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Animal Empires: The Perfection of Nature Between Europe and the Americas, 1492-1615 demonstrates how Renaissance patrons, naturalists, and husbandmen developed useful but dangerous ideas to make sense of natural diversity -- nobility, race, and species -- during the consolidation of the sixteenth-century Spanish Empire. Using the three major techniques at their disposal-relocation, cultivation and training, and selective breeding-elites began a colossal experiment. They sought to create an improved version of Christian nature both in European courts and then, on a larger scale than ever before imagined, in the Americas. Case studies focus on breeding theories and practices in Mantua, Naples, Madrid, Peru, and the Valley of Mexico. Starting in the heart of Renaissance Italy and ending high in the Andes, this project integrates disparate fields of investigation -- ranging from Renaissance aesthetics and animal studies to the histories of the Spanish Empire and of biology -- to reveal an ideal of nature grandly envisioned and prosaically enacted through imperial conquest.

Starting around 1850, the economically backward region of German central Europe embarked on a period of rapid economic growth that would soon transform it into a global economic powerhouse. Looking beyond the standard list of explanatory factors and conditions for industrialization (including proximity to Britain or German technological ingenuity), this dissertation offers a historically contingent interpretation by situating the region in its Atlantic World context. Between 1820 and 1900, some five million German speakers emigrated to North America. The study argues that this movement helped to catalyze development back in Europe because it exposed large, otherwise isolated segments of the population to an unfamiliar world of economic behaviors, mores, ideas, and institutions. Six chapters explore how this exposure mobilized the rural, working population for a centralized, industrial production regime; how it sparked the creation of new financial institutions like 'universal banks, ' often described as key during later stages of development; and how subtle changes in economic morality forced the introduction of innovative commercial laws upon which subsequent iterations of German industrialization would built.

Based on archival research in Europe, Africa, and Asia, "Empire of Hunger: Famine and the French Colonial State, 1867-1945, " traces changing conceptions of famine in the French Empire. Though French administrators once dismissed famine as an act of god or a misfortune of nature, developments in nutrition science, social engineering, and notions of race and gender suggested new tools for managing food and bodies in the colonies. At the same time, an emerging sense of the French Empire as a participant in an international humanitarian project, largely centered around the League of Nations, profoundly altered ideas of what colonialism was supposed to accomplish. In the interwar period, the high modernist confidence in the ability to mitigate hunger, coupled with the acknowledgement of the political obligation to do so, marked a turning point in the French Empire's relationship to its subjects and to nature itself. Increasingly sophisticated understandings of famine saddled the French colonial state with commitments that they were unable and unwilling to fulfill, undermining the ideological justifications of empire. This study shows how modern liberal ethics and norms of governance emerged from a contested history of imperialism.

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed unprecedented economic and social change in the United States. Largely agrarian in 1850, by 1900 the United States had become the world's premier manufacturer. My thesis is that these changes were wrought, in part, when millions of immigrants were engaged in entrepreneurial actives. In California over a million immigrants came to join the gold rush, and many stayed to build the railroad and/or engaged in agriculture and manufacturing. An examination of the development of the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) gives us a window into the workings of the early American capitalist system. Specifically, I demonstrate how the political power of the company's early investors and principals - Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington, and Charles Crocker - was derived from social networks. During the period under study, the networks of trusts these entrepreneurs brought from home to operate in California were place-based, which was in essence race-based. Because the terms of economic exchange were set politically, groups with strong political connections experienced wealth accumulation that was significantly better than other social groups. These results were evident in the making of the CPRR. Using the CPRR's own accounting ledgers and daily cash books as supplemented by railroad commission testimonies, I analyzed the motivations and decisions made by management at critical junctures. By tracing the timing and amount of cash receipts and disbursements, I infer the relationship of the payee/payer to the company, including the early investors taking the most risks. I also examine the mechanism by which conflicted transactions involving transfer of company assets to individual shareholders were effected. I introduce a business perspective into the discussions of the CPRR born of my thirty-years at the intersection of technology and finance in the Silicon Valley. Very much like Mark Hopkins, I was chief financial officer of a start-up company, and our team managed the day-to-day cash flow, making sure we made payroll every two weeks. We went through private funding with venture capitalists and finally brought the company to Wall Street in a public offering. The road show covered money centers such as Boston, New York, and San Francisco, cities that Stanford and Huntington tapped in the 1870s. What emerges is a picture of an entrepreneurial capitalist system with strong ties to political power centers where legislation was often to benefit one group to the detriment of others. This study contributes to our understanding of how our sociopolitical system came about and how our world came to be.

This dissertation examines the transnational history of Turkish guest worker families in Germany, emphasizing how their physical mobility across national borders, as well as state-driven efforts to facilitate or impede their mobility, reshaped ideas about German, Turkish, and European identities in a globalizing postwar world. It begins in 1961, when the West German government first began recruiting Turkish guest workers, and ends in 1990, a year marked by several developments: German reunification, the liberalization of German citizenship law, and renewed discussions about Turkey's compatibility with a post-Cold War conception of European belonging. At the core of the dissertation is an examination of the gradual process by which guest worker families came to feel foreign in both Germany and Turkey, the two countries they considered home. It traces the historical development of the term "Almancı, " a derogatory Turkish term that still today connotes the impression that the migrants living in Germany (Almanya) have undergone a process of Germanization and have become not only physically but also culturally estranged from the Turkish national community. The origins of this term extend as far back as the formal recruitment years (1961-1973), when guest workers were first separated from their families and rumors about adultery and infidelity spread. Simultaneously, as guest workers returned to their home cities and villages with cars and other luxurious western consumer goods, the stereotype developed that the migrants had transformed into a nouveau-riche class of superfluous spenders out of touch with the economic needs of their homeland. This history is deeply entwined with the rising xenophobia in 1980s West Germany. The dissertation's centerpiece is an investigation of the motivations and consequences of West German government's 1983 Law for the Promotion of Voluntary Return (Rückkehrförderungsgesetz), which paid unemployed former guest workers a "remigration premium" (Rückkehrprämie) of 10,500 Deutschmarks to pack their bags, take their spouses and children, and return to their home country within a brief timespan of just ten months. The dissertation traces how this controversial effort to "kick out the Turks" provoked the ire of the Turkish government, which used humanitarian rhetoric to obscure the underlying motivation for its opposition to the law: for largely economic reasons, the Turkish government did not desire an influx of return migrants. The migrants were thus left unwanted by the governments of both countries they considered home. Finally, the dissertation examines the consequences of the 1983 law, which brought about the largest remigration wave in the countries' postwar history, with 15% of West Germany's Turkish population (approximately 250,000 men, women, and children) returning to Turkey in 1984 alone. The final chapter emphasizes the struggles of the archetypical second-generation "return children" (Rückkehrkinder) who accompanied their parents to Turkey following the 1983 remigration law and became symbols of the possibilities and limitations of national belonging in both countries. Turning the concept of "integration" on its head, the dissertation argues that, amid the longstanding discourses about Germanization and cultural estrangement, many "Almancı" found that reintegration in their own homeland was often just as difficult as integration in Germany.

This dissertation investigates how German intellectuals, activists, and elected officials wrestled with the relationship between emotions and democracy during the years of the Weimar Republic (1918--1933), Germany's tumultuous first democratic experiment. It upends long-held historiographical assumptions about the sober rationality of Weimar republicans, unearthing rather the startling extent to which Germans both imagined and cultivated particularly democratic feelings in the years after the First World War: erotic desire and neighborly love, nostalgia and solidarity and belonging and righteous anger. This dissertation both charts the emergence of this passionate democratic style and tells an unsettling story about how and why it finally vanished. The following dissertation argues that while this renunciation was not inevitable, it is does help to explain how Germany's interwar democratic culture came to be so brittle. In this way, the dissertation offers an alternative explanation for the unravelling of Weimar democracy in the early 1930s. Most broadly, by tracing shifting ideas about democratic emotions and human nature, this dissertation offers European historians as well as scholars of democracy a novel way of approaching the success and failure of modern democratic states.

