Between 1840 and 1898, the United States and Canada reconfigured their geographic and demographic contours. In only the first few decades of this period, the United States added over one million square miles to its territory, gaining tens of thousands of new citizens through these annexations, while African-American men were, at least officially, granted citizenship and the franchise in the wake of the Civil War. In Canada, the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada were united with provinces as far away as British Columbia, and millions of British citizens became members of the new nation of Canada. My project explores the effects of these shifts on American national self-perception. While I analyze events and ideas in both the United States and Canada, the core of my argument is about the United States. Canadian expansion and unification was a continual backdrop to American attempts to dominate the North American continent, serving as both competition for continental domination and as a comparison for new U.S. policies and governmental forms.

Through their acquisition and incorporation of the Far West, the United States and Canada transformed themselves into what I call transcontinental nations. I use this term to emphasize the significance of the acquisition of the Pacific Coast to the development of the nineteenth-century North American nation. A distinctly North American form, the transcontinental nation was created out of the geographic circumstances that led European settlement to begin on the Atlantic Ocean and offered access to the Pacific only by crossing a continent. At the same time, the transcontinental national form was not only geographically determined, but was also fuelled by the nationalistic desire for territorial expansion and international influence that could be gained by settling lands on the Pacific Coast combined with a determination to avoid previous examples of states built over such distances and with such imperialistic goals.

Rather than presenting a conventional comparative study, my dissertation explores changing ideas about U.S. national identity through a focus on the similarities and differences between the development of the United States during the period from 1840 and 1898 and parallel events in other former British settler colonies, particularly Canada. The period between 1848 and 1898 is often seen as a gap in US expansionism, a hiatus between the Manifest Destiny of the early nineteenth century and the formal and informal imperialism of the twentieth. By looking at the parallel processes in the United States and other former British settler colonies, it becomes obvious that during these decades the expansionist energy had not dissipated, but had merely been refocused. The consolidation of transcontinental nations represented a shift in this energy from piecemeal territorial acquisition to concentrated national consolidation. Putting the United States in context with Canadian expansion allows me to avoid the pitfall of treating U.S. expansion as if it were exceptional and puts American territorial growth within the context of its origins in the first decades of British colonialism in North America. It also reflects the substantial parallels between the nineteenth-century transformation of the United States and other former and current settler colonies of the British Empire. Finally, comparing the United States with Canada and other British settler colonies allows me to sidestep an anachronistic consideration of United States expansion in the nineteenth century within the context of its eventual divergence from other nations in the twentieth.

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 markets is to observe that food provisioning was more than simply an efficient means to feed the masses. Food provisioning also touched social justice values. Markets not only provided sustenance, but also the potential for sociability and a respectable path into public space and public discourse--especially for blacks, women, and immigrants. For that reason, members of these groups pushed for changes to the restrictive public markets while simultaneously enacting change in other food provisioning landscapes that promised better opportunity. Significant numbers of antebellum residents longed for better economic chances, greater respectability, more freedom of movement, and a food system that matched their ethical values. They pursued these desires in the market house, but also in the streets, eating houses and restaurants, and alternative market systems that existed in the shadow of the official market houses themselves.

"Just Provisions" proceeds by looking at four different types of food spaces in cities. Its chapters consider broader definitions and alternative propositions to the market-house structure. Adding research about street vending, eating houses, and free produce markets to research about marketing infrastructure can illuminate further contours to the politics of identity and space shaped by food. Likewise, interrogating the definitions of the market as a traditional institution provides a glimpse into another dimension of urban public life, not only about the spaces themselves, but also about relationships and activities that occurred there. The cases explored here show urban residents pushing at the boundaries of the market model, seeking to create a more fair, inclusive, and just provisioning system. They argued that to be truly inclusive, the market model required modifications across multiple dimensions. In the process, blacks, women, immigrants, and members of the lower classes offered a different perspective on what full civic inclusion could look like.

Abstract

Making Place and Nation: Geographic Meaning and the Americanization of Oregon: 1834-1859

by

MacKenzie Katherine Lee Moore

Doctor of Philosophy in History

University of California, Berkeley

Professor 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 national incorporation

The following chapters reinterpret a series of key events in the history of Oregon's colonization. Chapter One traces the role of mental mapping in establishing an American colony. Chapter Two explores colonists' conceptual tools to manage anxiety about sharing territory with independent Indian groups and their destruction in the 1847 Whitman Massacre. Chapter Three scrutinizes the production of local geographic knowledge as a method of wresting spatial control from Indians during the California and Southwest Oregon Gold Rush (1848-1853). Chapter Four analyzes the territorial dimensions of a colonial program of ethnic cleansing toward Indians in the Rogue River War (1855-56). Chapter Five investigates the extinguishment of Indian title and its relationship to the uneven implementation of the Oregon Donation Land Act during the era of removal (1856-1859).

