History Theses and Dissertations
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Item "In This You Street Vicinity": Building a Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., 1903-1912(2024) Jamison, Bridget; Giovacchini, Saverio; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The decade of 1903-1912 was a period of great creation in the U Street neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the result of social conditions that had emerged through Reconstruction and beyond. The institutions that were built to house Black Washington’s cultural activities in this time were sites of conflict between contingents of Washingtonians, both Black and white, who held competing visions for the future of their city and communities. Although different principles and priorities determined the development and operation of different buildings, such as True Reformers’ Hall, the Twelfth Street Y.M.C.A., and the Howard Theatre, the concentration of cultural institutions in this one location produced a coherent idea of U Street that would carry into future decades. U Street at the beginning of the twentieth century was the local creation of people who were involved in national discussions on politics, religion, society, and economics and engaged with what was new and modern in arts and entertainment. Even before it became a famous theater district, U Street was an expression of Black business and Black artistry and the aspirations that the people there had for the future.Item “Quite Young Limbs that Bled”: Accidents, Apathy, and the Failure of American Aviation During the First World War(2024) Getka, Dana; Giovacchini, Saverio; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The advent of the First World War saw America’s first concerted attempt at building a world-class air service. Desperate to join the ranks of Britain, Germany, and France, it pushed poorly-built planes out of factories and poorly-trained cadets out of flying schools at an alarming rate. In this thesis, I argue that in blind pursuit of its goals, the United States air service ultimately doomed those whose efforts would bring the organization its prestige: the pilots. Aviators, especially non-combatants in roles such as training, testing, and ferrying, faced unavoidable death or harm every time they stepped into a plane, be it physically, emotionally, or psychologically. Despite their role as non-combatants, these pilots well understood that destruction would characterize their world, provoking emotional responses expected of those engaged in fighting on active fronts. Indeed, flying was a world of combat unto itself, and by war’s end, the Army Air Service had earned the dubious distinction of being the only arm of the United States military in which more men were violently killed in non-combat than in combat roles.Item LOCAL RESISTANCE AND RECOVERY IN THE NEOLIBERAL ERA: A CASE STUDY OF THE 1993 NAVAL BASE CLOSURE IN CHARLESTON, SC(2024) Verkouw, Clay Stephen; Chung, Patrick; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission transformed military base communities throughout the United States from 1988-2005. This work offers an account of military base closure from the local level, tracing the origins, resistance, impacts, and recovery in Charleston, South Carolina. A neoliberal turn in domestic politics resulted in the closure of hundreds of military bases, like the Charleston Naval Shipyard. Despite significant local resistance, the BRAC Commission shuttered the shipyard, ending decades of military investment and thousands of stable government jobs in the Charleston region. Yet, Charleston leaders took important steps in the post-closure years to maintain the traditions of military Keynesianism in Charleston, leading to a very successful economic recovery from the naval base closure crisis. This case study seeks to complicate existing narratives of U.S. military industry resilience, post-Cold War base closure, and military privatization benefits through a local history of a transformative period in Charleston.Item CHAOS AND CONSPIRACY: THE HAGERSTOWN DRAFT RIOTS AND THE WHISKEY REBELLION(2024) Lowery, Kourtney Renea; Brewer, Holly; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Thesis: CHAOS AND CONSPIRACY: THE HAGERSTOWN DRAFT RIOTS AND THE WHISKEY REBELLION Kourtney Renea Lowery, Master of Arts, 2024 Thesis Directed By: Professor Holly Brewer, Department of History This thesis explores the events of Washington County, MD in September 1794 to re-establish the significance of the Hagerstown Riots and their connection to the Whiskey Rebellion in Pittsburgh as well as to broader revolutionary ideals. The riots were a localized event in which the militia openly disobeyed orders. Citizens soldiers used militarized force to display their opposition to the excise tax and militia draft. Residents and many local leaders also opposed these measures and favored a progressive political and economic system. The Hagerstown Riots are an important microhistory and look at early American rebellion, protestors, and redress of grievances. The protestors at the Hagerstown Riots were angry with the excise tax and economic and political policies that the federal government created policies that were antiquated and unfairly administered. Hamilton’s taxation scheme was modeled on a British taxation system which colonials