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This dissertation argues that in the United States during the nineteenth century, men and women from different regions, class backgrounds, racial groups, and religious traditions shared an extraordinary faith in the diagnostic and classificatory power of hair. Hair was popularly understood to be capable of quickly and reliably conveying important information about a stranger’s identity or character; it could indicate whether that person was male or female, Christian or heathen, powerful or subordinate, healthy or diseased, black or white, or even courageous, ambitious, or criminally inclined. In some cases, hair was considered more reliable than other indices that have traditionally dominated the study of group and individual identity in modern American history, such as skin color.Hair was also a synecdoche for its owner. It encapsulated an individual when it was growing on the head or on the face, and continued to do so when it was shorn from the body and then stored in a book, album, or a piece of jewelry; exchanged between family and friends; or examined under a microscope. From a nineteenth-century perspective, hair was a part of the body. Its unusual properties relative to the rest of the body—such as its ability to resist decay after separation—made hair particularly significant to nineteenth-century Americans anxious to specify and identify meaning in the physical body.Hair is nearly ubiquitous in the human world, and it has been meaningful in different ways to varied cultures and communities. However, what was distinct about hair in nineteenth-century America was that the messages hair conveyed were seemingly written by the body itself: they were external communications between the public and the bearer—not the internal articulation of the identity the bearer wanted to project, as hair would come to function in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This dissertation proposes that an understanding of hair, and the meanings it conveyed, allowed Americans t

In nineteenth-century cities, men and women, black and white, rich and poor, engaged with the urban food system in ways that extended beyond the primary purpose of consumption and distribution. How and to what extent did food provisioning spaces advance beyond a utilitarian goal to feed urban populations to become sites for imagining, expressing, and achieving social aims? What cultural histories of alimentary spaces can be told during antebellum America's dramatic turn toward urban life? "Just Provisions" seeks to explore answers to those questions by investigating antebellum food provisioning and its politics of identity and space.Urban residents challenged the existing provisioning structure to create a food marketing system they considered more inclusive, fair, and representative--in a word, more just. In so doing, they transformed not only the food markets, but also related food systems and institutions: street vending, eating-house establishments, restaurants, and Northern market procurement practices. In questioning the existing structure, they further inserted themselves into the urban public discourse on the place of blacks, women, and immigrants in the new republic. As they lobbied for legitimate inclusion in public space, residents sought to disrupt the codes and patterns of the traditional marketing system. If food markets regulated social life according to one vision of an ordered society, alternative food spaces offered competing perspectives and different opportunities to envision public life. In considering forms of marketing beyond official markets, "Just Provisions" seeks to create histories of street vending and free produce markets, and to extend scholarship about public food markets and restaurant culture--and the people who frequented those spaces. Simply put, residents looked to markets for not only nutritional, but social needs. To view the antebellum urban food provisioning system from a broader perspective that looks beyond the official mar

Making Place and Nation: Geographic Meaning and the Americanization of Oregon: 1834-1859by MacKenzie Katherine Lee MooreDoctor of Philosophy in HistoryUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor David Henkin, Chair"Making Place and Nation: Geographic Meaning and the Americanization of Oregon: 1834-1859" examines the ways colonists worked to counteract the problem of Oregon's complicated geographic situation in order to naturalize the territory's membership in the nation between the first American missionary settlement and admission as the union's thirty-third state. Driven by their desire for national inclusion, colonists ascribed national meanings to local actions while also adapting national narratives to fit their immediate experience. This study uses two key concepts to spatially reconstruct the colonial experience: mental maps and vernacular geography. Colonists relied on mental mapping to navigate and to organize geographic knowledge, and this cognitive practice became part of the spatially focused community discourse dubbed vernacular geography. Locally produced geographic discourse united under one rubric the twin objectives that defined the conquest of Oregon: to civilize the landscape and eliminate the Indian presence therein, and to concurrently rewrite the map of the United States with Oregon squarely within its borders. Thus, "Making Place and Nation" asserts that the conquest of Oregon is best understood as a recursive process of making both place and nation.The dissertation relies on a wide variety of documentary materials, including personal and official letter correspondence, diaries and travelogues, pioneer reminiscences, petitions to local and federal government entities, newspapers, and official reports to agents of the central government. These sources reveal that colonists read both the physical transformation of Oregon's environment and the amount of independence enjoyed by native groups as indicators of the territory's potential for n

Few slogans occupy a more prominent place in popular mythology about the frontier than the exhortation, "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country." Despite its enduring popularity, surprisingly little scholarly attention has been devoted to probing the constellation of ideas about movement, place, masculinity, and social mobility that is captured in this short phrase. This dissertation explores how, in the decades between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, Americans began to think and write about the possibilities for "growing up" with new cities, towns, and agricultural communities on the frontier. Although politicians, newspaper editors, booster theorists, and popular authors figure prominently in this story, no group did more to construct and promote this masculine, entrepreneurial, and place-centered vision of the frontier than young men from middle-class backgrounds who migrated to new states and territories in the trans-Appalachian West during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In their diaries, letters, travel narratives, and pioneer memoirs, these migrants generated an unprecedented volume of writing about the possibilities for financial, social, and professional mobility in a new country. Their writing not only shaped popular perceptions of frontier opportunity in their own time; it also left an indelible mark on historical memory of westward expansion in nineteenth-century America.This study begins by examining how aspiring merchants, lawyers, farmers, land speculators, and other young men used personal writing to survey the geography of opportunity in the trans-Appalachian West. As they searched for valuable real estate or an advantageous place to settle, many began their reconnaissance by writing letters to peers, relatives, and business associates, requesting personalized intelligence about conditions in particular frontier settlements. Not content to rely on second-hand reportage, some set out on prospecting journeys, traveling great