"Just Images: American Policing and Popular Culture, 1840-1920” examines the historical relationship between American policing and popular culture from their contemporaneous antebellum origins through the Progressive era. The dissertation argues that the histories of policing, media, and commercial popular culture have been connected for much longer than most citizens, critics, and scholars have assumed. Placing these histories alongside one another establishes the moments of convergence, interaction, and mutual construction that allow us to reconceive the formation of American policing as a cultural history. “Just Images” offers new insight into how the role of police in American society developed over the 19th and early 20th centuries by first establishing that the historiography of policing is inevitably a part of the historiography of mass culture in the American city, not an adjunct to it. Realigning these otherwise disparate historiographies demonstrates that popular culture changed how Americans thought about civil and political institutions in the same ways it led them to reconsider the practical and psychic dimensions of everyday life. The project is built on an assemblage of fragments, chiefly the print ephemera of popular culture, in order to circumvent the problem of access to institutional police records; “Just Images” argues that institutional histories are always already cultural histories.

This dissertation is organized into four chapters, all of which situate the changing practices and institutional self-perceptions of New York Police Department in the broader context of the history of mass and popular culture in New York City.

The first two chapters contend that modern policing invented itself—its material practices and theoretical foundations—through mass media and popular entertainment. Telling the story of the NYPD’s adoption of criminal identification photography alongside the development of commercial photography reveals that what we now think of a professional practice actually originated with contemporaneous developments in and of mass culture—e.g., the arrival of the cheap daily newspaper, the development of the portrait studio and the museum as sites of instruction for the city dweller, and new guides to etiquette and social surveillance. The ways in which new modes of viewing, spectatorship, and visual communication reshaped American consciousness also made new modes of policing conceptually possible. New understandings of celebrity, notoriety, character, and confidence also shaped ideas about what—and who—constituted criminality. Commercial photography was the source of both the material technologies and conceptual structures of modern policing. The latter two chapters argue that police began to play a direct role in manufacturing the cultural imaginary of policing in the Gilded Age. They drew on the new notions of publicity and celebrity and new modes of entertainment that were part of the transformation of the city into a metropolis. Each chapter also considers how cultural responses to major social and political crises shaped the development of the NYPD.

Chapters One and Two examine the history of the department’s adoption of photography as a tool for criminal identification and show that NYPD practices were directly informed by, and patterned on, the material and social history of photography. Chapter One reconstructs the history of the NYPD’s rogues’ gallery in order to suggest that it owed more to museum culture and portrait photography than to nascent criminology. Chapter Two demonstrates how the introduction of the carte de visite and the family photo album helped transform police photography into a specialized vocational practice. Chapter Three shows how famed NYPD detective Thomas Byrnes created the persona of Inspector Byrnes by drawing on the late 19th century idiom of celebrity and the print culture that manufactured and circulated it. Chapter Four considers how the emergence of the moving image changed Americans’ perceptions of city life and social order, the nature of film’s relationship to the politics of Progressive reform, and its role as a medium through which the police department could assert a new professional identity on the heels of a major corruption scandal.

When police administrators directly participate in the production process, these are acts of intervention and invention. Police can rewrite their popular histories and circulate claims to legitimacy that typically go unchallenged—but the ways in which we privilege the perspective of the police in American society conceals this process. Through their cultural work, police continually reinscribe as epistemic the idea of their importance to civil society, and the sphere of popular culture becomes the staging area for maintaining and updating policing’s usable past. Who the police tell us they are matters a great deal; the image they project conditions how we think about the police, what we expect from them, and what we will tolerate in American society.

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 distances to purchase land or investigate opportunities in the many new towns and villages springing up throughout the nation's interior. During their journeys, prospectors used travel diaries and letters to collect and synthesize geographical intelligence, and to relay their findings to family members or business partners who were implicated in their decisions about relocation or speculation. All of this evaluative writing helped usher in a new conception of the frontier as a landscape of discrete places--cities, towns, and counties--whose relative advantages and future prospects could be assessed and compared with great precision.