Imperial Refuge revisits late Ottoman history through the lens of migration, holding the resettlement of Muslim refugees as critical to the making of the modern Balkans, Turkey, and the Levant. In the half-century before World War I, about one million Muslims from Russia's North Caucasus region arrived in the Ottoman Empire. Most of them came as refugees fleeing war and persecution. This dissertation investigates the political economy of refugee resettlement in the Ottoman provinces of Danube, Sivas, and Damascus and traces refugee networks throughout the empire and beyond. The ability of refugees to tap into local economies underpinned Ottoman regional and imperial stability. State support, whether in financial aid, legal infrastructure, or transportation, was paramount to the economic success of agricultural refugee settlements. In the northern Balkans, for example, insufficient state subsidies and scarcity of land for refugees contributed to the outbreak of Muslim-Christian clashes and then to the 1877-78 Russo-Ottoman War, which ultimately ejected the Ottomans from much of the Balkans. In central Anatolia, a lack of state investment hindered the development of refugee villages, which led to economic stagnation of the region. In contrast, in the Levant, Circassian and Chechen refugees took advantage of the state-built Hejaz Railway and land reforms to create booming settlements. The refugees founded three of the four largest cities in modern Jordan, including the capital city of Amman. This bottom-up history of refugee migration and resettlement is based on archival materials from Turkey, Jordan, Bulgaria, Russia, Georgia, and the United Kingdom, including previously unknown private letters and refugee petitions.

In the Name of the Home is a history of the central concept of the nineteenth-century United States: the American home. It explores how the home lay at the center of efforts to first connect and then reconstruct the expanding nation according to a single vision of American citizenship. The home served as a moral blueprint for the reconstruction efforts of government officials, politicians, social reformers, and cultural purveyors attempting to integrate both the defeated South and the still largely unincorporated West. However, when applied to the nation's "problem" groups—freedpeople, Native peoples, Chinese immigrants, and Mormons—the home failed to create the inclusive, homogenous society that they had imagined. Instead, by the end of the century, the home had been wielded to exclude, terrorize, and enforce assimilation. By connecting the experiences of southern and western minority groups together through home politics and policies, this project reveals how ultimately the home became an illiberal form of coercion in a new liberal order.

Drawing upon archival and oral history sources in Chinese, Japanese, English, and Russian, this dissertation examines the transformation of twentieth-century China's largest steel enterprise and its urban environment: the Anshan Steel and Iron Works (Angang) located in the city of Anshan in Manchuria (Northeast China). During the early years of the People's Republic of China (PRC, 1949-), Angang produced fully half of China's steel, and was also the fourth largest steel enterprise in all of Asia. A symbol of the new socialist state as envisioned by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Angang was also one of the PRC's largest state-owned enterprises that formed the primary pillar of the socialist planned economy. While Soviet technological aid to Angang in the 1950s is well documented, far less known is Angang's genesis, which lay squarely in Japanese colonialism in Manchuria before 1945. This study traces the evolution of Angang and its urban environment in Anshan under the successive regimes of imperial Japan (1916-1945), the Soviet Union (1945- 1946), the Chinese Nationalist Party (1946-1948), and the CCP (1948-present). I challenge the widely held idea that the PRC's planned economy was inspired purely by Stalinist and Maoist visions. Instead, I contend that Chinese socialism also built upon the physical assets, human resources, and institutions left over from the Japanese and Nationalist war economies. Moreover, as under these previous regimes, lower-level officials and local residents often undermined the PRC's top-down efforts to transform the economy by re-interpreting the organizational and ideological rules set by the state for their own interests. Through a transnational microhistory of Angang and Anshan, my work offers a new framework for analyzing late-industrializing regimes of the twentieth century. I propose the concept of "hyper-industrialism" to describe the global nexus of ideology on development that crossed the divide between socialism and capitalism. By hyper- industrialism, I refer to a strong faith in the state's ability to industrialize the economy through bureaucratic planning and dominant focus on heavy industry for increasing the nation's military strength. By analyzing how the tenets of hyper-industrialism were implemented on the ground, I also explain how people experienced state-led industrialization in their daily work and everyday life. The dissertation begins by exploring the pre-CCP origins of the socialist planned economy in Manchuria as epitomized by the rise of Angang under Japanese, Soviet, and Nationalist rule (Chapters 1-2). The core discussion focuses on the first phase of CCP rule between 1948 and 1957, especially the First Five-Year Plan (1953-1957). Specifically, chapters 3-6 examine the Japanese, Nationalist, and Soviet influences in the PRC's socialist industrialization; the early PRC's state-enterprise system; the planning and formation of the industrial city; and relationship between the CCP Party-State and Chinese citizens. The last chapter discusses the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) and its impact on Chinese socialism.

Too embedded in the Jewish community for Russian historians, yet too firmly linked to the Russian Marxist movement for Jewish historians, the experience of the Russian Bund in 1917 has long been sadly neglected in historiography. To date, there has not been a single major study of the Bund's experience in the Russian Revolution, despite the party's prominence. In the first years of the twentieth century, the General Jewish Labor Bund was the largest workers' party in Russia. Vaulted into prominence in 1905 by its prominence in organizing communal defense against pogroms, the Bund emerged as one of the key political organizations active in the Jewish community of the Russian Empire. Even as the Bund's membership dwindled under pressure of post-Revolutionary repression, it remained a preeminent force on the Jewish street. Once the Revolution of 1917 allowed the Bund to return to the political stage, the Bund, now an autonomous party within the Menshevik's federated structure, found itself on the center stage of both Russian and Jewish politics during those pivotal months between the abdication of Nicholas II in February, and the Bolshevik Revolution in October. Using long inaccessible Soviet sources and documents in America and Israel, my dissertation provides a fuller understanding a party desperately trying to navigate its own contradictions in the midst of one of the great convulsions of the twentieth century. Founded in 1897 as a strictly Marxist party, the Bund was intended to mobilize Jewish workers within the Russian workers' movement. However, in response to Zionist competition, the pogroms of 1903-1906, and a general milieu of antisemitism ever-present in late-Imperial Russia, the identity of the party changed as members committed themselves to a controversial form of Marxist nationalism, hoping to secure Jewish cultural autonomy within a socialist federation. Initially opposed by all Russian Marxists, the Mensheviks quickly softened their criticism, but distance remained between the positions of the two parties. While the issues could be put aside in exile, the February Revolution of 1917 forced these issues to come to a head. Bundist leaders were forced to navigate this thorny issue while simultaneously confronting the incredible difficulties facing Revolutionary Russia, including, but not limited to, hostile invading armies, economic collapse, and severe social disruption caused by war and revolution. The Bund defined the interaction between Jews and Russia's Revolution. It was through the Bund that Jews encountered the Revolution, and through the Bund that Russia's Revolutionaries came to understand Russia's Jews and other minorities. Pursuing a distinctly Bundist agenda, this party lay the foundation for national-autonomy in Russia and anticipated the eventual structure of the Soviet Union. Menshevik support proved crucial to allowing the Bund to overcome fierce opposition from within the Jewish community from Zionist and Orthodox organization, who had the support of the majority on the Jewish street. However, tensions often arose between Bundists and Mensheviks, as the federation became increasingly untenable even before the Bolshevik seizure of power delivered the decisive blows. The Bund's experience illuminates new facets of the Russian Revolution long occluded from historical view. Moreover, it represents the first Jewish engagement with modern politics, an occurrence that coincided with those pivotal months that would define so much of the twentieth century. Trapped poignantly between competing ideas, the Bund's story is vital to understanding the Jewish Revolutionary experience.

This dissertation offers a new interpretation of the beginning of the Yugoslav-Soviet rift in 1948, examines its relationship with Albania's communist takeover and Yugoslavia's enlargement policies from 1941 through 1948, and lends fresh perspective on the establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. While it challenges views that the Stalinist transformation of Eastern Europe was determined by the nature and outlook of Soviet despotism under Stalin, it argues that ideology and domestic politics were entwined, and that Bolshevism was related to wider political cultures and practices in the region, including citizenship, class, early Cold War discourse, political mobilization, nationalism, and bilateralism.

This study shows that European scholars gave up on China as a rational model for civilization and came to see it instead as an esoteric alternative, through genuine engagement with indigenous Chinese traditions of history and natural philosophy. Toward the end of the Enlightenment, the philosophes began to criticize the civilization of China because it seemed stuck in the past; other savants came to praise it for the very same reason. For those who challenged the emerging view of progress, China still had much to offer. Like gunpowder, printing, and the compass, other Western knowledge might have also had ancient Chinese antecedents: Had the sage-king Yu the Great known the secrets of modern astronomy? Was the theory of animal magnetism prefigured by yin-yang cosmology? French Scholars looked to Beijing to investigate. There, the ex-Jesuit missionary Joseph-Marie Amiot fostered a global conversation between a French statesman, a Swiss Freemason, a Chinese barber, and a Manchu prince. Together, they searched for Atlantis, discovered kung fu, and invented tarot card fortune-telling. In the process, they cemented the idea of China as a land enchanted. Where early-modern missionaries and scholars had once seen a model of Confucian reason, modern sinologists and philosophers instead saw an alternative of Daoist magic, establishing a new intellectual relationship between China and the West.

