History

This dissertation makes three key arguments regarding politics and print culture in antebellum Florida. First, Florida’s territorial status, historic geographical divisions, and local issues necessitated the use of political parties. Second, Florida’s political parties evolved from a focus on charismatic men and local geographic loyalties to loyalty to party regardless of who was running to national and regional loyalties above local issues and men. Lastly, the central and most consistent aspect of Florida’s political party development was the influence of newspapers and their editors. To understand Florida politics in the nineteenth century it is necessary to recognize how the personal, geographical, and political divisions in Florida’s territorial past remained a critical factor in the development and function of national political parties in Florida. The local divisions within Florida in the 1820s created factions and personal loyalties that would later help characterize national parties in the 1840s. Political leaders, with the help of editors and their newspapers, created factions based more on personal loyalties than on ideology. By the 1850s party loyalty became paramount over personal or regional loyalties. In the last years before the Civil War Democrats linked Southern loyalty to the Democratic party and accused their opposition of treason against the South leading Florida and the nation to Civil War. Yet, throughout these political changes, editors and their newspapers remained central to political success, becoming the voice of political parties and critical to attracting and maintaining potential voters. In addition to understanding how politics functioned in antebellum Florida, this dissertation contributes to our larger understanding of the Second Party System and the South. An underlying argument of this dissertation is that while the Democrats tended to be better organized and more ideologically coherent, the Whigs suffered from constant in-fighting and splintering. This led to the Democratic domination of politics and, in the South, the ability of secession supporters to control the public conversation during the Sectional Crisis of the 1850s and lead the nation to war. This dissertation also claims that there is not just one South but many and exposes the myth of a changeless and monolithic South.

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

This dissertation is a study of free African American politics, in the cities of Baltimore and Philadelphia, between 1817 and 1863. At the heart of this black politics were efforts to assert the right of free African Americans to citizenship in their native United States. Claims on the ambiguous notion of citizenship were important to free blacks both as a means of improving their own lives and as a way to combat slavery. The dissertation begins with the organized black protest against the founding of the American Colonization Society. The contest over the notion, advanced by the ACS, that free blacks were not truly American, or that they could not ever be citizens in the land of their birth, powerfully shaped the language and tactics of black politics. The dissertation ends with the enlistment of black troops in the Civil War, a development which powerfully shaped subsequent arguments for full black citizenship. It argues that in this period, free African Americans developed a rhetorical language of black nativism, the assertion that birth on American soil and the contribution of one's ancestors to the American nation, had won for African Americans the right to be citizens of the United States. This assertion was made even more resonant by the increasing levels of white immigration during this period; African Americans pointed to the injustice of granting to white immigrants that which was denied to native born blacks. This discourse of nativism served as a means of weaving the fight for black citizenship into the fabric of American politics. The dissertation also argues that the cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore were part of a distinctive borderland where the issues of slavery and black citizenship were particularly explosive, and where free African Americans, therefore, found themselves with significant political leverage.

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

History

Whaling in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a global industry. Ships from many nations with crews from ports all over the world hunted in waters from the Arctic Ocean to the Tasman Sea. Whale oil illuminated the cities and greased the machines of the Industrial Revolution. Far from formal legal institutions, the international cast of whalemen created their own rules and methods for resolving disputes at sea over the possession of a valuable natural resource. These unwritten customs were remarkably effective in preventing violence between crews of competing ships. Whaling was intensely competitive, yet the dangers of hunting in often treacherous conditions fostered a close knit community that was able to fashion resolutions to disagreements that also maximized their catch. Legal scholars have cited whaling customs as evidence that property law is often created by participants and not imposed by legislatures and courts. Whaling law was, in fact, a creation of both whalemen and lawyers. At sea, whalemen often improvised and compromised in ways that had more to do with personal and communal ethics than with well understood customs. Lawyers and judges, looking for certainty and consistency, imagined whaling customs to be much more established and universally observed than was ever the case. The same loose whaling customs that prevented violence and litigation failed, however, to check practices that severely depleted the available supply of bowhead and sperm whales. As a close knit community capable of governing themselves, American whalemen should have been able to find a way out of the "tragedy of the commons" which predicts that commonly owned and competitively exploited resources are - without an external or group imposed system of restraint - fated for destruction. Prior to about 1850, whalemen, generally believing that whales as a species were impervious to extinction, saw no need to limit their catch. By the time whalemen recognized that whales stocks were seriously depleted other sources of energy - coal oil and petroleum - had swept the market. There was, at this point, no reason to preserve the prey of a soon to be obsolete endeavor.

Temple University – Theses

History

An ever-present figure throughout much of the nineteenth century, the prostitute existed in a state divorced from "traditional" womanhood as a shadowy yet "necessary" evil, and was largely seen as a static element of the city. The archetypes of the "endangered maiden" and the "fallen woman" were discursive creations evolving from an inchoate form to a more sharply defined state that were designed to explain the prostitute's continued existence despite the moral objections voiced by religious and social reformers. These archetypes functioned in an agrarian/proto-industrial society; however, under pressures of urbanization, industrialization, and population mobility, these archetypes were gradually supplanted by sharper, more emotionally loaded archetypes such as the "White Slave" and the trope of the "Vice Syndicate" to explain the prostitute. In this manner Progressive-Era social and moral reformers could interpret prostitution in general and the prostitute in particular within the framework of their understanding of a contentious social environment. In moving away from a religious framework towards a more scientific interpretation, the concept of prostitution evolved from a moral failing to a status analogous to a disease that infected the social body of the state. However, because the White Slave and the Vice Syndicate were discursive creations based upon anecdotal interpretations of prostitution as a predatory economic system, their nebulous nature encouraged a crisis mentality that could not survive a concrete examination of their "problem." Realities of race, class, and gender, as well as the fluid nature of the urban environment as well as non-moral concerns rendered the new archetypes and tropes slippery, and applicable to any reform-oriented argument. By the later years of the Progressive Era anti-vice discourse ceased to advocate moral arguments calling for the rescue of the prostitute and instead became a vehicle to articulate non-moral concerns such as political reform, social order, and female economic suffrage. After the First World War, the archetype of the White Slave collapsed in the face of women's suffrage and sexual agency, and the prostitute once more reverted to a state analogous to pre-Progressive cultural interpretations of prostitution.

Temple University – Theses