Dissertations in Progress

Advisors: Scott Sandage and Edda Fields-Black

Private Wrongs: A Hidden History of the American Civil War's First Black Union Regiment.

This project explores the actions of formerly enslaved men and their kinship networks in the Lowcountry South who voted with their feet for a general strike against slavery and for “joining the black ranks,” the first to enter the Union Army yet virtually unknown to history. Whether facing those who claimed ownership over their bodies and labor, or the material and social structures of the slavery economy, the ranks of the First South Carolina Volunteers fought on battlefields far removed from the likes of Gettysburg. In such fights, they “had private wrongs to avenge.” This study thus narrates their war within the Civil War: a fight not only to secure freedom but also personal justice and even revenge for the crimes of enslavement. Its central themes are continuity and circularity, exploring how prewar lives and labor flowed into and informed wartime actions and fluid identities. I seek to address challenges posed by scholars who argue for framing the Civil War within specifically Atlantic “slave rebellion” contexts. By asking how understandings of the conflict are changed by placing it in conversation with the long durée of uprisings by enslaved and laboring people in the revolutionary Atlantic World, this study proposes a reevaluation of long-held, monolithic assumptions about Black soldiers and their motivations, and thus a new history of the Civil War. This project aims to develop and tell for the first time the hidden stories of the Black ranks, their white allies, and how they worked to destroy slavery from below.

Advisor: Joe Trotter

Black Pittsburgh’s Healthcare Experience, 1941-1996

My dissertation will examine the transformation of health and health care within Pittsburgh’s African American community from World War II through the close of the 20^th century. While this study will focus primarily on the Hill District as the principal black community in Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, it will also explore changes in other black neighborhoods within the city (especially Homewood-Brushton, Lincoln-Lemington-Belmont, and Manchester). In methodological and theoretical terms, this dissertation builds primarily upon the historiography of African American urban, labor, and social history, including research on the City of Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, as well as an expanding literature on the history of black health and healthcare during the industrial and emerging postindustrial age. More specifically, I employ social, cultural, and political historian Earl Lewis’ notion of “multipositionality” to argue that Pittsburgh’s black medical history was much more than a tale of class and racial conflict (and sometimes cooperation), it was also a story about how individuals navigated a variety of identities – including gender and age among others – in their quest for equal access to healthcare in the city and region’s mainstream medical establishment. In this process, I also argue that the fall of the steel industry and the manufacturing sector of the economy represented a major watershed in black health and medical care. The emergence of medical and higher education institutions at the center of the city’s changing political economy not only ushered in a new and more subtle system of health care segregation and injustice, but also intensified Pittsburgh’s medical rights struggle as part of a worldwide fight against medical apartheid in South Africa and around the globe.

Advisor: Nico Slate

World Peace: Visions from India and Afro-America 1945-1991

This dissertation will examine the relationship between nationalism and internationalism within the global peace movement, with a particular focus on African American and South Asian contexts. This project is informed by historiography in modern South Asian history, transnational African American history, and historiography on the emergence of the Third World project. Scholars have done work to combine perspectives from diplomatic history, transnational social movements, and transnational intellectual history into these fields. These works provide fertile ground for new projects to further develop connections between modern African American and South Asian histories of internationalism.

This project will examine the relationship of the African American and South Asian activists to the global peace movement from 1945-1991. It will analyze how the broad Black Freedom Struggle and the Indian Freedom Struggle related to the struggle for world peace. It will pay special attention to the role of ideas emerging from these two movements as they relate to the struggle for world peace. A working hypothesis is that activists from both movements saw the struggle for world peace as essential for fulfilling the visions their movements strove for. At the same time, the anti-colonial and anti-racist ideas emerging from these movements meant that they sought remold the peace movement to incorporate these ideas. This process means that peace activism was a means by which grassroots activists could engage in the broad Bandung vision which has usually been associated with states and government officials.

            The World Peace Council as an organization including activists from the First, Second, and Third Worlds will be examined as a forum in which these activists worked and in which they brought in ideas from the respective movements of their peoples for independence and civil rights. The association of the WPC with organizations associated with the Black and Indian Freedom Struggles such as the Southern Christian Leadership Council, Communist Party USA, Communist Party of India, and Indian National Congress will be examined. The ways in which all of these organizations worked with ordinary people as well as used access to the levers of state power will be analyzed.