This dissertation investigates religious conflicts between the Augustinian order and the diocesan clergy in sixteenth-century New Spain. Using letters, lawsuits, and theological treatises, it reconstructs discussions over the nature of the Church that took place in the viceroyalty in the middle decades of the century. Augustinians, later joined by their Franciscan and Dominican counterparts, argued that European ecclesiastical institutions could not be transplanted wholesale to the empire and oversee non-European populations, while bishops came to hold the opposite view. These debates led not only to the formulation of divergent ecclesiological theories by the intellectual leaders of each side. They also led to the violent enactment of these ideas in Amerindian villages by Augustinian friars and diocesan priests. Chapter I reconstructs the arguments over the ecclesiastical tithe that raged in New Spain starting in the 1530s. It argues that these debates eventually became a proxy to discuss the future shape of the Church in New Spain. Some bishops were partisans of this tax, for it would be allocated, for the most part, to the diocesan hierarchy. The tithe question was subsumed into the crown's fiscal policy for its indigenous subjects, which dictated that their tax burden should be lighter than before the Spanish conquest. The mendicant orders became the crown's trusted interpreters of pre-Hispanic cultures, and were able argue that the royal policy of fiscal alleviation was incompatible with the ecclesiastical tithe. The chapter ends in 1554, with the arrival in New Spain of two staunch advocates of the Amerindian tithe, Bishop Vasco de Quiroga of Michoacán, and Archbishop Fray Alonso de Montúfar of Mexico. Chapter II follows the career of the Augustinian theologian Fray Alonso de la Vera Cruz, from his training under Fray Francisco de Vitoria at Salamanca, to the Augustinian college he founded in Michoacán, and subsequently to various leadership positions within his order in New Spain, culminating in his appointment at the new University of Mexico. With his university lectures on the tithe (1554-1555), which asserted that this tax could not be imposed on Amerindians, he played a predominant role in the formulation of the mendicant ecclesiological project. Vera Cruz's argument for mendicant supremacy among Native Americans implied the division of the Church into two organizationally distinct units, with mendicant orders ruling over indigenous people, and the bishops supervising the religious life of everyone else. This chapter also describes how the episcopal attempts to impose the tithe were defeated by a coalition of royal officials, indigenous municipalities, and religious orders, while Archbishop Montúfar denounced Vera Cruz's ideas to the Council of the Inquisition. Shifting to a microhistorical mode, chapters III through VII reconstruct the clashes that occurred when the episcopal and mendicant visions of the Church came face to face in the small indigenous village of Tlazazalca, in the diocese of Michoacán. There, from 1558 to 1562, Bishop Quiroga took a stand against the Augustinian order, who under the leadership of Vera Cruz, sought to replace the priest the bishop had assigned to the village, a tactic promoted by Vera Cruz in his university lectures. When this priest refused to leave, religious authority in the village was divided. I show how Bishop Quiroga, the Augustinian leadership, and the viceroy all took part in this conflict. In defense of their bishop's jurisdiction over the village, Quiroga's subordinates harassed, brutalized, and imprisoned the friars' followers. The Augustinians saw their outdoor chapels dismantled, their baptismal font smashed, and their church burned to the ground. This conflict resulted in three lawsuits, with testimonies from clerics and indigenous villagers, which form the main documentary basis for this account. The events at Tlazazalca demonstrate the tangible effects of academic debates on the lives of the indigenous peoples of New Spain. The epilogue recounts how Vera Cruz traveled to Spain in 1562 to defend his ideas on the tithe against Archbishop Montúfar's accusations of heresy. While at court, he successfully lobbied for the crown to defend the privileges the mendicant orders held in the Spanish empire, just as the pope determined to revoke them as contrary to the Tridentine principle of the supremacy of each bishop in his diocese. In the end, this victory for the religious orders was but a temporary reprieve. Their project of a mendicant Church suffered unsurmountable setbacks with the crown's need to extract more resources from New Spain, a further demographic collapse of the indigenous population, and the channeling of mendicant reinforcements to newer missionary fields in other parts of the empire. The consecration in 1573 of Pedro Moya de Contreras as archbishop of Mexico heralded the end of the mendicant project and the triumph of Tridentine Catholicism in New Spain.

This dissertation provides the first archival account of England's seventeenth-century prisons, uncovering their internal social structures, their place within wider society and their role in political conflict. As inmate populations swelled with debtors due to dramatic economic shifts and growing strain placed upon credit relations, prisons became hubs of social and political activity. In ever-closer quarters, prisoners lived, petitioned, rioted, participated in self-government and developed novel political arguments. Reacting against what they perceived as oppressive legal and prison systems, inmates proposed more equitable means of maintaining credit networks, and developed radical new models of social relations. This was particularly significant during the English Revolution, when imprisonment was increasingly equated with royal absolutism. Arguments against imprisonment for debt were first developed within inmate societies, but in the mid-seventeenth century entered into broader debates over authority and tyranny, intersecting with a radical political milieu that included John Lilburne and the Levellers during the English Revolution. These developments were contingent upon (and reactions against) both economic turbulence and experiences of the participatory processes that constituted the early modern state. Inmates were the casualties of new levels of economic instability and the increasing activity of an agonistic legal system, left at the mercy of gaolers whose offices operated at the intersection of self-interest and state power. Within this context, inmates developed novel critiques of legal systems (particularly imprisonment for debt) and the social order. Thus, this dissertation considers how direct engagements with the ligatures of the early modern state precipitated by rapid economic change and dislocation could produce friction and contention that was not simply a by-product of growing participation in governance and negotiation with authority, but a key experience in generating political dissent and opposition. In short, it explores how straining credit networks, swelling inmate populations and civil war reshaped early modern prisons and their social worlds, and the political resonances this had within and beyond the prison walls.

In 1793 an outbreak in Saint Domingue (modern Haiti) grew into a global crisis. The violent illness swept through the West Indies, the United States, and southern Europe traveling as far as Livorno, Italy. The scourge was a viral, hemorrhagic fever known as yellow fever. This outbreak was not the first attack of yellow fever, but it was the largest up to that date. The pandemic lasted twelve years (1793-1805) and killed tens of thousands of people situated on the Atlantic rim. This dissertation is the first study of the crisis from a global perspective. While taking a broad view, it centers on the United States and explores the impact of yellow fever on American trade, politics, and diplomacy.

For much of the United States' first one-hundred years, a significant and diverse array of politicians argued that the nation's black population should be removed. The most commonly recommended resettlement destination was west Africa, specifically the colony of Liberia, established by colonization advocates and black American emigrants in the early 1820s. Other recommended destinations were Haiti, locations in Central and South America, and unsettled territory in the western part of North America. Although we, in the present, might expect that the cohort of politicians who promoted this idea had limited influence, the roster included many of the nation's most prominent statesmen: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Henry Clay, Francis Scott Key, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln. These individuals, along with allies from nearly every state and territory, repeatedly asked Congress to support the cause of racial separation. My dissertation asks two fundamental questions. First, why was colonization so strongly and persistently advocated by federal politicians during the fifty years prior to slavery's abolition by the Thirteenth Amendment? Second, if colonization had such strong and persistent support, why did Congress pass so few colonization-related bills during this period, and why, in the end, was colonization not part of the final moment of abolition?.

"Making Sense of Slavery" is the first full history of the study of slavery in America from the rise of abolitionism to the start of the civil rights movement—a century during which questions about slavery were open for debate in a way that they had not been before and have not been since. The story unfolds in two parts. Part 1, "Slavery, " looks at the origins of the study of slavery while the institution still existed. This was the period when political pressures encouraged the development of new arguments both for and against slavery that ended up having ramifications for society as a whole—and helped lead to the Civil War. Part 2, "Freedom, " examines how the study of slavery was incorporated into the modern research university from about 1865 to 1935—after emancipation ended slavery but before the civil rights movement asserted black equality as an incontrovertible fact. Scholars seeking to navigate the social and political changes of Reconstruction and the Progressive Era looked back to slavery as a way of thinking about race relations and industrial capitalism. Here I start with the historian Herbert Baxter Adams and his students at Johns Hopkins University, who were the first university scholars to study slavery. Then I turn to Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, a Georgia-born historian who made himself into the first modern scholar of slavery. I also look at how other scholars—especially Carter Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois—started to undermine Phillips's work and lay the foundation for the kinds of slavery studies that emerged during the civil rights movement and continue to be written today.

In the quarter century between 1950 and 1975, Americans launched four major emergency campaigns to resettle children caught in war zones. This dissertation investigates these child evacuation airlifts in Korea (1950), Cuba (1960-1962), Nigeria (1968), and Vietnam (1975). It explores why Americans considered refugee children especially worthy of rescue; to what extent the Cold War informed their philanthropic efforts; and how the relationship between private humanitarians and the U.S. government changed over time. This study argues that small-scale acts of relief helped the American public endure the military and diplomatic setbacks of the Cold War. It demonstrates how aid to a symbolic few insulated state actors from more systematic critiques of U.S. foreign policy. Finally, by tracing the history of postwar child rescue missions through the lens of gender politics, this project illuminates the rise of one of the signature institutions of our own time: the international NGO.

