The history of vegetarianism in the United States has long been shrouded in myth, assumption and obfuscation. Vegetarianism as a vital ideological and political movement has often been presented—even by its proponents—as a product of twentieth century modernism, reflecting a rise in ethical consumer awareness. The historical record of the nineteenth century, however, tells a very different story. The notion that dietary choices could be connected with larger social and political goals was formulated during, and changed dramatically in the nineteenth century. This dissertation charts the rise and evolution of vegetarianism in the United States from 1817 until 1917. This project will present the first complete analysis of vegetarian activities in the United States during this time period. Through analysis of health and reform journals, personal papers, vegetarian society administrative papers, newspaper accounts and popular culture references, it is possible to chart distinct changes in the ways that vegetarians reacted to rapid socio-political change. Dividing the vegetarian movement in the United States into two distinct time periods gives insight into the changing nature of reform, gender roles, health care, consumerism and individualism. During this time period vegetarianism shifted from a method aimed at conquering social ills and injustice, to a path for personal strength and success in a newly individualistic, consumption-driven economy.

From the closing stages of the British colonial era to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Philadelphia merchants experienced some of the darkest trading days, an era of tumultuous revolutions, wars, and heightened commercial competition, and also some of the best commercial opportunities that political independence from England could offer. Within the broader trade connections of the Atlantic world, my work tracks the importation of linen textiles together with the exportation of flaxseed, one of Philadelphia’s most important exports to Ireland by the 1750s, in a cycle of trade across the north Atlantic. This is also a story about re-exports as most linen imported into America was first imported into England from Ireland and continental Europe, reexported to Philadelphia, and then merchants here re-exported linens to the hinterland, the Caribbean, and South America. I show that both British imperial aspirations and American patriotic manufacturing rhetoric could not dismiss the reality that the United States consistently imported more European textiles than before the Revolution, a higher import than any other commodity. I explore the cooperative relationships between importing linen merchants, the retail trade in urban and rural areas, and the export of essential raw materials to the fabrication process. The dissertation chronologically charts how Philadelphia merchants transferred goods from the producer to the consumer, what was available in the midst of political tumult and what was desired, their systems of credit and accounting, the internal organization of their partnerships, the development of marketing techniques for the fairly stable priced linen, and their methods of transportation and distribution of Irish, English, and northern European linens. It shows important trends of material improvements for middling and elite customers from the colonial era to the beginning of the nineteenth century. My dissertation bridges the gap between studies related to the techniques of textile production and a separate scholarship on textile use, between writings on manufacturing and consumption, and it shows how common people’s textiles were distributed within the context of maritime commerce, shipping, and the economic development of late-eighteenth century North America. This dissertation challenges the centrality of trade that was conducted with the West Indies flour and sugar relationships and pushes our gaze toward the north-Atlantic traders’ ties, arguing that within an interwoven web across the Atlantic with new trading patterns, Americans could start to substitute the traditional markets for their fabric with both their own cloth and its eventual replacement, cotton, from new places.

This thesis examines how and why the high church faction of the Episcopal Church revived the use of priestly vestments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although this practice met with much opposition from the Churchs more evangelical or low church sectors, garments like stoles, chasubles, copes and dalmatics, along with altar linens, gradually became more common in Episcopal parishes. Use of these vestments signified a more sacramental view of the Eucharist, drawing attention to the priest and showing reverence for the liturgical presentation of Christs sacrifice. The symbolic decorative motifs embroidered on vestments further emphasized this theology. Despite the seeming resemblance of Episcopal vestments to those of contemporary Roman Catholics, the high church party actually pursued a unique religious identity that looked to England for inspiration. The Oxford and Cambridge Movements, Anglican studies of vestment history, and museum collections of pre-Reformation English vestments all influenced high church Episcopalians. Anglo-Catholics were the most ardent restorers of rituals； they posited that the English Church had its own Eucharistic rites and clergy descended from the Apostles, and was thus on par with the Roman rite and the rest of the global catholic Church. Collective memory of the English Reformation changed as Anglo-Catholics bemoaned iconoclastic destruction of Gothic glory. Episcopalians further solidified their identity by relying on their own transatlantic network of vestment production, of which female labor was an integral part. Wealthy parishes ordered vestments from English designers, many of whom relied on embroidery workshops in convents. Orders of Episcopal nuns in the United States also imitated this model, filling vestment orders to fund their charitable work. Altar Guilds were another major source of Episcopal vestments. Parish women employed their needlework skills to clothe their priests and offered assistance to needier parishes that could not afford elaborate silk garments. Both convent and parish workshops learned about vestment symbolism and production from embroidery manuals. The English and American authors of these books offered Church history as well as practical instruction. Vestments were costly creations of skillfully crafted imported silk, gold thread, and even jewels. This gave the Episcopal Church an air of luxury. Wealthy Episcopalians donated expensive vestments to their parishes, often in memory of deceased loved ones. These gifts represented elite benevolence as well as piety. Parish patrons were trying to emulate the aristocratic splendor of Europe. This fascination with Gothic opulence also found expression in the curious phenomenon of antique vestment collecting. Antique dealers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided Italian and Spanish church garments to collectors who incorporated these seventeenth century garments into home decor. This domestic re-appropriation of ecclesiastical vestments shows the continuing American desire to imitate and own vestiges of European splendor.