In the months or years after they settled down in emerging towns or agricultural districts, young migrants used a variety of novel writing practices to assert their commitment to their adopted homes, and to fashion themselves as community builders. Some composed boosterish letters to family and friends, speculating about their own prospects and the prospects of their chosen abode. Others produced elaborate narratives of their migration experiences, chronicling the meandering westward journeys that led them to their new place of residence. In the late nineteenth century, many of these antebellum migrants also produced pioneer memoirs, a new type of personal narrative that wove together the story of their own financial, social, and professional striving with the history of their towns, counties, and states. Through their letters, migration narratives, and reminiscences, they constructed and popularized a new image of the pioneer as a young man who moved west, found a permanent home, and grew up with the country. As the later chapters of this dissertation will show, this vision of pioneer masculinity exaggerated some aspects of their experiences and obscured many others. Nevertheless, it became a central part of frontier mythology for many generations to come.

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 to feel more confident as they traversed streets, rode trains, and negotiated markets—confident that the hair they saw on strangers’ heads had the power to reliably tell them who was who, and who could be trusted.

This dissertation is organized into five thematic chapters. Chapter one provides a prologue to the dissertation’s nineteenth-century story, tracing how the meaning and communal regulation of hair in English North America changed from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century through an examination of the long-standing debate over whether it was acceptable for men to wear long hair. Chapters two, three, and four examine three corners of American life to demonstrate the breadth of the nineteenth-century system of hair legibility that this dissertation proposes. Chapter two shows how cultural understandings of men’s facial hair turned the Bearded Lady of the late-nineteenth-century freak show into a symbol of contemporary struggles over women’s social and political power. Chapter three considers something more ordinary: the material culture of hair collecting, and how locks of hair preserved in books, letters, jewelry, and museums functioned as synecdochically as the hair still attached to the body. Chapter four explores the research and writing of the nineteenth century’s most famous hair scientist, Peter Arrell Browne, and considers the consequences of his work for contemporary understandings of race. The final chapter, Chapter five, asks how nineteenth-century Americans tested the limits of hair’s legibility and reconciled the tension and unease surrounding its malleability, focusing in particular on false hair, disguise, and criminology. The epilogue suggests how the meaning of hair changed in the twentieth century.

Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates that in the nineteenth century, hair counted as part of the legible body. Hair was important to the people from whose bodies it had grown, but it was equally important to the people around them: it conveyed meaning to strangers about their identity and character, providing a sense of scientifically-approved security in a world that felt increasingly unknown and unstable. Moreover, once it was severed from the body, hair helped to cement relationships across great distances. Hair’s grounding in the biological gave it legitimacy as part of the legible body, yet its plasticity also gave Americans a raw material for self-invention and transformation. The physical properties that made hair different from the rest of the body also meant that it was uniquely situated to become the focal point of characteristic anxieties of nineteenth-century urban and interconnected life: truthfulness, reliability, disguise, and deceit. In this way, to understand hair is to understand the ambitions, hopes, and fears of ordinary nineteenth-century Americans.

This dissertation examines how and why social and moral reformers, philanthropists, social activists, and charitable givers became fixated on human migrations in the pre-Civil War United States. In this period, Americans created and participated in philanthropic organizations, preached to congregations and readerships, and lobbied the public and the government in order to encourage, aid, or curtail the international and internal migrations of European immigrants, enslaved and free Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, and white western settlers. In doing so, reformers promulgated rhetoric and engaged in argument about humanitarian responsibility to people in the process of resettlement. Additionally, they sought to manage migratory flows and intervene into the lives of people on the move in order to craft what they envisioned as a more perfect world.

By placing eighteenth and nineteenth-century discourses about migration in the context of social benevolence and middle-class reform culture, this dissertation demonstrates how a variety of shared concerns about human mobility informed reformers’ ideologies and efforts across social movements and across time. Reformers debating the moral nature of migration worked through several questions: whether migratory flows and mass population transfer would strengthen or imperil American society; whether migration and migrants should be encouraged, discouraged, assisted, or otherwise organized by benevolent men and women; and whether and how individuals’ moral and social characters might be reshaped through the process of geographical relocation and transplantation. In answering these questions, reformers, philanthropists, and activists engaged in significant debates about foreignness and belonging, race, charity and poverty, religion, territorial expansion, and exclusion and inclusion in the American body politic.