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 Odd Characters: Queer Lives in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore(2020) SCHMITT, KATHRYN; Lyons, Clare; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Queer history in Baltimore began long before the twentieth century. People who diverged from societal norms of gender and sexuality were always present in Baltimore’s history, and they can be seen through media representations and popular press of the time period. Even when representation of queerness in media was less common, stories of people who diverged from gender and sexual norms were still distributed to the public. Media representations provided inspiration and information to people who did not have access to a group of like-minded people through a distinct subculture. Queer Baltimoreans drew from media representations, early stages of a developing subculture, or their own personal thoughts and feelings to inform their gender and sexual identities. Despite the legal and social measures restricting these people from living their lives as freely as they might wish, they still found individualized ways to live life outside of gender and sexual norms.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 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 FOR THE BENEFIT OF THESE CHILDREN: AFFIRMING RACIAL IDENTITY IN THE ERA OF SCHOOL DESEGREGATION, PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY, MARYLAND, 1954-1974(2017) Matthews, Avis Danette; Muncy, Robyn L.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This history examines attitudes toward and responses to school desegregation within an established, closely knit network of African-American communities in Prince George's County, Maryland, from 1954, immediately after Brown v. Board of Education, through the first year of the destabilizing busing era. Optimistic about the opportunities and social equality desegregated schooling might afford their children, black residents of this county nonetheless recognized the value of segregated schooling in securing a general sense of well being within both their children and their communities. Thus, for two decades they approached school desegregation with expectation and ambivalence, asserting collective agency to influence the school board's decision making, prevent the closing of black schools, and affirm their racial and cultural identity.Item Maryland, the Marine Hospital Service, and the Medical Relief of Chesapeake Oyster Dredgers, 1870-1900(2017) Kibler, Austin Todd; Zeller, Thomas; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The thesis will be challenging the notion that the federal government took a hands-off approach to industrial health during the Gilded Age by examining the stances taken by the Maryland government and that of the federal Marine Hospital Service (MHS) in specific relation to oyster dredgers of the Chesapeake Bay. It will highlight the important role played by newly professionalized bureaucracies in developing public policy through its examination of the creation of the MHS Relief Station at Solomons Island in Southern Maryland. It will also show that policymakers viewed the Chesapeake Bay as an industrial space and how that construction refracted responses to the oyster dredgers’ health problems.Item A CONSUMING HERITAGE: BALTIMORE'S EASTERN EUROPEAN JEWISH IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY AND THEIR EVOLVING FOODWAYS, 1880-1939(2013) Sturm, Charlotte Louise; Mar, Lisa R; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study explores how Baltimore's Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their American-born children engaged with American foodways during the period 1880-1939. Food-related charitable aid and food education were used as tools of Americanization and moral uplift by public health officials, middle-class charitable workers, and social reformers between 1880 and 1920. The home economics classrooms of Baltimore's public schools continued this work in the early twentieth century, teaching the immigrants' American-born children lessons about food and middle-class domesticity. Although somewhat influential in reshaping the immigrants' food habits, the Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their children largely retained their traditional foodways, making their own choices about how to adopt American foodways. Interconnected issues of food, health, economics, middle-class domesticity, citizenship, and identity are evident in this study. Using sources such as cookbooks and oral histories, this study demonstrates how foodways expressed and continue to express Jewish, American, and Jewish American identities.Item The Brandstetter Tunebook: Shape-Note Dissemination and the Germans of Western Maryland(2012) Barnett, Joshua Rush; Warfield, Patrick; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The newly discovered personal tunebook of Maria Brandstetter (1820) reveals that shape-note hymnody was alive in the mountains of Western Maryland in the early nineteenth century. The tunebook's presence in the region fills in a gap left by the usual dissemination story of shape-note hymnody, which emphasizes an exchange between Eastern Pennsylvania and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The tunebook is also connected to the German community that migrated from Pennsylvania into Maryland and Virginia in the early 1800s, and thus sheds light on the musical culture of the German-American immigrants of Western Maryland. Finally, the contents of the Brandstetter tunebook suggest that pivotal Virginia shape-note composer and compiler of the Kentucky Harmony, Ananias Davisson, may have first been exposed to shape-note music by migrating Germans like the Brandstetter family.Item "There Slavery Cannot Dwell": Agriculture and Labor in Northern Maryland, 1790-1860(2007-07-26) Grivno, Max L.; Rowland, Leslie S; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)There were many paths from slavery to free labor in the Americas and the Caribbean. In some cases, freedom came with a thunderclap amid civil war and revolution. Elsewhere, governments sounded slavery's knell through a prescribed process of immediate or delayed emancipation. The people of northern Maryland experienced a different kind of emancipation in the decades preceding the Civil War. Final freedom came when Maryland adopted a new constitution in 1864, but slavery along the Mason-Dixon Line had been collapsing under the combined weight of slave flight, manumission, and the interstate slave trade since the 1820s. This dissertation examines the dynamic, multifaceted relationships that developed among northern Maryland's labor regimes during the region's gradual transition from slavery to free labor. Having expanded into the Maryland piedmont during the flush decades of the Napoleonic Wars, slavery experienced a sharp decline in the lean years that followed the Panic of 1819. Faced with mounting slave resistance and stagnant demand for wheat, their primary staple, landowners struggled to forge a more efficient, economical workforce. Many espoused the emerging free labor critique and began to divorce themselves from slavery by liberating their bondspeople or selling them southward. Slavery did not, however, die a quick death. Many owners freed their slaves through delayed manumission agreements, which guaranteed that the institution would linger for several decades. During this extended emancipation, landowners and their free and enslaved workers fought pitched battles over the terms of emancipation and the contours of the emerging free labor regime. Unlike previous scholarship, which tends to examine the various segments of a given workforce in isolation, this dissertation considers the evolving workforce of northern Maryland as a single, unified whole. It examines how landowners cobbled together workforces from a diverse laboring population of apprentices, indentured servants, slaves, and wage laborers. The study also explores how--and why--the composition of the workforce changed over time, and how the region's myriad labor regimes jostled and merged. In tracing the evolution of northern Maryland's kaleidoscopic workforce, the dissertation considers how wage laborers and slaves navigated the treacherous shoals of the rural economy and how workers' gender, race, and status shaped their experiences.