History Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2778
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Item “Freedom in Their Hands is a Deadly Poison”: Print Culture, Legal Movements, and Slaveholding Resistance on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, 1850-61(2018) Chaires, Jacob Wayne; Bonner, Christopher; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The goal of this thesis is twofold: to explain the rise of slaveholding anxiety in relation to the growing free black question, as well as to articulate how slaveholders sought to regain their power. I argue that slaveholders on the Eastern Shore politically organized around ideas and concepts produced in newspapers. Slaveholders utilized new ideas about race and the law to organize, and call upon the General Assembly to enact tougher sanctions on free black mobility. Newspapers are not only a means by which to quote mine, but they are also living, breathing, cultural organisms. They both reflect slaveholding anxieties, as well as play into them. They both record local news events, as well as conspicuously pair those local stories with similar stories from other counties, states, and nations.Item SPINNING SUGAR, REFINING AMERICA: CONSUMERS AND CREATORS OF DESSERT IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY(2019) Flaherty, Morgan; Brewer, Holly; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Dessert presentations in America shifted in the eighteenth century from simple desserts with few ingredients to elaborate confections of sugar. As a luxurious end to the meal, dessert increasingly reflected class and race. After the Revolution, as dessert presentations modeled on those of European aristocracy became popular, the elite turned to confectioners to create towering displays of dessert. The scarcity of skilled confectioners pushed elites to recruit and train confectioners, including those they enslaved. The genteel movement towards refinement and the consumer revolution fueled middle-class aspirations to emulate elite dessert displays, leading them to purchase specialized material goods like serving pieces and recipe books. They also continued to use simple recipes but elevated dessert as a measure of refinement. The use of enslaved labor to produce some of these confections indicates the extent to which post-revolutionary hierarchies embedded slavery, even as enslaved confectioners had potentially more room to negotiate.Item “LABOR HAS A LONG MEMORY”: TRANSFORMATIONS IN CAPITALISM AND LABOR ORGANIZING IN CENTRAL APPALACHIA, 1977-2019(2019) Heim, David; Freund, David; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1989 the UMWA went on strike against Pittston Coal. In response to declining union power and corporate anti-unionism, the UMWA embraced community members and women as participants in its striking strategy. Although sometimes reluctant to do so, the union accepted the involvement of non-miners in non-violent demonstrations and civil disobedience, and was successful because of the strategic shift. The victory against Pittston Coal in 1989 suggests that scholars cannot rule industrial unions as sites of resistance to capitalism after 1982. The union’s acceptance of community organizing in 1989 also suggests a link between the strategies and success of the Pittston Strike and more recent organizing victories in West Virginia—the West Virginia Teachers’ Strikes. More recent labor militancy in Appalachia has also built off of legacies of resistance dating back to events like the Paint Creek Mine War and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1912 and 1921.Item The Sole Measure of Service: A Social History of Baltimore's Public Libraries During World War II(2019) Coddington, Gwenlyn; Woods, Colleen; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the history of public libraries in Baltimore and Maryland during World War II. Drawing from contemporary newspapers and institutional records, it argues that World War II expanded institutional opportunities for public libraries while exposing their limitations as agents of social change. Concentrating on how Baltimore’s libraries successfully contributed to and enabled the war’s information economy undercuts the narrative of libraries’ impotency as information centers during this period by locating their validation among the communities they served, rather than their relationship with the state or their postwar status. However, even as the war enabled this transformation, it simultaneously exposed the limits of libraries’ social ideology, destabilizing their position as institutions of social progressivism. Analyzing gender discrimination within librarianship and the experiences of African American Marylanders as users and library professionals demonstrates the limited vision Baltimore’s librarians held for enacting meaningful change within their institutions and communities.Item The Surface of Things: Reading a Cinema of Decline(2018) Leininger, Derek Michael; Giovacchini, Saverio; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A declensionist imagination dominated intellectual and cultural discourse in American society through the late twentieth century. The 1970s and 1980s were punctuated by real declines of multiple sorts, but the alarmed debates about juvenile delinquency, rural blight, urban decay, and violent crime often obscured coterminous trends and the more meaningful critiques of the historical forces prompting the changes felt as decline. By looking at American films from the 1970s and 1980s focused on thematic decline of varied sorts, this project explores the postmodern social experience of the late-twentieth century and the cultural roots of overcriminalization in the United States. Reading between the filmic lines (or what film theorist Siegfried Kracauer called the surface expressions of cinema) provides clues into unpacking the often contradictory political, social, and