This dissertation explores black litigation strategies, black legal culture, and the effect of black litigation on civil law. Not only did African Americans sue white southerners and white-owned companies for white-on-black violence under Jim Crow, they shared their collective legal knowledge through a network of black newspapers and contributed to...
This dissertation explores the reciprocal relationship between international politics and digital computation since the 1960s by examining the first attempts to use computer simulation to credibly forecast our planet’s economic and environmental future on a global scale. In particular, this project offers the first sustained historical analysis of the origins...
Histories of digital media, software, and computing are inseparable from histories of queer and transgender life. Stored in Memory: Recovering Queer and Transgender Life in Software History situates visual media like video glitch art, the computer’s graphical user interface, video games, and computer operating systems as the product of historical...
Celebrity, reputation, and identity were complex issues for nineteenth-century British actresses. This dissertation examines how actresses responded to, integrated, and defied gender norms and social structures as they performed “authentic” identities for consuming publics. I investigate how actresses participated in charity events and bazaars, autobiographical writing, and advertising campaigns in...
“Musical Networks in Bergamo and the Borders of the Venetian Republic, 1580–1630,” examines the mediation and circulation of northern Italian music through social and professional networks with an emphasis on Bergamo, a thriving musical center during this period. In so doing, I challenge established narratives of early modern history that...
This dissertation argues that the convergence of industrialized wage-labor, increased economic precariousness, close and partisan elections, and weak ballot laws dramatically increased the incidence of economic voter intimidation between 1873 and 1896. When this form of coercion primarily affected African American voters, as it did in the 1860s, politicians did...
Prisoner reentry has become an increasingly popular topic of research in the past few decades due to the phenomenon of mass return as a result of the era of mass incarceration. While research has been done on the experiences of the returning population before mass incarceration, few contemporary researchers have...
Popular histories of United States mass incarceration often focus on federal wars on crime, law and order policing, and the passage of harsh sentencing laws to explain how the United States transformed into the world’s leader in incarceration. My dissertation on the crisis of state prison overcrowding and prisoner resistance...
The Unquenchable Fire examines how the United States outsourced the work and costs of imperialism through arms exports after the Vietnam War. As wartime contracts disappeared and government officials confronted new limits to interventionism, a devastating recession pushed defense contractors abroad in the late 1960s and 1970s. While arms makers...
This dissertation addresses inter alia the problem of certain intertextual discontinuities across Thomas Hobbes’s oeuvre regarding the issue of ecclesiology. I find that these disparities did not result from a change in Hobbes’s private opinions, but from the regicide of 1649 as an event that liberated Hobbes to unveil his...
This study examines how Latino migration politics developed in Chicago from the 1930s to the 1970s. Although scholars usually identify the emergence of Latino immigration activism in the 1960s and predominantly in the region of the Southwest with the farm workers movement, this study argues that immigration activism began much...
This dissertation seeks to explain the discursive origin, development, and transformation of “Republican anticommunism,” and how and why this state-originated ideology continues to shape Vietnamese exile communities today. The dissertation focuses on examining mechanisms that allows certain narratives produced by the Republic of Vietnam to persist, despite the regime changes,...
This dissertation argues that silence played a fundamental role in the Victorian novel and in Victorian novel writing, operating as a productive force in service of sympathetic exchange and creative labor. It examines Charles Lamb's and Thomas Carlyle’s foundational roles in detaching silence from its traditional Romantic associations with solitude,...
After the Second World War, two states claimed to represent the same nation: “China.” This work examines how the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Communist Party of China (CPC) competed to represent China and the international consequences of that competition. The CPC’s victory in the Chinese Civil War (1946-1949) led to...
This dissertation explores the development of public access cable television programming made by and for LGBTQ people in New York City. Through archival research, interviews with the producers of these shows, and analysis of their content and textual features, I argue that LGBTQ public access programming reflected and amplified particular...
My dissertation is entitled “Post-civil Rights in the Hold: Neoliberalism, Race and the Politics of Historical Memory in the Deep South.” Post-civil rights discourse as a specific object of investigation has been under theorized, it has primarily been understood as a fundamental marker of racial progress in the United States...
