The last two decades in nineteenth-century West Africa witnessed a two-fold movement, namely the territorial expansion of French colonial empire and the first attempts to extend biomedicine through mass vaccination to control smallpox epidemics. This study provides both a deep history and conceptual framework to analyze the relationship between the...
This dissertation explores a seventy-year period of community growth and activism among African Americans in nineteenth-century Iowa, showing how citizenship was defined, contested, expanded and confined. Antebellum black migrants lived on the margins of a hostile society and struggled for equal citizenship using their labor, their community institutions, the legal...
This dissertation, "Myth and the Modern Problem: Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain," argues that a widespread phenomenon best described as "mythic thinking" emerged in the early twentieth century as way for a variety of thinkers and key cultural groups to frame and articulate their anxieties about, and their responses to,...
This study explores the history of Bugwere, Busoga and Buganda, societies in present-day east-central Uganda, from the late first millennium and it does so through a focus on motherhood. Motherhood - as ideology and biology - impacted on almost every aspect of life in these societies, but did so in...
This dissertation examines the history of Mexicans' changing racial status in the Chicago metropolitan region, a place where race has traditionally been understood in strictly black and white terms. From World War I through the 1930's whites violently resisted Mexicans moving into their neighborhoods in Chicago, East Chicago, and Gary,...
In the Old Northwest, networks of activists across dispersed communities took controversial direct action against prejudice and slavery. By largely eschewing the growing cities that disproved the Old Northwest rule, this is a study of reform as it would have impacted most people, at the local level in the smaller...
This dissertation examines the transformation of the city-state of Florence from a republic to a principality during the first half of the sixteenth century. It explores how this fundamental change in political organization altered the culture and society of the Florentine office-holding class. The dissertation describes the course of socio-cultural...
A spokesman for the American Revolution, John Adams, famously claimed that a third of colonists supported independence, a third supported Britain, and a third remained neutral. Since then historians have struggled to understand the mixed loyalties of the Revolutionary generation.
"The Popular Politics of Loyalism During the American Revolution, 1774-1790,"...
This dissertation examines the nature and development of Protestant ideology in Tudor England. Historians have traditionally seen Tudor Protestants as classic "magisterial" reformers. Unlike "radical reformers," who formed separated sects and rejected the union of church and state, English Protestants are seen as deeply committed to royal authority and the...
During the eighteenth century, European trade with Asia was characterized by the importation of sophisticated manufactured goods in exchange for silver. The features of Euro-Asian trade testify to the vitality of the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese economies in the period before the Great Divergence. Many European observers, however, mistook them...