My thesis examines the contentious debates on health care reform in U.S. and British society from 1945-50. In particular, this analysis juxtaposed the positions of the U.S..s American Medical Association AMA) and National Medical Association NMA) and the United Kingdom.s British Medical Association BMA) and Socialist Medical Association SMA). From the 1940s to today specialists on health care reform have conducted numerous studies on the development of U.S. and British health care. However, this project focuses on the discourse utilized by these associations and the ideological values that largely fueled their efforts. This is a comparative study that considers issues and topics both associations addressed. These topics include the associations. proposed health care/insurance reforms as well as the actual successes/failures of such reforms. Specifically, the analyses explored each association.s proposals in relation to the doctor-patient relationship, method of remuneration, and how it viewed the doctor.s status within society. These analyses reveal ideological values that propelled such views. In essence, this study necessitated the comprehension of two western world powers that ultimately went in opposite directions concerning health policy. The medical associations. values reflect a part of the overall sociopolitical context of each respective country. Most importantly, this study reflects the actual degrees of conservatism, capitalism, socialism and libertarianism each association harbored by comparing its values and tactics to one another. In particular, the AMA.s platform was far more conservative and capitalistic than the BMA while the SMA offered a socialistic alternative to British politicians, which was not complementary to either the AMA.s or NMA.s plans. The NMA promoted equal care for African American communities during a time of racial segregation. Finally, the debates amongst these groups reflect the contributions of the victors, the less successful and the outright losers in the U.S..s and Britain.s health policy development.

The story of American Methodism from 1777 to 1835 presents a puzzle. During those years the Methodist Episcopal Church grew into the largest denomination in the United States while fashioning the most hierarchical organization in American Protestantism. In other words, the Methodist Episcopal Church leaders steadily denied the laity any role in the ecclesiastical government over the same period that most Americans embraced a political order based on republicanism and democracy. Over time the government grew more complex, the bishops more autocratic, and the number of people excluded from participation greater and greater. Solving this puzzle sheds new light not only on the Methodist Episcopal Church, but on the competitive evangelical marketplace churches found themselves in after the American Revolution, and on the relationship between Americans secular ideals and their religious expectations. This dissertation explores the role of two schismatic movements in shaping the development of the church and explaining its remarkable success. The James OKelly schism took place in 1792, when OKelly stormed out of the General Conference, frustrated by yet another failure to limit the growing hierarchy and the power of the bishops. He took with him one-fifth of the churchs members and formed the Republican Methodist Church—a remarkably egalitarian denomination. The church leaders foundered for years, failing to respond as OKelly attacked them in spirited, popular published works. Eventually they issued a rejoinder and the membership rolls again began to grow. In 1820, the Methodist Episcopal Church came under a sustained attack by reformers demanding lay representation in the church government. This time, the churchs leaders responded differently, learning from the mistakes of the past and from their critics. They acted immediately, expelling those who advocated for reform, and offering mercy to those who repented of their sins and returned to the fold. Finding their petitions ignored, their people expelled, and their names tarnished, the reformers left to form the Methodist Protestant Church in 1830, one that drew away only a trivial number of people from the Methodist Episcopal Church. The key to understanding the contradiction between the Methodist Episcopal Churchs success as the most hierarchical Protestant church, in Americas increasingly democratic political culture, lies in its image as a folksy church that appealed to every day Americans, hiding its fundamentally undemocratic nature. The Methodist itinerants—uneducated, poor men of little social standing—met the people where they were, and literally met them in their homes where they graciously accepted whatever hospitality the laity could offer them. Later, the editors of the nations most widely read evangelical magazines met them in print—running short, readable stories of an entertaining nature. The populist campaign worked—Americans flocked to a church that looked like it represented them, even as its leaders expelled them for daring to call for change and looked down on them as spiritual inferiors. And today, the image of the Methodist Episcopal Church as a democratic institution still triumphs over the reality.