Advisor: Chris Phillips

Social Science and the Aging Mind in Twentieth-Century America

My dissertation examines how twentieth-century American social scientists studied the aging process, and how their research was applied in corporate retirement systems, age-based discrimination law, and personal health practices. I argue that, between the 1940s and the 1980s, social scientists first made and then unmade a monolithic notion of “normal” aging. The first half of the dissertation follows an interdisciplinary group of researchers at the University of Chicago, one of the first groups to approach aging from a sociological and psychological rather than medical perspective. These researchers were influenced by the established field of child developmentalism, borrowing research tools as well as the midcentury preoccupation with proper social adjustment for children. As a result, the research projects that emerged from Chicago were aimed at producing well-adjusted elderly people, who retired at 65 and moved seamlessly from a life of work to one of leisure. Examining this research reveals how the social sciences helped construct and reinforce expectations of a normal life cycle. The second half of the dissertation follows the field of life-span developmental psychology as it emerged in the 1960s and grew in the 1970s and 1980s. While this group also borrowed ideas from child developmentalism, technical innovations in psychometrics and research methodology complicated their understanding of how to measure normality in the elderly. The goal of life-span developmental psychology was not proper adjustment but “successful aging,” with a focus on the maintenance of cognitive abilities into old age. This program fit well with a growing movement for elderly rights, which positioned itself against stereotypes of the elderly as victims of inevitable mental decline. Life-span developmental psychology was deployed as evidence in the legislative push that banned mandatory retirement in the United States. The history of aging research thus connects developments in labor relations, discrimination law, and research design to broader expectations of what a normal life looks like.

Advisor: Lisa Tetrault

Peace Work: The National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War and the Transformation of White Women's Organizing After Suffrage

The interwar women's peace movement directed the energies of millions of American women to beat back the rising tide of militarism, conceptualize a world without war, and capitalize on the successful campaign behind the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. My dissertation uses the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War (NCCCW), a massive peace coalition, to argue that, in a period commonly known as the "doldrums of American feminism," white women in post-1920 politics used their experience and organizing prowess to vie for power and influence in the most consequential debates of the era.

Advisor: Lisa Tetrault

Gender, Sexual Violence, and Contested Space in Progressive Era Pittsburgh, 1880-1930

My dissertation explores the complicated politics of street harassment from 1880 to the late 1930s in the context of one urban space, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. During these decades, street harassment emerged as a publicly prominent topic, appearing regularly within the courts and newspapers of cities across America. This relatively new phenomena—as least in public discourse—gives pause to the many celebratory affirmations about the New Woman’s independence. It forces us to confront how women, as they moved autonomously around big cities, were assaulted and harassed in an effort to curb their independence. It reminds us that no understanding of women’s lives can be reached without a consideration of the violence they face every day. Yet we have almost no scholarship addressing this Progressive-era phenomena. As a
result, we have not been able to effectively grapple with precisely which freedoms the New Woman did or did not enjoy. And we have overlooked how resisting gender violence occupied their lives in a decisive fashion. When we pay attention to this, we get closer to a broader picture of how women pursued and fought for their right to live independent lives. In a moment of large-scale movements such as #MeToo, Stop Street Harassment, and Hollaback!, this dissertation allows us to historically contextualize this a much longer campaign for women’s autonomy and bodily integrity.

Advisor: Nico Slate

Black Home Education: An Intellectual History

The history of Black home education has been overlooked by historians, not only because the terms schooling and education are generally used interchangeably within the field, but because traditional Anglo-Saxon educational frameworks do not epistemologically recognize Black educational values and ways of learning and knowing. This dissertation asserts that the origins of Black home education are rooted in the Black Intellectual tradition and occur in Black spaces similar to that which bell hooks refer to as homeplace. Black home education has been neither traditional homeschooling nor black homeschooling. I argue that, over the twentieth century, Black home education has manifested as political community educations which strive towards Black liberation and have been inclusive of all age groups from babies to the elders and it has not been simply a pre-kindergarten through 12th grade process. This dissertation bears witness to four episodes of Black home education in the United States spanning the twentieth century.

