point that women’s lives and contributions in nineteenth century America were as vital and necessary as they had been in the eighteenth century. The rewriting of the narrative of the American Revolution enabled the WCEC to celebrate women’s accomplishments in the most public manner and to herald their achievement in both domestic production as well as in terms of education and employment. The women of 1876 formed a continuous line backwards to the Revolution, and they showed the world that American women had always been a vital part of the country and that, if afforded their rights, they would continue to do so into the future.

Temple University – Theses

History

This dissertation challenges the dominant interpretation in women's history of the 1920s and 1930s as the "doldrums of the women's movement," and demonstrates that Philadelphia's political history is incomplete without the inclusion of African American women's voices. Given their well-developed bases of power in social reform, club, church, and interracial groups and strong tradition of political activism, these women exerted tangible pressure on Philadelphia's political leaders to reshape the reform agenda. When success was not forthcoming through traditional political means, African American women developed alternate strategies to secure their political agenda. While this dissertation is a traditional social and political history, it will also combine elements of biography in order to reconstruct the lives of Philadelphia's African American political women. This work does not describe a united sisterhood among women or portray this period as one of unparalleled success. Rather, this dissertation will bring a new balance to political history that highlights the importance of local political activism and is at the same time sensitive to issues of race, gender, and class. Central to this study will be the development of biographical sketches for the key African American women activists in Philadelphia, reconstructing the challenges they faced in the political arena, as feminists and as reformers. Enfranchisement did not immediately translate into political power, as black women's efforts to achieve their goals were often frustrated by racial tension with white women and gender divisions within the African American community. This dissertation also contributes to the historical debate regarding the shifting partisan alliance of the African American community. African Americans not intimately tied to the club movement or machine politics spearheaded the move away from the Republicans. They did so not out of economic reasons or as a result of Democratic overtures but because of the poor record of the Republicans on racial issues. Crystal Bird Fauset's rise to political power, as the first African American woman elected to a state legislature in the United States, provides important insight into Philadelphia Democratic politics, the African American community, and the extensive organizational and political networks woven by African American women.

Temple University – Theses