Nell Donnelly created a stylish, practical, affordable pink gingham apron frock in 1916, selling out her first order of 216 dresses the first morning at $1 apiece at Peck’s Dry Goods Company in Kansas City. This study investigates the forces behind the success of her dress, and finds that during the early 20th century, woman’s role became modernized, shifting from that of producer to consumer, and that clothing—in particular, the housedress—was a visible reflection of this shift. Specific attributes contributed to the success of the apron frock in design and social perspective. First, her housedress incorporated current design elements including kimono sleeves, empire waistline, waist yoke, asymmetrical front closure, and ruffle trimmings sensibly. Socially, mass advertising and mass media articles promoted fashion consciousness in women to look as pretty as those in the ad or article. As a result, integrating trendy design elements into an affordable housedress along with the growing demand for a stylish, yet practical housedress guaranteed the success of Nelly Don’s pink gingham apron frock. As such, the availability and value of the apron frock provide a vivid illustration of woman’s shifting role: its popularity as an alternative to old-fashioned Mother Hubbard housedresses demonstrates both women’s new consumer awareness as well as their growing involvement in the public sphere.

This dissertation examines the history of religious participation in the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. The project makes two central arguments. First, it demonstrates how religious actors in the United States have defined debates over morality and sexuality in public discussions of the epidemic. And second, it illustrates the political roles American religion has played in the formation of public health policies since the 1980s. Religious groups in America have a long history of involvement in social reform and providing social services alongside or, all too often, in place of those provided by the state. The AIDS epidemic, however, presented a unique challenge for religious organizations, given the early association of the disease with gay men and drug users. How would churches respond to a disease transmitted through sexual practices that most religious denominations denounced, if not actively condemned? Indeed, this association did slow religious responses, but as this dissertation demonstrates, religious groups did not remain silent for long. By the mid-1980s, a number of religious leaders, congregations, and denominations confronted AIDS by calling for care for those suffering with the disease and by establishing AIDS ministry programs. Most responses also placed the epidemic in a particular social and moral context, as religious groups addressed the sexual behaviors involved in the transmission of HIV. This dissertation examines how these groups constructed AIDS as a moral epidemic precisely through their discussions of sexuality. It demonstrates how religious discourses about AIDS often posited a moral etiology for the disease, placing moral reasoning alongside biological and medical arguments in discussions concerning the genesis of the epidemic and methods for preventing new cases. These languages of sexual morality, moreover, often found expression through recourse to the imagined nation and national citizenship, contributing to the formation of a particular American sexual morality that privileged monogamy and abstinence as crucial components both in the fight against HIV/AIDS and for the security of national health.

In the fall of 1956, the Suez crisis caused a rift between the United States and its European allies France and Britain. As each country tried to come to terms with the meaning of Suez for their foreign policy, widely different visions of the alliance emerged in each country. In the years that followed, these competing visions of leadership within the alliance created tensions across a range of topics from nuclear policy to European integration and African decolonization. This dissertation uses a multi-national and multi-archival approach to reinterpret the history of the transAtlantic alliance from 1957 to 1963. Looking beyond Cold War-induced preoccupations, it adds to the current literature by bringing to the fore issues of economic and strategic interest, national prestige and internal alliance politics. Moreover, Diverging Visions of Leadership argues that the personal relationships between American presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and French President Charles de Gaulle largely influenced their actions and those of their governments. In elucidating the complex interactions of France, Britain and the United States during the period, it quickly becomes clear that many of the most interesting controversies occurring during this time cannot satisfactorily fit into the Cold War framework traditionally used to explain the period between 1945 and 1991. The British and French colonial retreat, their quest to obtain and maintain an independent nuclear deterrent and the efforts to unite Europe economically and politically through the European Economic Community, for example, have little to do with the Cold War, but remain extremely important to understanding the transatlantic relationship. I argue that diverging visions of leadership and struggles for power within the alliance itself, rather than the external threat of the Soviet Union, provide for a more complete explanation of the actions taken by the leaders of each country as they sought to steer alliance policy towards their own goals.

