This dissertation documents the centrality of emotion to Americans’ understanding of, participation in, and critiques of the expanding economy in the first half of the nineteenth century. By then, many people viscerally understood that white men’s attempts to procure credit and escape debt could produce fear, anger, guilt, and sadness....
This project centers set design as the primary aesthetic, economic, and sociopolitical driver of the sitcom genre’s emergence and development during the first half of the twentieth century. My work treats sitcom set design as a category of historical architecture that can be (and has been) mapped, toured, built, and...
This dissertation traces the rise and the demise of the Amerasian in the years roughly set by the Amerasian Immigration Act (1950-1982). I argue that an Amerasian is not simply an individual fathered by a US servicemen in Asia, nor is it just a racial descriptor used to term mixed...
During the 1870s and 1880s, state governments in the former slaveholding South established eleven public institutions for black higher learning. Given the volatile, impoverished, often repressive climate of the region, how did black political and educational leaders mobilize to expand state support for black higher education? Furthermore, how did they...
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Russian Orthodox Church established a dense network of social and material aid for thousands of migrants who travelled from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires to find work in the United States. The church’s growth followed the path of Progressive Era industrialization, with...
This dissertation argues that the U.S.’s World War I experience helped condition Americans to relate to war primarily through cinematic recreations. The country’s geographical distance from the fighting provided Americans a degree of geopolitical spectatorship from which they could imagine their nation’s role in an ever-changing world through film. Onto...
This dissertation takes up Islam’s relationship to Black nationalism across the Atlantic diaspora of Muslims that I call “the Fugitive Islamicate.” Scholars most often have described this relationship as commencing in the twentieth century with the rise of “Black Muslim religion,” a U.S. religious movement that begins with Noble Drew...