had fought against. They viewed these policies as created by elites in the federal government. State governments and officials, meanwhile were becoming more egalitarian in places like Maryland, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Washington County, Maryland showcases these frustrations and changes by retracing the dynamics of the rioters, officials, and militia. It also seeks to resolve why this event has been forgotten. The riots decenter the Whiskey Rebellion from an isolated large uprising in Pennsylvania to a broad movement that includes local events such as the Hagerstown riots, and that started before the American Revolution.Item "Scandalous Conduct Tending to the Destruction of Good Morals": Dynamics and Tension in Sex Crime Courts-martial in the Interwar U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 1919-1941(2024) Forschler, Andrew Cavin; Lyons, Clare; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Interwar (1919-1941) U.S. Navy and Marine Corps sex crime courts-martial had complex dynamics and tension. Written policy criminalized most sex. When policy was enforced, it mostly targeted same-sex crimes. Enlisted men held different beliefs about sex than commissioned officers. Enlisted men’s lived experience was incongruent with policy. Leadership believed that men who had sex with other men should be expelled from the Navy and Marine Corps. Duty was a powerful and frequently used rhetorical tool by judge advocates to argue for conviction for sex crime. The Navy Medical Corps expressed the idea that same-sex sexual activity should not be criminalized as same-sex desire was a mental defect. The dynamics of written policy/policy in action, enlisted men/commissioned officers, and naval service/duty/sexology are explored.Item The Clash between Race and Politics: Marion Barry, the District of Columbia Financial Control Board, and the Fight for Home Rule(2023) Horn, Dennis Marshall; Freund, David M.P.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACTTHE CLASH BETWEEN RACE AND POLITICS: MARION BARRY, THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA FINANCIAL CONTROL BOARD, AND THE FIGHT FOR HOME RULE Dennis Marshall Horn, Master of Arts 2023 Thesis Directed By: Associate Professor, David M. P. Freund, Department of History In 1995, the District of Columbia (DC) was insolvent. Marion Barry, who had just been elected mayor of Washington, DC for the fourth time was advised that D.C. faced a $722 million deficit which DC was unable to finance. In addition, DC residents were not getting adequate public services like police, schools, trash pick-up and street repair. In response, Congress suspended “Home Rule”, the law which granted DC citizens the right to be governed by a mayor and a thirteen-member citizen-elected council. Instead, Congress empaneled the District of Columbia (DC) Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority (Control Board), a five-member board appointed by the President to take control of the District’s governance. The Control Board stayed in place and Home Rule was suspended from 1995-2001. The Control Board rather than the elected officials had the authority to run the District’s government while leaving in place the mayor and the DC Council to implement the Control Board’s directives. The division between the authority to set policy and the executive function to implement that policy created a conflict of governing objectives between Marion Barry and the Control Board. In accordance with his Civil Rights background, Barry believed that the main purpose of DC government should be economic empowerment for DC’s Black citizens. The Control Board’s main objectives were to gain control of DC finances, cut unnecessary municipal costs and improve city services with the ultimate goal of attracting middle class residents to stabilize DC’s tax base. The resulting housing boom and population growth led to gentrification which priced the less affluent residents, including many Black residents, out of DC. These dueling policy objectives benefitted some to the detriment of others, and vestiges of these competing policies survive today. This thesis, which is largely based upon interviews with key officials in Congress, the Control Board, the Clinton Administration and the DC government, contributes to the scholarly literature by viewing Barry, the Control Board and the fight for Home Rule through the lens of social and racial politics. The thesis concludes that while the Control Board saved Home Rule by putting the DC government back on a sustainable course, it is at best a temporary solution to a broken government. An unelected Control Board does not have either the capacity or the public support to resolve problems that cannot be separated from group identity politics. On the other hand, when Congress determines to intervene in DC governance, DC’s citizens have little defense without voting representatives in Congress.Item "And They Were Bedmates!": Travel and the Development of Privacy in Colonial America.