Advisor: John Soluri

Conserving "Lost Crops": Agrobiodiversity, Food Sovereignty, and the Commodification of Quinoa in Twentieth-Century Peru and Bolivia

Two defining consequences of twentieth-century agriculture have been the immense loss of biodiversity on farms and the centralized control of biodiversity in corporate and government seed banks.
Beginning in the 1930s, Latin American agronomists began to fear that traditional, native crops like quinoa were endangered. More recently, environmental historians of Latin America have documented the social, economic, and political factors that accelerated this biodiversity loss. This dissertation challenges the narrative of precipitous crop diversity loss by showing how biodiversity persisted on Quechua and Aymara in the Peruvian and Bolivian altiplano in the twentieth century. It follows quinoa trom smallholder farms to kitchens, restaurants, and seed banks to understand the local, national, and transnational forces that shaped Andean crop diversity. This study uses records from provincial and national archives, agricultural development projects, cookbooks, and seed bank accession data. I argue that conserving quinoa depended on the state's ability to remake highland agriculture, the market's desire to incorporate pseudocereals into modern diets, and farmers' efforts to maintain food sovereignty.

Advisor: Christopher Phillips

Remembering Blair Mountain: History as a Mode of Memory in a Digital Age

In late August 1921, thousands of United Mine Workers of America battled local and state law enforcement at Blair Mountain, West Virginia, the largest labor uprising on U.S. soil. In the century since, a variety of special interest groups have tried to create a collective memory of the Battle of Blair Mountain and put it to political use. Immediately following the violence, West Virginia's state government and the coal industry crafted an official narrative that silenced memories of militant labor activism in favor of revisionist accounts of harmony between miners and coal operators. In the 1960s, activists revived public consciousness of Blair Mountain in order to encourage a new wave of activism, but they also embedded their own biased conceptions of race, class, and gender within this counter-memory. Thus, the 1960s generation of scholars inadvertently limited those who could use the memory of Blair Mountain to just white, working-class men. The digital folk memory of Blair Mountain that has emerged since relies on an unstable bundle of tropes that represents a fusion of the state's official memory and activists' counter-memory. And despite the efforts of many social justice movements to use this folk memory for their own causes, the memory still belongs to reactionary white men.

Advisor: Benno Weiner

Rethinking Warlordism: Navigating Social Reconstruction, Nationhood, and State-Building Amid Political Fragmentation

If internal political struggles influenced the negative reputation of “warlords” and if the junfa were not all as bad as they were “painted,” what role did “warlords” actually play during this era? This dissertation unveils an untold chapter of Republican China, where “warlords” emerge not as chaotic militarists but as unlikely architects of state-building. By reframing these regional powerholders—often dismissed as obstacles to progress—as key players in social reform, the study delves into their pivotal roles in the anti-footbinding movement, anti-religious campaigns, and rural administrative reforms. This narrative challenges the traditional lens of centralization, revealing how, amid political disunity, these “warlords” laid the foundations for modernization and national identity, working in unexpected parallel with the central government. In doing so, it invites a fresh understanding of China's tumultuous journey toward a unified state and reimagines “warlordism” as a driving force in China’s evolution.

Advisor: Nico Slate

Shaping Blackness in the White City: Rethinking the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition

The 1893 Columbian World's Exposition in Chicago is heralded as the moment of technological, commercial, scientific, and economic success that ushered in the 20th century. Yet, from the Roman Greco architecture meant to connect the United States to an illustrious past, to the ordering of races from the most civilized to the least, the fair distorted history, science, cultures and commerce to create a vision for, and version of, the U.S. that never existed. Foremost in this delusion was the creation of the permanent periphery in the form of Blackness that would serve to control the remainder of society. This dissertation uses the fair to discuss the creation of a permanent Black periphery and the resistance by Black Americans to their exclusion from the fair, society, and the history being presented that their labor made possible. Rather than focusing on industry and empire at the fair, I discuss the fair as pivotal to a social order designed to create the means for the expansion of capitalism using Blackness across the globe as a permanent periphery.