This dissertation traces the rise of Shanxi merchants during the Qing era (1644- 1911). During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, merchants from Shanxi Province in north China formed an unprecedented, expansive business network that not only controlled long-distance trade between China proper, Mongolia, and Russia, but also created an empire-wide banking system in China for the first time. Given these accomplishments, Shanxi merchants have become synonymous with traditional Chinese entrepreneurship. My research considers how Shanxi merchants rose to prominence and why they became so successful. I argue that the history of Shanxi merchants has to be understood in the context of the political economy of the Qing imperial project. During the first half of the eighteenth century, thanks to its rapid expansion, the Manchu empire engulfed the Mongolian steppe and Xinjiang, which resulted in the opening of the nomadic market for Chinese traders for the first time in history. The activities of Shanxi merchants helped to integrate these frontier regions with China proper. These merchants developed a series of institutions based on the time-honored local traditions of north China, which were then adapted to suit the socio-economic conditions on the frontier. These institutional innovations included the creation of new forms of native-place organizations, trade guilds, new firm structures, and new banking systems. Shanxi merchants' institutional innovations had profound impacts on late imperial Chinese society. On the one hand, these new institutions on the frontier pioneered a series of changes in China proper during the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Shanxi merchants used these institutions to create a new social order with mercantile power at its helm, which was radically different from the orthodox Confucian order backed by imperial ideology. For this reason, I argue that understanding Shanxi merchants' history also challenges dominant perceptions of the spatial economy of the Qing Empire. As this study reveals, the remote and landlocked northern frontier of the empire was not a backwater but a center of economic dynamism, a source of enormous wealth, and an incubator of new institutions, organizations, and values. Drawing insights from the "New Qing History" scholarship and institutional economics, this dissertation builds on a wide range of primary sources, including Chinese-language archival materials from both Inner Mongolia and the Mongolian People's Republic, local business documents made available to me by private collectors in Shanxi, stele inscriptions collected by Japanese investigators during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as gazetteers, genealogies, and oral history interview records from Shanxi and Inner Mongolia.

This dissertation is a study of regional elites in postwar, post-Stalin Soviet Ukraine, focusing on local bureaucracies in Kyiv, Lviv and Dnipropetrovsk, and the personal networks that shaped Soviet Ukrainian relations with the Kremlin. It is one of the first in-depth, archival monographs on the post-Stalin Soviet elite. It incorporates biography and memoir to shed light on the informal connections among elites, as well as their interactions, codes of conduct, and forms of civility within a power structure that was decidedly uncivil. I examine the issues of housing and defense in Dnipropetrovsk, illicit trading and agricultural reform in Lviv, and the Brezhnev-era culture wars in Kyiv in order to better understand the forces influencing the interactions between the party, the KGB, and the state with Soviet Ukraine's "unofficial official world" of factory directors and local powerbrokers. In Kyiv, I also focus on the transformation of Ukraine's top leadership and the efforts they made to expand the republic's political and economic autonomy within the Soviet system and internationally. In doing so, I am able to show how Ukrainian regional elites contributed to the emergent postwar socio-political order and reshaped politics and grographies of power in the Soviet Union. I also show how socialist legality reframed citizen claims for greater equity and justice during these crucial transformations.

Worthy of Freedom explains the "normalization" of Indian indentured labor migration after the abolition of slavery in the British empire. In the immediate aftermath of abolition, indenture caused a public scandal and faced legal and economic instability. But over the course of three decades, indenture came to be accepted as a legitimate form of "free labor." It was also consolidated in a material sense, as thousands of new workers bolstered sugar production. This dissertation explains how these transformations occurred. In the process, it argues that new ideas about race and political economy displaced older modes of antislavery thought, transforming perceptions of indenture and emancipation. Linking ideological and structural change, it further argues that shifting local and global economic dynamics helped legitimize indenture. In short, the dissertation illuminates the peculiar ideological, legal, and economic conditions that shaped the category of "free labor" in the era emancipation.

"'Agents Wanted': Sales, Gender, and the Making of Consumer Markets in America, 1830-1930" is a history of capitalism and a gender history that explores both a business model and women's conflicted engagement with it. The agency method of distributing consumer goods became widespread during the nineteenth century. With a gathering force in the antebellum decades and real abandon after the Civil War, entrepreneurs recruited individuals into agency networks and assigned them territories in which to cultivate demand for new kinds of mass-produced consumer goods—lavishly illustrated books, family magazines, engravings, patent medicines, and more. Agents not only persuaded people to buy but as independent contractors they also shouldered risks and carried out quotidian economic practices that enabled businesses to function. This dissertation examines three sites where agency distribution was particularly visible—the periodical, subscription book, and patent medicine industries. The agency economy recruited diverse participants into the work of selling. It offered possibilities not only to men struggling to make their way in a changing economy but also to women. In the gender-segmented and highly unequal nineteenth-century labor market, it provided a rare venue that valued the labor of men and women equally. It kindled hopes for economic independence and offered a tool for salvaging a productive home-based family economy. While most agents were men, women's minority perspective illuminates how the system functioned and how appeals to older cultural values both facilitated new economic developments and came under pressure. Women found bridges into agency work in cultural practices of hospitality, patronage, and charity to widows and via fraternal networks. They experienced obstacles as well, including negative class and moral associations. After 1870, their selling coincided with increased agitation for woman suffrage and temperance and a movement towards a freer and more commodified sexuality. These historical conjunctions of politics, sexuality, and economics informed women's interaction with selling and entrepreneurs' efforts to attract sales workers. The agency model changed over time. In the periodical industry, distinct distribution channels developed, including a system of clubbing that rewarded women's sales labor with consumer goods. After the Civil War, entrepreneurs, including E.C. Allen, elaborated agency, using advertising, merchandise premiums, and inexpensive second-class postal rates to recruit masses of agents and transform their names into commodities. With agents' help, periodical publishers built nationwide readerships, platforms that other entrepreneurs used to fulfill distribution dreams. A case study of the Viavi Company shows a patent medicine concern and its female sales workers shaping agency into direct selling—the purview of companies like Avon Products, Inc.—and in the process forwarding a commercial maternalism. Cultural representations of sellers played a role in agency transformations. Stereotypes of male and female book agents informed women's approach to selling while working to limn sales as a male pathway to business success. The comedic trope of the female drummer, or commercial traveler, evolved in ways that helped to alleviate concerns about women's ability to balance work and domestic life. In revisiting this nearly forgotten business meaning of the word "agency, " this project makes gender central to the new history of capitalism and illuminates the importance of the small-scale actions of sometimes unlikely economic actors.

Banned Books: Medicine, Readers, and Censors in Early Modern Italy, 1559-1664 examines the censorship of medical books as a lens into debates about the complex relationship between faith and knowledge after the Reformation. I approach the question of censorship from many perspectives: the community of physicians who wanted to maintain access to prohibited medical works; the ecclesiastical and lay censors who both carried out, and in some instances undermined, efforts to expurgate books rather than burn them; the readers licensed to keep prohibited books; and finally expurgated copies of the books themselves that bear the physical marks of censorship. Each of these angles reveals the ways in which the Counter-Reformation project of intellectual and religious control was a human drama defined by institutional ambitions, personal agendas, social constraints, practical realities, and the material form and content of the early printed book. Catholic censorship was a form of promulgation that fostered a community of readers with particular expertise. The consequences of this contradiction included a system of selective expurgation rather than total destruction, an extensive population of licensed readers of prohibited books, and ultimately a selective embrace of Protestant and heterodox medical knowledge in Counter-Reformation Italy.

