College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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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 "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 “THE GREAT QUESTION”: SLAVERY, SECTIONALISM, AND THE U.S. NAVAL OFFICER CORPS, 1820-1861(2021) Bailey, Roger; Bell, Richard; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation analyzes how United States naval officers’ beliefs about race and slavery shaped sectionalism between the North and South in the antebellum era. As agents of the federal government operating far from the capital, naval officers had significant influence on the implementation of American foreign policy. With reputations as respected professionals and travelers, they also shaped national discourse with their reports, speeches, and publications. These traits made officers important public figures as the future of slavery became a pervasive issue that increasingly affected American naval operations. The study examines the US Navy’s suppression of the transatlantic slave trade, support for African colonization in Liberia, policing of unauthorized “filibustering” invasions in Latin America, and exploring expeditions. It argues that up until the secession crisis at the outbreak of the Civil War, the naval officer corps was remarkably resilient to the growing divide between the North and South. Most officers considered themselves to be politically moderate on the issue of slavery, and they tried to curtail the institution’s worst excesses, eliminate threats to the stability of slavery, and promote external, compromise solutions to the nation’s domestic crisis that prioritized rule of law. These solutions sought to unify white Americans around visions of empire and the expatriation of African Americans. In pursuing such goals, officers tried to enact their own version of American foreign policy. Though they had limited material success, their efforts supported political moderatism in the antebellum United States. As more and more Americans took up pro- and antislavery stances, naval officers used federal power and their personal influence to help maintain the belief that compromise could preserve the Union.Item In the Habit of Resistance: Radical Peace Activism and the Maryland Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, 1954-Present(2021) Ludewig, Sara; Muncy, Robyn; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Between 1968 and present, members of the Maryland Province of Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur (SNDN) participated in radical peace activity. These sisters cultivated a distinct religious identity and used the all-woman spaces of their order to define, support, and sustain their peace activism. The SNDN illuminate the vital role women religious played in shaping the form and longevity of the Catholic peace movement. Sisters were central to Catholic peace activity, drawing on their religious identity and linking their actions to work sanctioned by the Catholic Church. Between 1954 and 1970, the SNDN responded to changes in the Church and constructed a religious identity based in a Catholic feminist ideology. During the Vietnam War, sisters called upon this religious identity and their order’s support networks to motivate their activism. After the Vietnam War ended, the SNDN continued to cultivate their religious identity and maintained their peace activism within the Church.Item LIBERTY, GENTILITY, AND DANGEROUS LIAISONS: FRANCOPHILIA IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC, 1775-1800(2020) Mahoney, Nicole; Bell, Richard; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates the various and occasionally competing streams of French culture generated in several different arenas – print culture, polite society, marriage, and gender performance – in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. My work makes the case that Francophilia was both consequential to early American culture and a continuing source of gentry power in the post-revolution years of the United States. Analysis of American architectural spaces, decorative arts, literature, and cultural landscapes reveals that aristocratic urban Americans fashioned and displayed ideologies, from the personal to the political, by way of the pageantry of French gentility. From Boston to New York to Philadelphia, affluent Americans used the performance and spectacle of French luxury to enhance their cultural prestige and political authority at home. Despite contradictions and ambiguities in Franco-American relations, Francophilia remained a powerful way for elites, especially women, to assert aesthetic propriety and cosmopolitanism in the 1780s and 1790s. These early Americans, seeking ways to present themselves as genteel, erudite, and worldly, saw copying French culture and performing it as a way to make themselves—and sometimes their new nation—appear culturally sophisticated. My dissertation therefore challenges scholarship that judges Anglicization and Anglo culture by its capacity to create uniquely American sensibilities and identities. In particular, French-language periodicals, salons, sociability, aristocratic émigrés, and libertine philosophies in the United States highlight how Americans in the highest echelons of society reproduced, used, and consumed French gentility to express cultural refinement and perform cosmopolitan identities, recasting themselves as more than provincial former British subjects. French proclivities and Francophilia could, therefore, be mobilized by patrician Americans as another form of self-fashioning. Even as news of the increasing violence of the French Revolution reached the United States and the posture of American political allegiances shifted in relation to France, the cultural capital of French elegance did not fade in the American imagination.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 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 Fight or Flight: The Commitment of German-Americans to the Union Cause during the American Civil War(2017) Cade, II, Anthony J; Sumida, Jon T; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)German-Americans fighting for or supporting the Union during the American Civil War felt humiliated on several occasions because of the failures of German units on the battlefields of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, and the command mistakes of the German general, Franz Sigel, at New Market. Nativist Americans exploited these events to question the loyalty and fighting ability of all German-Americans fighting for the Union. This thesis examines the commitment of German-Americans to the Union cause and the resiliency they demonstrated when they experienced disgrace and hostility during the Civil War.Item CULTURE AND DIPLOMACY: MARJORIE MERRIWEATHER POST AND SOVIET-AMERICAN RELATIONS, 1933-1939(2016) Inge, Lindsay T.; Cameron, Sarah; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Marjorie Merriweather Post is best known for her Russian art collection (the largest collection of its kind outside of Russia), showcased at Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens. This thesis examines Post’s role as the first “ambassadress” to the Soviet Union, during which time she began her interest in collecting Russian art. I argue that Post’s role as ambassadress was not purely ceremonial, and was instead essential to her husband’s, Joseph Davies’s, diplomatic mission. I also argue that Post’s collecting habits reveal not only details about the Soviet art trade and its role in Soviet-American cultural diplomacy, but also speak to the United States’ ambivalent attitude towards the Soviet Union in the 1930s: while embracing artifacts of Russian and Orthodox culture, Post essentially ignored the destructive Soviet policies that made these artifacts available for purchase.