In 1995, American public opinion rallied around the sacrosanct “Good War” and its atomic culmination above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the Smithsonians National Air and Space Museum contemplated an inclusion of the Japanese victims of atomic warfare in an exhibit planned for the fiftieth anniversary of the Pacific Wars end, the intense public furor against the purportedly revisionist undermining of the “American Centurys” greatest triumph extirpated the Enola Gay from any consideration of the bombs enduring civilian toll. In short, fifty years after the dual incinerations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seemed that the same American consensus supporting the righteousness of the atomic bombs still existed, as it had since 1945. This dissertation seeks a re-examination of American and Japanese memories of atomic warfare, grounded in the dissent that appeared as early as August 1945. By returning to the years of Japans Occupation, from 1945-1952, we can trace the counternarratives of atomic tragedy that emerged from Japanese and American Christians, questioning not only national celebrations of the just nature of Hiroshima and Nagasakis destruction, but also national adherence to the long-held identity as an exceptional Christian democracy. Immediate opposition to the use of the atomic bomb to end war in the Pacific, particularly from vocal Christian activists, revealed the lack of any national consensus that shadowed nuclear war from its birth and that complicated the memory of World War II as the “Good War” in Americas past. Confirmed by the victory of war, the United States embarked on a new Christianizing mission in Occupied Japan that extended the boundaries of American democracy, in the Cold Wars fight against communism, across the globe. As General Douglas MacArthur fostered democracy in recently militaristic Japan, he called on Christian missionaries to assist the American transformation of its former enemy. Among the Christians to respond to MacArthurs call were those, such as many of the founders of International Christian University, who based their active commitment to improving Japan on their desire to apologize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki； this dissent disappeared from American collective memory as the Cold War bolstered support for nuclear arsenals.

This dissertation analyzes nearly 200 plans for institutional reform in British America between 1675 and 1791. In doing so, it views the colonial period from an imperial perspective, since plans incorporated North America, the West Indies and Great Britain as an integrative whole. Reform plans addressed practical problems in colonial administration, trade, defense, and the constitutional connection between the colonies and the mother country. In the attempt to devise solutions, men throughout the empire—including colonial governors and assemblymen, Members of Parliament, merchants, customs officers, economists, and colonial agents in London—constructed plans that sought to improve the imperial connection by strengthening institutions. This study thus emphasizes the empire as planners viewed it, as an institution writ large, with integrally-connected parts secured by bonds of commerce, affection, government, common heritage, religion, and royal political culture. Political ideology and institutional structure influenced and reinforced each other in reform plans. The planners ideological assumptions originated from an evolving, transatlantic, political dialogue and generally represented a positive vision of empire. In their institutional suggestions, planners employed imperial models, such as Rome, the Dutch Confederation, and the Anglo-Scottish Union. They also used legal precedent and constitutional theory to buttress plans that they believed could provide a solid, workable foundation and incorporate disparate parts of the empire. Initially, plans focused on consolidation and centralized control； however as colonies grew and matured and the empire evolved, events demanded adaptive solutions. This created a public forum on establishing imperial equity and the constitutional foundations of the empire. It also forced advances in thinking about imperial structure that eventually led to imaginative suggestions for expanded governmental and commercial frameworks. Despite these developments, throughout the entire period of colonial reform planners sought to create order and stability, and to distill the idea of a common good into institutional form in order to create a mutually-beneficial, symbiotic imperial system. The plans thus collectively represent a consistent strain of eighteenth-century political ideology in British America that centered on the concepts of union and empire.