Drawing on trade publications, the personal papers of bankers and municipal officials, credit ratings, annual reports, and bond ephemera, "Bonded Metropolis" offers the first historical account of the tangled trajectories of finance capitalism, race, and metropolitan redevelopment in twentieth century America. With San Francisco as its focal point, this dissertation shows how the municipal bond was at once a debt obligation used by municipal debtors to finance physical infrastructure, a cultural signifier with historically contingent meanings, and the basis of social relations between municipal debtors, bankers, sellers of financial information, and investors. The story begins in 1900, when Progressives repudiated an older logic of fiscal austerity to embrace municipal bonds as tools of progress. In so doing, the city opened itself up to events, processes, and relationships that impinged on the trajectory of public infrastructural development. I end in 1976, when complex structural changes and shattered social relations within the municipal bond market were largely reduced to a simplistic narrative of bad municipal debtors. As New York City's urban fiscal crisis reverberated outwards, an odd tandem of San Francisco liberal Democrats and fiscally conservative Republicans responded by imposing municipal retrenchment. The narrative arc moves from one form of municipal retrenchment to another, but in between I trace the reconstitution of the municipal bond market and situate the construction of public housing, transportation, parks, and schools within the context of rising borrowing costs. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates how municipal bonds were central to the production of urban space, how bonds held the potential to undo and remake urban inscriptions of racial inequality, and how the extension of municipal credit allowed geographically distant institutions and individuals to accumulate tax-exempt interest income. By beginning with the municipal bond, this dissertation confronts and reworks familiar narratives about twentieth century American capitalism, the co-creation of cities and suburbs, and layered forms of racial, spatial, and wealth inequality.

"Boundaries of Nature" investigates the creation of the Iguazú National Park in Argentina (1934) and the Iguaçu National Park in Brazil (1939), analyzing the geopolitical reasoning and the spatial practices behind the establishment of these two protected areas. Located at the Argentine-Brazilian border around the famous binational Iguazu Falls, the two national parks were initially envisioned as tools for the nationalization of the border. In Argentina, park proponents innovated by engaging the country's national park service in the promotion of settler colonization in national park lands. The Argentine national park agency traced street grids, parceled and sold lots, and implemented urban infrastructure inside park boundaries. Brazilian officials in turn, partially inspired by the Argentine example across the border, engaged in more modest efforts to use national park policy in the development of their side of the border. Brazil's weak control of public land, however, resulted in thousands of contested settlements inside its own border national park. In the 1960s and 1970s, the consolidation of an international paradigm of national parks as spaces devoid of dwellers and the strengthening of state tools to manage land and people led the military regimes in the two countries to engage in conflictive processes of settler eviction. This study employs space as a crucial dimension in the reconstruction of the history of Iguazú and Iguaçu, showing the spatial practices that helped to define these protected areas: mapping, demarcation, zoning, parceling, patrolling, eviction. It also demonstrates how settlers, poachers, and heart-of-palm harvesters contested the enforcement of national park rules in the space of the parks. The result was the establishment of landscapes of protected nature that were socially and politically constructed through spatial processes.

This dissertation examines the development of evolution as a cosmic concept—that is, as a concept that people applied to both the physical transformations of the astronomical heavens and to everything else in the universe—across the eight decades preceding Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species' (1859). The story I tell is centered in Britain, but with important roots in, and connections to, French and German natural philosophy. The language people used to refer to the concept of the transformation of organic and inorganic nature changed over the time period in question, of course, but it did so within a consistently universal paradigm that extended a single transformist law or principle to everything in the universe, from the transformation of nebular matter into solar systems, to the development of the earth, to the emergence and transformation of organic life on its surface, the progress of individuals and human societies, and even life in a spiritual world to come. This cosmic evolutionary paradigm was developed in the context of imaginative habits of thought associated with a historical movement known as Romanticism. The story of cosmic evolutionary thought is important for three reasons. First, it reveals the way in which evolution was a feature of nineteenth-century thought more generally, uncovering new avenues for historical research across domains of study. Second, it presents evolution not as the product of a few individual moments of genius, but as a rising tide of thought that saturated literary, religious, social, political, and natural philosophical life. Finally, our understanding of evolution in particular, and the scientific enterprise more generally, are transformed by a clearer recognition of the imaginative, Romantic roots of evolutionary ideas. The story of the cosmic evolutionists demonstrates the critical role of imagination in science, and particularly evolutionary, historical accounts of nature, while also examining the controversy that has accompanied it from the very beginning.

This dissertation contends that the First Anglo-Afghan War should be studied not only for dramatic import or political point-taking, but for the critical light it can shed on imperial thought, practice, and identity during this crucial period of the British Empire. Through a detailed examination of the historical record, it argues that the war was the birthing ground for techniques, policies, and strategies which echoed down the imperial century. These imaginative, rhetorical, and practical tools, blooded in the wreck of the first British adventure in Afghanistan, would become crucial elements of the imperial military machine. They included imperial mythmaking and the power of narrative construction to transform unacceptable failure into a useful imperial narrative; the brutal efficacy of exemplary violence to not only restore Britain's imperial honor and prestige, but to bolster imperial security by demonstrating the horrific consequences for those who would resist British rule; and the expanding imperial public sphere that played a newly critical role in the contestation of imperial self-analysis and the creation of imperial history. This dissertation argues that the First Anglo-Afghan War was the formative catalyst for the Victorian military machine.

This dissertation investigates the production of a distinctive local identity in Kharkiv, once the third largest city in the Soviet Union and today the second largest city in Ukraine. Beginning with the aftermath of World War II, it traces the city's growth into a modern Soviet metropolis, characterized by enormous factories, numerous higher education institutions, and an ethnically diverse population. It argues the dynamic interaction between Soviet ideology and local patterns of identification in Kharkiv created a durable local culture that continues to shape the city today. Grounded in archival research, this project utilizes diverse methods in order to get at its subject, including social, political, and cultural histories, discourse analysis, interviews, and the study of urban spaces. It focuses on three major themes: the evolving nature of local urban identity; the intertwining of Soviet and Ukrainian factors in local identity; and the continual renegotiation of the city's regional, national, and revolutionary pasts. I argue that the creation of a distinctively Soviet urban culture in Kharkiv was largely successful; Soviet policies and ideology structured public spaces, forms of political contestation, subjectivities, linguistic practices, and historical memories. The Soviet Union's attempt to imprint the historical narrative of the October Revolution on the urban spaces of Kharkiv found resonance locally, in part because Kharkiv was depicted as the cradle of the Soviet Ukrainian state. This mode of identification was strengthened by the experience of World War II and reconstruction, the post-Stalin revalorization of the Soviet Ukrainian narrative, and the peaceful coexistence between the city's two major nationalities, often celebrated as a model for the union. During the 1970s and 1980s, even dissenting movements in the city operated within a Soviet political paradigm that sought to reform the system rather than destroy it. My dissertation shows the relative success of Kharkiv's integration into the Soviet Union, even as it sheds light on the tensions that led to its undoing.

This dissertation reexamines the rise of Brandenburg-Prussia in the seventeenth century through the lens of food culture. It explores the ways that culture, politics, the natural environment, and science intertwined to define taste at the court of Friedrich Wilhelm (1640-1688). I argue that the decisions about everyday life at court were fundamental to the larger growth of the power of this court on the European political stage and its consolidation of power at a time when most central European states fell into obscurity. This work offers an alternative to the traditional military and bureaucratic narratives of the rise of Prussia. Instead, this dissertation views the military and bureaucratic accomplishments of this dynasty as part of a wider cultural program that shaped the consolidation of the state. In studying the economic, environmental, social, and political dynamics in choices about food at court, this work exposes the micro-decisions that determine the identity of any state.

Inventing an American Political Tradition elucidates the trans-Atlantic influence of the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke on American thought and culture from before the American Revolution through the Civil Rights Movement. It tells the story of how and why Americans transformed Locke, best known to them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an epistemologist of the Scientific Revolution, into "America's Philosopher" in the twentieth century—the supposed founder in his Second Treatise of a distinctly American liberal democratic political tradition resting on property rights, individual liberty, freedom of religious practice, and representative government. This dissertation is the first study of Locke's place in American intellectual and political life across multiple centuries.

This dissertation examines the civil war on the island of Crete during the mid-1890s that led to a major refugee crisis when tens of thousands of Cretan Muslims emigrated to Asia Minor, Syria, and North Africa. The limited scholarship on Crete has generally regarded the violence in the 1890s as a revolt instigated by Christian islanders against the Ottoman administration. By investigating this episode as a case of civil war, this dissertation differs from earlier works in that it offers a novel way of conceptualizing violence between social groups with shared cultural characteristics. In addition to presenting an account of local history, this dissertation explores the Cretan refugee crisis in its international context by discussing the policies of the European powers regarding the displaced Muslims. The story told in this dissertation ends with the discussion of the impact of the Cretan crisis in the Ottoman world. Drawing on source material from Ottoman, Greek, French, and British archives—a collection of documents which has never been combined in a study of this period—this dissertation explores social and political transformation set in motion by a sovereignty crisis over Crete between Greece and the Ottoman Empire (1908-1912). It argues that the Ottoman collapse requires a novel interpretation, one that highlights the social upheavals triggered by Crete. This dissertation offers such an appraisal through an investigation of popular rallies and the first long-lived movement of economic boycott across the Ottoman Middle East and the Balkans.