(2023) Labor, Joanna; Brewer, Holly; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is a study of how travelers, particularly white, elite travelers, thought about their lodgings over the course of the long eighteenth century, and how their lodging options changed as a result. Their writings about how they ate and where they slept reveal shifting cultural attitudes from both travelers and their hosts. Genteel travelers began to expect greater personal privacy, and private householders who formerly provided accommodations began to refuse to do so. The material culture of gentility spread quickly through the Atlantic world; elite homes became more compartmentalized places that allowed for people to develop new senses of personal privacy. While many Americans could partake in the trappings of gentility, they could not participate equally. Such differences in a standard of living created tensions between travelers and their hosts. Taverns, inns, and private homes were the main sources of lodging; however, most hosts were unable and increasingly unwilling to provide the individualized spaces that genteel travelers increasingly expected for their bodily privacy. Chapter one describes travelers and boarding in urban areas, and the role that boardinghouses played in affording travelers a measure of privacy. Chapter two discusses rural America during the colonial period, looking at why so many travelers ended up lodging in private homes despite their discomfort. Chapter three illustrates the standards of genteel travelers, and why they were often in opposition with the families who lived in the homes and taverns that they stayed in. Finally, chapter four discusses the reasons why householders and tavernkeepers began to deny travelers a berth overnight. If the first three chapters are about the power of elite travelers, the fourth chapter is about the power of householders to refuse entry in their homes, and the tools they used to reclaim their space from intrusive travelers. The conclusion discusses the emergence of the modern hotel, purpose-built buildings that both allowed travelers’ personal privacy as well as taking them out of domestic spaces. The rise of a tourist economy, coupled with changing ideas about who was allowed in domestic spaces, ensured both that travelers no longer sought respite in private homes, and that householders would not willingly allow strangers into their homes. However, the practice did not die out entirely, persisting in the backcountry frontier and in less settled areas where there was less travel infrastructure, into the nineteenth century.Item Claiming Place, Placing Claim: African American Life in Working-Class Nashville, Tennessee, 1861-1900(2023) Maxson, Stanley D; Rowland, Leslie S; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation tracks the development of Black Bottom, a working-class neighborhood in Nashville, Tennessee, from the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century. It examines the lives of African Americans, mostly refugees from slavery, who lived in Black Bottom during and after the Civil War and created one of the city’s first Black enclaves. In so doing, it argues for using space and place as analytical categories. Black Nashvillians claimed space by building Black Bottom into a neighborhood of labor, leisure, culture, education, and community. Attention to space offers insight into the lived experience of working-class African Americans and the opportunities and threats that urban life presented. The dissertation traces the racialization of place in a New South city by adopting the focused scope of a neighborhood study. White newspapers depicted Black Bottom as a slum and its residents as a danger to the entire city. The characterization of Black Bottom as a place of crime, vice, and disease was a crucial tool for those who sought to justify its policing, regulation, or even destruction. The dissertation also argues for the importance of space and place in the politics of Black claims-making and joins scholarship that has emphasized the collective nature of Black politics in the late nineteenth century. Claiming space brought tangible, real-world benefits for working-class African Americans. Black Bottom was a place where Black Nashvillians exercised freedom in the physical world, on porches and sidewalks, and in churches and dance halls. The physical space of Black Bottom enabled communal relationships among residents, which, in time, became a resource for Black claims-making. African Americans defended Nashville during the Civil War and claimed Black Bottom as their neighborhood. Later, the neighborhood defended the founding generation’s claims to the entitlements of wartime service.Item A BAROMETER OF SCIENTIFIC CULTURE: THE DEBATED ROLE OF AMERICAN SCIENCE AT THE 1850’S SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION(2023) Buser, Allison; Woods, Colleen; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)During the initial decade of the Smithsonian Institution’s existence, its first secretary, Joseph Henry, sought to establish an institution for the advancement of science that defied popular understandings of scientific work in the United States. From the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, American science was infused with republican ideology and was widely expected to prioritize practical results that would directly benefit society at large. At the Smithsonian, Henry sought to establish a boundary between professional, theoretical science, conducted and distributed more selectively among experts, and wider public influence and demand for utilitarian scientific work. Examination of discourse in popular publications