UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
3 results
Search Results
Item "A Decent External Sorrow": Death, Mourning, and the American Revolution(2022) Dye, Dusty Marie; Bell, Richard; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that the study of eighteenth-century deathways provide important perspectives on the lives and experiences of those who lived through the colonial era, the Imperial Crisis, the American Revolution, and the early national period. Beginning with a broad survey of funereal culture in colonial America, it shows that individuals used their mourning customs to make public and private statements about a variety of topics ranging from proper social relationships to intimate matters of religious conviction and personal feelings. It also demonstrates that, as Americans faced the numerous challenges and changes of the eighteenth century, they adapted their funeral customs to suit new circumstances and worldviews. Thus, as tensions arose between Great Britain and its North American colonies over issues of Parliamentary policy, American protestors expressed their discontent by staging mock funerals and executions of government officials. At the same time, they boycotted imported mourning accessories in an attempt, not only to put economic pressure on Britain, but also to demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice public status and private comfort to preserve colonial liberties. When American resistance to British rule broke out into armed conflict, wartime disruptions to burial customs required further changes and new understandings of funeral rites. By both tradition and official regulations, differences in military rank usually served as the most important consideration in soldiers’ funerals. However, strict separation between officers and the rank-and-file, and sometimes even broader conventions of “decent” burials, were often subject to the vagaries of war. When casualties were high, or when armies had to move quickly, the disposal of the dead took second place to the imperatives of military strategy. Similarly, the crowded and unsanitary conditions of hospitals and wartime prisons often led to perfunctory or even indecent interments as burial parties struggled to deal with high mortality rates and the callousness of enemy captors. These significant departures from traditional funeral rites often distressed soldiers as they witnessed the deaths of their friends, neighbors, and comrades. Many tried to provide whatever final respects they could to the fallen, even as official rhetoric encouraged them to believe that the approbation of God and country would serve as ample reward for patriots’ sacrifice. In the years after the war, funereal culture became one arena in which Americans attempted to work out the meaning of the ideals that had underpinned the War for Independence. As many began to look forward to the return of traditional mourning practices, the growth of religious freedom and promises of liberty and natural equality encouraged individuals to use their funeral customs to communicate new denominational alliances and to challenge older ideas about social hierarchies. These changes encouraged churches to adapt their approach to the final services that they offered, prompted merchants to return to offering a wide array of mourning accessories, and encouraged the growth of the undertaking profession in America. At the same time, the fallen soldiers of the Revolution, as well as those who survived the conflict, presented special challenges as the nation attempted to grapple with the legacies of the war. Ultimately, the task of finally reconciling with the dead of the American Revolution would fall to later generations as they defined their own relationship to the nation’s founding conflict.Item City of Grace: Power, Performance, and Bodies in Colonial South Carolina(2014) Shifflett, Matthew; Nathans, Heather S.; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Colonial Charles Town, South Carolina, was widely reputed to be one of the most refined and genteel cities in the early British Empire. As its planters and merchants grew rich from the overseas rice trade, they sought to embody their new elite status by learning the courtly styles of European social dancing, using dances such as the minuet to cultivate a sense of physical "grace." This sense of grace allowed them to construct cosmopolitan identities and differentiate a social order that consolidated their power over the colony. Meanwhile, other social factions, such as the colony's large slave majority and the emerging class of middling tradesmen, sought their own share in controlling the vocabulary through which bodies might mean. "City of Grace: Power, Performance, and Bodies in Colonial South Carolina" puts colonial Charles Town's "bodies" into conversation in order to highlight how bodily behaviors such as dancing, posture, and comportment could organize power relations in an eighteenth-century British colony. This dissertation considers in turn the part that four groups played in the conflict over the values assigned to Charles Town's bodies: the wealthy elites who sought to use "grace" as a means to proclaim and ensure their status, the dancing masters who sought to capitalize on the elites' need for training, the African slaves whose syncretized performances of their own ethnically-specific dances troubled elite ideals of a graceful "white" body, and the emerging cohort of middling tradespeople and evangelical believers who critiqued the pretensions of elite manners. By using sources such as dancing manuals, paintings, and private letters, I put the colonial body back "on its feet," in order to understand the kinesthetic qualities of movement itself as a site for creating and transmitting meaning. Within this framework, I suggest that genteel grace was a strategy by which eighteenth-century elites sought to perform class status without betraying the artificiality of the performance.Item THE "OTHER" WOMAN: EARLY MODERN ENGLISH REPRESENTATIONS OF NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN, 1579-1690(2011) Lush, Rebecca Marie; Bauer, Ralph R.; Donawerth, Jane L.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how early modern writers deployed figures of similarity and arguments of similitude in textual and visual representations of Native American women in trans-Atlantic texts about the Americas. I explore the relationship between representations of English and Native women by investigating the ways English authors link the two figures through comparisons that reveal similarities. English writers asserted shared traits between Native and English women to cast indigenous peoples as potential subjects of the English crown. However, these writers did not describe processes of assimilation or acculturation: the English represent the Natives as already like them. English writers used similarity between Native and English to differentiate themselves from other European colonizers in the Americas, to provide rationales for possessing American land, and to reassure English investors and would-be colonists of the safety and stability of the relationship between Native and English. My introduction situates early modern arguments of similarity and similitude alongside contemporary notions of fluid racial and cultural identities. Chapter 1 examines the descriptions of the Native woman captive in George Best's travel narrative about the Frobisher voyages and the rhetoric of similarity between Native and English women employed in this description; this rhetoric enables Best increasingly to include England's own Elizabeth I as a central character in support of the voyages. Chapter 2 considers Sir Walter Ralegh's use of the figure of the Native woman to make an analogical rhetorical argument comparing Elizabeth I to Native women rulers and, thus, to argue for English claims to American land. Chapter 3 examines how Aphra Behn and Mary Rowlandson reflect changing attitudes about Native Americans through their use of similarity to convey colonial anxieties about safety and cultural degradation as opposed to earlier depictions of similarity to convey a reassuring statement of colonial peace.