cultural configurations taking shape at the end of the twentieth century.Item Cultivating Politics: The Formation of a Black Body Politic in the Postemancipation Louisiana Sugar Parishes(2018) Calhoun, John; Bonner, Christopher; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The capture of New Orleans by Union forces in 1862 led to the emancipation of thousands of slaves across Louisiana’s sugar parishes. This early emancipation preceded the abolition of slavery elsewhere in the South, and it held far-reaching implications for the freedpeople of the sugar parishes. In this thesis, I argue that early emancipation fostered the rise of a powerful black body politic in the sugar parishes that would endure throughout Reconstruction and beyond. This body politic aimed to protect black people’s unique conception of freedom as both white Southerners and white Northerners endeavored to circumscribe that freedom for their own purposes. In pursuit of this goal, the mobilized sugar workers employed a broad range of political tools, ranging from extralegal violence to labor organization. These methods proved effective and safeguarded the freedom of black sugar workers for decades after the Civil War despite attempts by both Democrats and Radical Republicans to dissolve and demarcate that freedom respectively.Item Moving Milk: Public Health, Milk Transportation, and Modal Choices in Baltimore, 1840-1940(2018) McDonald, James Dixon; Zeller, Thomas; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis studies the factors leading to the modal shift from rail to road in Baltimore’s farm to city milk transportation in the 1920s. It draws on histories of transportation, public health, food, and business to maintain that progressive public health regulation, driven by calls for reform of the milk supply, created an oligopoly for which trucks better suited vertical integration goals. This research highlights the relevance of public health policy to the study of transportation regulation and modal competition. Secondarily, this thesis establishes railroads as a primary actor in the 19th century rise in urban milk consumption.Item In Pursuit of Reform, Whether Convict or Free: Prison Labor Reform in Maryland in the Early Twentieth Century(2018) Durham, Erin; Woods, Colleen; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Highlighting the labor actions of inmates and organized labor, this thesis explains the transition from a contract labor system to a state-use system in Maryland’s state prisons. While many northern states abolished the contract labor system by 1911, Maryland continued contract labor into the 1930s. Efforts of prison administrators to maintain discipline and fund prison operating costs despite the labor actions of inmates and working men and women reveal the close relationship of prison labor and revenue generation. By situating prison labor within the broader history of the labor movement in Baltimore, this thesis reveals how the Maryland prison system transitioned from a backwater of Progressive Era reform to a model of New Deal ideology. Its examination of prison profits lends insight into the post-1960s rise in mass incarceration, and is vital to the project of understanding the connections between the criminal state, corporate profit, and incarcerated populations.Item Edifice Complex: Public Stadium Funding and Urban Redevelopment in Baltimore, Maryland(2018) Bucacink, Ian Charles; Freund, David M; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the 1980s, Marylanders engaged in a public debate over the need to replace Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. New stadium proponents, led by an elite coalition of politicians, businesspeople, and the newspapers, argued that Baltimore needed professional sports teams economically, as well as for the positive image they bestowed upon the city. Only a new publically-funded stadium would prevent the baseball Orioles from following the football Colts out of town, these supporters contented. A large segment of the public questioned the need to replace Memorial Stadium and suggested alternative social priorities for state funding, but the state legislature decided to fund the new stadium complex at Camden Yards anyway, despite intense popular opposition. For Baltimore’s elites, the issue was about more than sports. The new stadiums were a defense and continuation of the city’s neoliberal policies of urban redevelopment, along with all that those policies entailed, both good and bad.Item “LIQUEURS WITH THE LADIES AFTER DINNER”: PUNCH RITUALS IN DOMESTIC PUBLICS DURING THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY(2018) Daniels, Catherine Denise; Brewer, Holly; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Throughout the eighteenth-century, punch drinking was incredibly popular among groups of men. Sharing a bowl of punch with one’s associates created a bond of fraternity. In fact the punch bowl itself, with its wide brim and elaborate decoration, symbolized conviviality. But while men were enjoying this drink in public, they also imbibed in the home where women partook in the ritual. Because of the communal and genial nature of the flowing bowl, these gatherings created domestic publics, a space which defied the traditional public and private spheres. There are several artifacts which may provide examples of domestic punch consumption in the eighteenth-century. Cookbooks, illustrations and prints, and punch bowls and punch pots can provide some insight into the ritual in the home. After examining these artifacts, one can clearly see that women participated in the punch ritual in the home. Martha Washington, for example, often served punch to guests at Mount Vernon. Punch had the ability to temporarily blur the traditional public and private spheres of men and women and create a space in which both groups were briefly bound by the convivial spirit of the drink.