reveals that Henry’s plan created an ongoing public debate in the 1850s regarding the Smithsonian’s legitimate scientific mission. This included criticism of the Smithsonian publications program’s inaccessibility and lack of utility to the public as well as many alternative proposals for how the institution might be of better scientific use to Americans. Such expectations that Smithsonian research and resources would serve the general American population were also expressed throughout the correspondence of the Smithsonian Meteorology Project—the Institution’s first major scientific research initiative. Although Henry sought to create a boundary between theInstitution’s work and the public, the utilitarian demands of many of the project’s volunteer observers ensured that the practical goals of the public remained intertwined with Henry’s own goals to promote theoretical science in the development of the Smithsonian. The influential work of this extended scientific community was often made possible through the contributions of additional members of households. Close reading of the meteorological project correspondence reveals an extensive, although often officially unacknowledged, contribution from women and other individuals whose labor was often more fixed to the household. While the public volunteers of the project shaped the trajectory of the Smithsonian, the devalued labor of peripheral contributors to the Institution’s large-scale data work set important precedent for professional scientific frameworks at the end of the century. Overall, the relationship between the early Smithsonian and the public in the 1850s demonstrates that the process of establishing borders defining a professional/amateur dichotomy in American science was uneven. The Institution contended with republican expectations of the scientific public and its projects continued to rely upon contributors without formal or elite credentials who in turn demanded accessible and practical research and shaped scientific institutions. Despite Joseph Henry's contribution to the professionalization and specialization of science, the boundaries of science and who could participate in scientific research remained fluid through the mid-nineteenth century.Item WARFIGHTING: JOHN BOYD’S THEORY OF CONFLICT, THE ORIGINS OF MANEUVER WARFARE, AND THE COMPLEX PROCESS OF DOCTRINAL CHANGE IN THE U.S. MARINE CORPS, 1975-1989(2023) Callahan, Shawn Patrick; Sumida, Jon T; Chung, Patrick; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation analyzes the origins of the American concept of maneuver warfare and the process through which that concept was first encoded as military doctrine in 1989 by the U.S. Marine Corps in Fleet Marine Force Manual 1 (FMFM 1), Warfighting. Examining the process through which these ideas were incepted, matured, and encoded in doctrine makes it clear that the prevailing narrative is deficient in several important ways, and these misconceptions obstruct an accurate understanding of what maneuver warfare is and how military organizations deal with radical new ideas. A detailed examination of the ideas advanced by John Boyd, the man commonly thought to be the creator of maneuver warfare based upon his Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) Cycle theory, shows that neither of those concepts was ever his central argument. Rather, Boyd was developing a much more expansive theory of competition and conflict, and his method and ideas are widely misunderstood. It was a military reform colleague of Boyd’s named William S. Lind who originated the concept of maneuver warfare based on his own interpretation of German military history. He promoted this style of fighting through a dichotomous model contrasting it with firepower/attrition warfare in an effort to help the U.S. Army understand how it needed to change its approach to warfare. Ultimately, Lind’s ideas about maneuver warfare found better reception within the U.S. Marine Corps, where he worked with Marines in several different organizations to further develop the concept. The way that Lind incorporated Boyd’s early ideas to promote maneuver warfare has much to do with why Boyd’s role and theory are misunderstood today. The Marines who interacted with Lind, and to a lesser degree Boyd, meanwhile, played an important role in developing the supporting concepts and techniques needed to make maneuver warfare an actionable approach to war. Efforts to incorporate the new ideas in Marine Corps doctrine were limited less by simple institutional conservatism than they were by the inability of the service’s bureaucracy to incorporate fundamentally new concepts, which required a particular new, shared understanding of war. The most important achievement of FMFM 1 was not that it formally adopted maneuver warfare, but its definition of a common conception of war within which maneuver warfare made sense, emphasizing moral and mental factors, the inherent nonlinearity of warfare, and the fundamental uncertainty that surrounded military decision-making. This, defining a new way of thinking about war that all Marines would share, was the most significant accomplishment of FMFM 1. However, this accomplishment has been undercut by several misconceptions about maneuver warfare, all of which were byproducts of the process through which the concept was formed and promoted.