This study centers on the intersection of environment, society, and the law along the northwestern frontiers of the Qing Empire, particularly the area known as "Hehuang" straddling the modern-day Gansu-Qinghai border. Through an analysis of central and local legal case records, this work traces the ground-level changes that both bound Hehuang to the empire and triggered increasingly ethnicized explosions of violence that culminated in the Great Muslim Rebellion (1862-1873). In a region of altitudinal extremes and great ethnic diversity, I find that socio-demographic change occurred primarily in mid-altitude slope zones that were sites of overlapping jurisdictions and multiple landholding regimes. Concentrating on the lives of individual peddlers, smallholders, laborers, and herders, Part I shows how migration and the extraction of resources connected mid-slope settlements to regional networks. Over the course of the nineteenth century these changes eventually threatened both the environment and the village-level customary practices that had previously bound communities together. Behind the more proximate causes of violence and rebellion lies this deeper story of ecological crisis and growing communal struggle. Based on the local archives of Xunhua Subprefecture, Part II reveals how official reconstruction policies in the aftermath of the Great Rebellion froze in place resentments between Muslim, Tibetan, and Han Chinese populations. Despite occasional official orders to the contrary, reconstruction efforts did not return mid-slope communities to the status quo ante bellum. Rather, in a wave of post-rebellion disputes and fights over resources, Muslim cultivators often won official title for and recognition of their war-era gains. Official recovery efforts were ambitious. Implementation, however, was foiled by ground-level dynamics that officials did not fully understand. Beyond empowering local elites, reconstruction regulations, which centered primarily on rebuilding a tax base, demanded increased state intrusion into the village and the extraction of reconstruction expenses squeezed from war-torn populations. These policies bred resistance in mid-slope villages. Official efforts in the wake of the rebellion, therefore, froze ethno-religious hatreds in place, amplified the competition over land and resources, and increased tensions between local populations and the state. The legacy of these conflicts echoed in repeated rounds of strife over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though faded by the passage of time, memories of the inter-communal violence continue to haunt these villages.

Between the years 1910 and 1930 Fresno County, situated in California's Central Valley, witnessed a tremendous upsurge in the number of Mexican immigrants seeking opportunity and employment in the rich agricultural zone enclosed by the Sierra Nevada and Coastal mountain ranges. Fresno attracted a great number of Mexicans during the years of the Mexican Revolution, and experienced the greatest percentage increase of Mexicans per capita than any other California county in the same period. Although farmers throughout the county welcomed them for their cheap labor, they were otherwise perceived as a problem by a White culture predicated on a racial hierarchy. Indeed, once Mexican immigrants stepped away from fields and out of the role as workers they became a nuisance and even a menace—a menace unfit for citizenship, and rather incarceration. In the aftermath of the American Civil War, southern Whites trekked into the Fresno area to make a new home, establishing a "new south." Beginning in the late 1860s migration from the southern states into Fresno County continued well into the early twentieth century. These southern migrants were essential in creating a culture in early Fresno founded on notions of White superiority. They built and worked the land where only deserts and swamps once thrived; they harnessed the waters of the mountains and created a veritable agricultural paradise—a White paradise with defined niches and little room for what they perceived as lesser, darker races. In the dynamics of power in Fresno County the ability to inflict legal punishment was wholly vested in the hands of White gatekeepers. Unlike other immigrant destinations in California such as Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego and the Monterey area, Fresno County did not have a substantial Spanish and Mexican past. Before the advent of irrigation in the late nineteenth century there was no reason to settle the Central desert region. Fresno was not founded on the site of a Mexican town with the typical Spanish plaza centered between the main church and municipal buildings. This meant that Mexican immigrants that came into the County in the early twentieth century came into an area that was totally foreign -- they came as strangers into an alien land. Without a local history to reference, the vast majority lacking education, and without the support of Californios to at least engage with the anti-Mexican discourse of the day, Mexicans lacked the power to combat their demonization and harsh treatment by the Fresno County justice system. This dissertation is concerned with the Mexican immigrant at the periphery of society who, for various reasons, committed a crime and was dealt with by an early twentieth-century justice system in Fresno, California. Of particular interests are how Mexicans were treated by the criminal court and how their sentences compare with similar cases involving Whites. Over seven hundred criminal court cases from the Fresno Superior Court archives provide the foundation for this examination.

This dissertation reconstructs the history of public defender offices in the United States and, more generally, the American legal profession's efforts to conceptualize and institutionalize a right to state-provided counsel in criminal cases, from the first public defender experiments beginning in the 1910s through the troubled implementation of the Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright in the 1960s and 1970s. Although journalists and legal scholars have told parts of this story, this dissertation is the first historical study to piece together the story as a whole, using not just published judicial opinions and legal writings, but also a variety of archival materials, including lawyers' personal papers, correspondence, and organizational records. The dissertation argues that the problem of the "indigent accused" was both produced by and rendered ultimately insoluble by two enduring features of American law and governance, each of which has cultural, social, and political dimensions: adversarialism and federalism.

This dissertation argues that the concept of "dialect" was fundamental to the formation of modern Chinese nationalism and identity. I contend that elite and non-elite groups, inspired by diverse conceptualizations of nation, local place, and self, relegated China's myriad local languages to the status of 'dialect' -- a category that simultaneously webbed local communities to the broader concept of the Chinese nation, but also excluded them by placing them outside of the idealized form of "standard" Chinese. By tracing how the meaning of dialect was transformed by nineteenth-century Western missionaries, early twentieth-century artists and academics, and finally, the Nationalist and Communist governments, I show how Chinese—both as a language and as a national and ethnic moniker— was not just heterogeneous, but something that state-defined standards could not adequately capture.

This dissertation explains why the Bolshevik leaders devised and how they executed key revolutionary policies during the Soviet system's formative period. It argues that their most radical policies were motivated by Bolshevik ideology, whose impact stemmed not from its content, but from the self-referential mode of thought which formed its core. This mode of thought was based on the tautological conviction of its absolute correctness and unlimited power, which made it immune to any criticism. As such, it engendered a pervasive sense of possessing answers to any possible question, solutions for any conceivable problem, and the ability to overcome any obstacle. "To be a Bolshevik" meant more than thinking in terms of Marxist ideas and categories, which provided few concrete guidelines for the actual construction of a socialist utopia. It meant being driven towards radical action even in cases where Marxist teachings failed to provide orientation. As a result, Bolshevik leaders regularly backed themselves into policy dilemmas which they were not equipped to solve. In their attempts to escape from them, the leaders ended up asserting the correctness and feasibility of a blunt and often inherently contradictory course of action, which they then sought to implement with dogged determination. Herein lies the key to understanding the Bolsheviks' tendency to cause and exacerbate crises, their proclivity to pursue crude and outright violent policies, and the resulting dysfunctional, paradoxical, and at worst catastrophic outcomes. The dissertation starts by identifying and explaining the core principles and paradoxes of Bolshevik thought as well as the inherent dilemmas of the resulting "Bolshevik" approach to politics. It then applies this interpretation to explain policy-making processes in two major areas. The first of these case studies examines the genesis of the Soviet planned economy. It shows how the Bolshevik leaders, increasingly frustrated with their continuous failures to guide unruly economic processes onto the presumed, predetermined path towards "Socialism, " convinced themselves of the feasibility of their goals via centralized planning. In the short term, the attempt to implement this vision resulted in the uncontrolled, escalating planning bacchanalia of the first five-year plan period. In the long term, it produced an economic order whose systemic contradictions and shortcomings ultimately spelled the failure of the Soviet experiment at large. The second case study examines the evolution of the Bolsheviks' approach to the complex problem of agriculture and the peasantry. In their attempts to simultaneously integrate "the village" into, and harness it for, the project of "socialist construction, " the leaders pursued contradictory goals at various levels. As a result, their policies led into a self-induced intellectual and political cul-de-sac. The leaders' growing frustrations with the persistent failure of their schemes to materialize, along with the categorical insistence on the correctness of their course, paved the way for the Bolsheviks' disastrous all-out assault on the Soviet village in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The thesis is based on a close, hermeneutic reading of the leaders' deliberations at various stages in the policy-making process. Through the examination of the Bolsheviks' statements regarding underlying assumptions and dispositions as well as logical lacunae and contradictions, I demonstrate that the patterns of "Bolshevik" thought were crucial for guiding the leaders' political actions. Altogether, the dissertation combines a new interpretation of the role and significance of Bolshevik ideology with a reassessment of central questions in Soviet political and economic history. It illuminates how the inherent contradictions and dilemmas of Bolshevik thought directly informed major political decisions that determined the trajectory and fate of the entire Soviet experiment. Thus the dissertation contributes to ongoing, cross-disciplinary efforts to explain the origins of the pathologies and paradoxes that characterized the Soviet system.