This dissertation, titled “The Rocket’s Red Glare: Global Power and the Rise of American State Technology, 1940-1960,” makes three distinct but interlocking historical interventions. First, it argues that the rise of technology as a central ideological component of global hegemony represents a historical contingency, rather than a reflexive characteristic of...
“Open Tables: Restaurants and Reform in Progressive Chicago” considers restaurants as contentious spaces where larger debates about gender, class, race and ethnicity, public health, and the role of the state were carried out between the end of the Civil War and the ratification of the 18th Amendment. Using Chicago as...
This project uses the political and environmental history of maquiladoras—duty-free assembly plants along the U.S.-Mexico border—to offer new insights into two pivotal moments in the history of the U.S political economy: the poverty eradication plans of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the neoliberal growth models of the late twentieth century....
“Los Grans Mals: Disasters and Civic Life in the Late Medieval Midi” examines the many catastrophes that struck the cities of Marseille and Montpellier during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. During this era, southern Europe witnessed increasingly frequent episodes of natural disasters due in part to the Little Ice...
This dissertation explores an intellectual and political tradition that questioned the use of natural resources and the socioeconomic structures of rural Brazil in the early 20th century. “Organicist agrarianism” postulated an orderly transformation of the Brazil under the guidance of the state in the name of a natural and eternal...
This dissertation examines the role of the Botanic Garden at Buitenzorg, created in 1817, in shaping the practice of colonial agriculture in the Netherlands East Indies. It explores how Buitenzorg and its surrounding highland environs were an ideal place for botanical investigations and agricultural experimentation. The initial task of the...
This dissertation is a history of religious conservatism between 1880 and the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. Its main argument is that conservative religion in America, rather than being defined by fundamentalism, theological disputes, or cultural antipathy towards pluralism, was an outgrowth of a profound faith in capitalism...
This project traces the efforts by Scottish Protestants to achieve complete religious uniformity in the decades following the Reformation. Discontented with outward conformity, the via media that long characterized our understanding of religious reform in England, Scotland’s ministers sought to work genuine conversions among those who resisted the new order....
Judiciary at the Crossroads argues that a professional judiciary was able to restrain power, and thus lay the foundation for an independent judiciary and possible the rule of law later. Historical evidence comes from the performance of courts in property ordering projects launched by the governments in Taiwan and Manchuria...
This dissertation explores lasting familial relationships and friendships among southern African Americans from the antebellum years to the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on southern Maryland, the dissertation shows how free and enslaved African Americans cultivated familial and non-familial relationships in towns and rural neighborhoods. Over the course of...
This dissertation is a case study of one midwestern city and its Latinx inhabitants. It explores the intertwined pursuit by ethnic Mexicans and Puerto Ricans of inclusion in union and electoral politics. The world of machine politics offered ethnic Mexicans and Puerto Ricans an avenue for inclusion. Central to this...
How we remember, narrate and teach the past is an inherently political and ethical act. This is especially true when teaching about race and racism within the context of United States history. In this dissertation, I ask: how do young people narrate the durability of racial inequality in the United...
Critical pedagogies offer a particular orientation towards education that understands the process of learning as inherently political. These frameworks demand explicit political attention by teachers to support student development of practices needed to create a liberatory world. Recent work evidences the positive impact critical pedagogies have on students academically, civically,...
This dissertation investigates the muscle-powered transport technologies that pervaded the Japanese empire. It examines the production, adoption, evolution, and decline of draft animals, rickshaws, human-powered railways, and push-car railways in Japan and colonial Taiwan, 1850-1930. Invented in Tokyo in 1870, rickshaws proliferated across Asia and became a symbol of modern...
This dissertation traces the historical development of diasporic Filipino American activism after the watershed 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and during the military dictatorship of Ferdinand E. Marcos in the Philippines. Using multi-country archival research and approximately sixty oral history interviews, it analyzes labor, student, anti-dictatorship, and human rights activists...
On March 11, 1966, Indonesian President Soekarno suddenly transferred executive power to the Army, which has played a role in the Indonesian state and society since the late 1950s. This act replaced Soekarno’s own government with a military dictatorship dubbed the New Order, which lasted for nearly 32 years. Why...