"The Animal City: Remaking Human and Animal Lives in America, 1820-1910" examines the important role of animals in nineteenth century American cities and traces the transformation of urban animal populations and human relationships with animals into the twentieth century. In so doing, it also examines larger social, cultural, political, legal, and economic change. American cities were once full of a variety of domesticated, semi-domesticated, and undomesticated species of animals. By the early twentieth century, however, the range of human-animal relationships and the geography of certain animal populations in cities were utterly transformed. This project seeks to understand what happened in those intervening decades and to recover the lost worlds of urban animal life and human-animal relations. Animal policy became a major form of governmental regulation in the lives of urban Americans in the nineteenth century, effected through new laws and new means of enforcement. Ideas of sanitation, refinement, and morality shaped animal policy profoundly, bolstered by the development of public health agencies, law enforcement, and the spread of early forms of urban zoning. Understanding nineteenth century urban animal policy also helps explain certain aspects of urban development and environmental inequalities into the twentieth century and up to the present. Many cities continue to show the invisible scars of this environmental history of animal regulation and exclusion. In some ways this is also the story of an emerging chasm between consumers and the animals they consume. Urban residents in nineteenth century America experienced the disappearance of livestock alongside the growth of pet ownership and pet culture. Together, the layers of change in urban animal populations in nineteenth century America marked notable remaking of human and animal life.

"Equal Opportunity Politics In Post-Civil Rights America: African Americans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, 1964-1980" examines the relationship between African American and Mexican American communities in Los Angeles during the 1960s and 1970s. This study uses the federal War on Poverty program to argue that the mid-1960s were a critical moment for the development of African American and Mexican American relations in the city and brought these groups into contact at a level unprecedented in U.S. history. By combining the fields of African American history and Mexican American history, this story demonstrates that key historical moments, including the Black Freedom Movement, Chicano Movement, and urban uprisings were linked through the War on Poverty and set the foundation for recent debates about black/brown relations.

Roughly 150000 émigrés from across the social spectrum fled their homeland over the course of the French Revolution. Although republican law continued to equate absence with treason, most émigrés returned to France within a decade of Robespierre's fall—a remarkable feat of reintegration that was neither straightforward nor inevitable. This dissertation examines the divisive and often unconstitutional means by which the fragile First Republic attempted to police its membership. Causes célèbres such as the drawn-out saga of the "accidental outlaws" shipwrecked at Calais fueled public frustration with a system that struggled to differentiate between counter-revolutionary threats and bona fide refugees, especially women and children. Legislative, judicial and personal documents illuminate the political and practical challenges raised by France's forgotten great return.

"Mahjong, American Modernity, and Cultural Transnationalism" is a socio-cultural history of how the Chinese game mahjong became American, and how in doing so, it helped create modern America from the 1920s through the 1960s. Its story takes us from its inception as a global phenomenon in Shanghai to its evolution as a marker of gendered ethnicity in the United States. Drawing from diverse archival sources, personal papers, print media, and over fifty original oral histories, this dissertation is the first scholarly history of mahjong in the United States. Mahjong reflected the larger processes of social change in which it was embedded, but it also served as a tool for diverse groups to shape behaviors and ideas that had consequences of their own. By examining its trail across ethnic groups and through expatriates, entrepreneurs, immigrants, socialites, and housewives, mahjong tells the story of an American reorientation toward the Pacific in the twentieth century, the tensions between assimilation and cultural continuity that created identifiably ethnic communities, and how women leveraged a game to gain increasing, though contested, access to respectable leisure. Its liminal position as both American and foreign, modern and believed to be ancient, domestic and disruptive to domesticity, allows us insight into often abstract concepts such as economics, culture, and ethnicity, and unites them with on-the-ground individual experiences. Mahjong reveals the intersections of capitalism with gender and sexuality, and with ethnicity and race, but the game has gone unnoticed or has been dismissed as an everyday, often feminized pastime. In fact, mahjong's integration into daily life gives it power to illustrate human-scale aspects of social, cultural, and economic history. From mahjong's migration in the bowels of steamships to its evolution at game tables across the nation, Americans used the Chinese parlor game as a tool to navigate modernity, build communities, and create ethnic identities. The mahjong craze that erupted in the 1920s symbolized key elements of Americans' heightened sense of the "modern, " especially America's global strength abroad and its commercialized, cosmopolitan urban life at home. In the subsequent decades, mahjong offered a powerful tool for creating ethnically defined communities. Chinese Americans and Jewish American women used it in very different ways through the 1960s. For Chinese Americans, mahjong quickly transformed from a lesser-known male gambling game to a more respectable marker of transnational Chinese identity. Jewish American women had been playing mahjong since the 1920s fad, but the Cold War era nurtured a flourishing and unique gendered mahjong culture. Mahjong's history charts the substantial diversification of American culture, as the nation became increasingly able to incorporate difference and even, at least rhetorically, to embrace it. It also highlights the ongoing contestation and fears generated by social change. Through the material culture of mahjong, players have been able to stretch both time and distance. By evoking ideas of China, the tiles' aesthetic symbolism offers a spectrum of meaning, whether giving shape to a sense of ancestral homeland, or an exotic otherworldliness, or a cosmopolitan American modernity. In their enduring physicality and sensory experience, the tiles also facilitate a physical connection across generations, as the sets carry memories of those whose fingers rubbed and clicked the tiles in years past. Mahjong continues to serve as a cultural tool for individuals and groups to build a sense of belonging in new and possibly anxious situations, to imagine a connection to China or what China represents, and to join with those who share heritage or are forming a common identity. It reveals the deeply American experience, sometimes desired and sometimes enforced, of simultaneously belonging and also standing apart.

A Multiplicity of Human Destinies: Development and Settler Colonialism in French Algeria 1860-1940 provides a new account of the historical origins and institutionalization of development in empire, beginning in the ninteenth-century. A formative politics of development arose in Algeria as a form of proxy for institutionalized settler privileges; it compensated for struggling and then retreating European rural settlement. In the 1860s an advisor to Napoleon III named Ismaÿl Urbain (1812-1884) advanced a Saint-Simonian model of state-financed, modern economic development for Algeria, based on cultural recognition for subject populations and curtailing their summary dispossession. A decade later, an export industry based on fiber harvesting, on extraction of a steppic grass known as halfa (alfa in French), adopted the Kingdom's principles. This industry captures how both the conceptual framework and policies of development changed as officials improvised responses to indigenous protest. At the turn of the century, officials' concern to conserve the grass contributed to the theory that nomadism (mobile pastoralism) was a product of the universal human adaptation to environmental constraints. French officials leading new institutions such as the Southern Territories of Algeria embraced this new case for the accommodation of mobile pastoralism. Yet as the settler colonial regime became more and more cognizant of the value of mobile pastoralism and adopted a raft of measures to reflect this change, conditions for it on the ground were worsening. This paradoxical situation illustrates how prototypical development was shaped as much by officials' inconsistencies and blind spots as by formal epistemic systems of rationality, science and technology.

We enjoy exceptional material prosperity, but its form make many of us anxious. Modern material culture appears unsustainable. And, nothing seems to epitomize this better than the proliferation of plastic. America pumps over 100 billion pounds of it into the market each year, and we have already produced more plastic in the twenty-first century than during the entirety of the twentieth. Derived mostly from fossil fuels and mostly immune from degradation, it is not surprising that many people consider plastic to symbolize unsustainability. Yet, the development of synthetic materials represents our grandparents' and great-grandparents' response to resource anxieties of their own. A hundred years ago, conservationists recognized that America's economy was overexploiting forests, fur from Canada, ivory from Africa, whale oil from the Antarctic, gutta percha from Indonesia, shellac from India, and countless other commodity feedstocks. It was in this historical context that the economic and ecological value of synthetic materials was first vindicated. Plastic's potential to relieve pressure on traditional material resources was solidified when America's burgeoning car culture compelled engineers to crack apart the hydrocarbons of crude oil to fuel more powerful internal combustion. That process produced the unsaturated hydrocarbons like ethylene that became the feedstocks of the most successful plastics. Amid material shortages of the Second World War, these new synthetics were so important that the U.S. government invested $3.5 billion into their production--$1.5 billion more than the Manhattan Project. To satisfy consumer demands of baby boomers, the Truman Administration declared that petroleum-derived materials were critical, and within a single generation America produced a greater volume of plastics that that of steel, copper, and aluminum combined. Even during the oil shocks of the 1970s, the World Watch Institute advocated for plastics given their relative energy efficiency. Plastics have functioned as a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card, sustaining our materials culture as it grew beyond the bounds of traditional natural resources. Undoubtedly, petroleum-derived plastics exacerbated certain forms of unsustainability by enabling more wasteful consumption and by deepening our reliance on petroleum. But that is only one part of the history of plastics, which is not confined to petroleum. Plastics were originally engineered from cellulose and other biological molecules, and bio-based plastics producers can capitalize on the economic and ecological benefits established by petroleum-based plastics. The complexity and scale of our economy depend on plastics. And, contrary to popular assumptions and most historiography, the history of synthetic materials I illuminate in my dissertation shows that important aspects of sustainability depend on plastics too.

Eighteenth-century rulers strove to remake Russia according to their ideas of enlightenment and modernity. Moscow, the country's largest city and traditional capital, served as a particular focus of reform. According to contemporary elites, Moscow's haphazard planning, superstitious populace, and decentralized administration represented the antithesis of the well-ordered capital befitting Russia as a European power. Efforts to remedy these shortcomings culminated in Catherine the Great, who introduced a series of reforms to "Europeanize" the city. This dissertation challenges assumptions that Catherinian policies brought much-needed changes to a city mired in dysfunction and fundamentally backward in comparison to the West. It does so by focusing on the Moscow Police, the institution championed by authorities as the practical means to root out behaviors and practices deemed contrary to enlightened good order. Policing in practice worked to supplant functioning administrative structures and social relationships in favor of imposing alternatives that would be much more transparent and responsive to central authorities. The language of disorder and "Europeanization" thus belies how Russian rulers wielded reforms to achieve goals in Moscow shared by their early modern European counterparts, namely to concentrate authority in central institutions and authorities and to exercise an unprecedented measure of control over the lives of their subjects.

The Postal West is a spatial history of one of the defining transformations of the late nineteenth-century United States. When the American Civil War drew to a close in 1865, much of the West remained a sparsely settled and violently contested periphery with only tenuous connections to the rest of the country. Over the next three decades, the West incorporated six new states and millions of new inhabitants into an increasingly interconnected regional system. How did this integrative project unfold so quickly across such a massive area? The answer comes from an unlikely source. More so than the any other institution, the U.S. Post was the midwife of western integration. Its sprawling network of post offices and mail routes connected local communities to larger systems of capital and commerce, law and governance, politics and culture. This dissertation maps where, when, and how that process unfolded in the western states and territories. The spatial infrastructure of the U.S. Post explains the speed and course of the region's integration into the larger nation.

This dissertation examines what happened to the vast landed estates of Prussia's nobility in the former German territories assigned to Poland after Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945. I follow these estates and their villages from their occupation by the Red Army, to the expulsion of their German inhabitants, through the subsequent resettlement of the land by Poles. The transformation of these estates into Polish farms involved the forced resettlement of millions of Poles and Germans and an attempt by Polish authorities to convert large capitalist agricultural enterprises into smaller holdings or state farms expected to operate in the new country's socialist economy. While previous works have studied the transformation of western Poland's urban spaces, this study shows how rural communities and the land they depended on changed as a result of war, forced migration, and regime change. The forced migrations accompanying the end of World War II in Central Europe resulted from the Allies' decisions establishing the new postwar European order. During three separate conferences, the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union decided to shift Poland's borders westwards by several hundred kilometers. This would allow the Soviet Union to keep former Polish lands in the east, which Stalin had first invaded in 1939, and would compensate Poland for that loss with German territory in the west. While the western Allies acceded to Soviet and Polish demands that the German population from these territories had to be transferred, they left the final decision on the exact run of the new Polish-German border to a future peace conference which never took place. While Polish authorities began to expel Germans from the lands provisionally placed under their administration, Polish settlers arriving in this territory from the center and former east of the country remained uncertain that their settlement would be permanent. The movement of millions of people in the aftermath of a destructive war did not happen overnight. Long after the fighting had ended hundreds of thousands of Germans continued to live and work on the large estates of Poland's sparsely populated northwestern countryside. As a result German citizens, Polish settlers, and Red Army soldiers lived alongside one another for at least four years following the war. Their everyday life in this contested space is the subject of this dissertation.

This dissertation examines Japanese efforts to understand, rehabilitate, exploit, modernize, and showcase Korea's forests during the period of colonial rule (1910-1945). As a source of natural resources, a space of habitation, and a repository of rural traditions, Korea's woodlands formed a dynamic and highly contentious site of colonial governance. And yet, save for Korean- and Japanese-language studies on forestry policy, Korea's mountains and forests, which comprise more than 70 percent of the peninsula, remain a historiographical hinterland. Building on the growing body of comparative literature on the tangled roots of colonialism, scientific forestry, and conservationism, I argue that the forestry enterprise in colonial Korea was as concerned with the seed as it was with the saw: it placed afforestation and forest conservation at the heart of the colonial project to reform the Korean landscape and the ecological sensibilities of its inhabitants. Driven by utilitarian concerns about resource scarcity, a growing empire-wide demand for Korea's forest products, and fears of cascading environmental degradation, Japanese foresters set out in Korea to reclaim a peninsula routinely described as "a land of bald mountains and red earth." But forest reclamation in Korea was far from benevolent or benign: it siphoned off forestland to Japanese corporations and capitalists, cut off local communities from woodlands that had long sustained them, and placed vast tracts of commercially viable forests (especially those in the Yalu and Tumen River basins) under state control. Afforestation, in other words, was a process rife with conflict and fraught with contradiction. By chronicling the vicissitudes of this intensive, contested, and largely forgotten forestry project, I offer a case study in the promise and perils of natural resource management as it took shape in Japan's empire. Three principle lines of inquiry sustain my analysis. First, by surveying how, where, and when Korea's forests (and the range of resources therein) were utilized during the colonial period, I examine the materiality of modernization and the ecological implications of colonial rule. Second, through an examination of the mechanics and implementation of forestry policy, I map the contours of the politics of sustainability: a term that connotes the often-conflicting interests inherent to forest management and the myriad forces shaping forestry reforms (including bureaucratic conflict, geopolitics, peasant protest, and global markets). Third, by drawing attention to the interpenetration of forestry and everyday life, I explore the emergence in Korea of colonial ecological modernity: a concept that highlights how colonial forestry was not simply a process of modernization, but a far reaching and contested public campaign that touched the lives, values, and sensory experiences of residents across the peninsula.

This dissertation explores how and why three countries with different histories and political cultures—Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany—came to adopt communist political systems in the period following the Second World War. Through a comparative study of one institution, the communist secret police, it explores the people, sentiments, debates, and motivations that turned post-war chaos into centrally organized communist states. It argues that secret police forces in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany were never as homogenous and unified as historians have commonly assumed. In fact, Eastern European secret police forces developed different institutional forms depending on the social conditions, geography, and experiences of war of each country.

This dissertation examines the creation, demarcation, and enforcement of the Canadian-United States border from the American Revolution until 1924. Although diplomats often viewed the division between national spaces as a clean and uniform line, the Canadian-United States border is better understood as a series of interlocking, uneven, and inconsistent walls. Federal administrators created national border policy, but local agents dictated the practical impacts this policy could have. Inconsistent policy decisions ensured that the border closed at different times in different regions and created an uneven set of impositions on borderland communities. As a result, federal border policy cannot be understood by looking at a single racial, ethnic, or tribal group. Europeans, Chinese, African Americans, Cree, Sioux, Nez Perce, Métis, Stó:lō, Haida, Ojibwe, and Iroquois all experienced the impacts of border closure in different ways and to different extents.

Over a continuous span of two hundred and twenty years members of the Barbou family in early modern Limoges, France maintained a livre de raison, or family journal, that both documented and helped to transmit a fascinatingly idiosyncratic family culture. Their work as printers, a cornerstone of their identity even as they gained noble status, earned them fabulous wealth and a prominent status in their industry thanks to their cultivation of multiple patrons, their reliance on widows to continue their husbands' work, and their creation of a family-run satellite workshop in Paris. When it came time to spend that wealth Barbou parents invested in land and offices to increase their social standing but never lost their focus on the world of work. Connections to both spheres allowed them to find elite husbands for their daughters and wealthy wives for their sons—a hypergamous marriage pattern that was only possible because of their commitment to sharing the patrimony among all of their children rather than practicing the strict primogeniture of many other ambitious families of the time. As sibling groups rose through the social hierarchy together they cemented their alliances through spiritual kinship, choosing godparents from among both parents' relatives and favoring horizontal relationships above all else. Throughout their history the Barbou benefitted from the geographical patterns that shaped their culture; from the important contributions of the many strong widows who guided the family's course; and from the liminal social position that enabled a wider variety of choices through the lack of strong ties to their community. Studying such a unique family supplies a counterexample for numerous historiographical generalizations and provides a glimpse of what was possible in early modern France.