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Advisor: Lisa Tetrault

Strangers on the Street: Street Harassment and The Gendered Politics of Public Space in Progressive Era Pittsburgh

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: Lisa Tetrault

From Outsiders to Insiders: The Interwar Women's Peace Movement and US Foreign Policy

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: 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: 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’: Quinoa, Agrobiodiversity, and Food Sovereignty in the Altiplano, 1930-1990

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.

Advisor: Christopher Phillips

The Color of Contamination: Artificial Food Dyes in the Twentieth Century United States

Artificial color in food is a political flashpoint today, but it has been a point of contention in the United States for well over a century. It has remained a subject of public concern even as the dominant paradigm for understanding risk in the U.S. food system shifted from adulteration in the first half of the century to processed food in the latter half. This dissertation will argue that Americans’ sentiments on artificial food colorings throughout the twentieth century can be read a measure of their feelings about the environmental world they inhabited and the industrial actors with which they shared it. Spanning from the 1910s to the 1980s, this study will rely on popular science publications, the archives of the federal government, and the records of nonprofit groups. This history of synthetic food dye use in the United States offers insight into how and why Americans’ ideas about risk and safety, as well as what made food industrial or natural, shifted over the course of the twentieth century.

Advisor: John Soluri

Multi-Species Confluences: Cattle in the Transformations of Chihuahua’s Borderlands, 1885-1934

My dissertation focuses on the ways in which centering cattle is essential to understanding Chihuahua’s ecological and political confluences. This concept of confluence has been key to explaining the distinctive social and political interactions that define borderlands, but it must also be extended to the ecological realm.
During the period of my dissertation, cattle lived through shifting management regimes that increasingly industrialized and regulated their lives as part of state, capitalist, and scientific projects. Although cattle do not perceive national borders, they nonetheless encounter and navigate boundaries in their daily lives—whether human-made, such as fences, or natural, such as rivers - that structure their interactions with diverse ecosystems and other animals.

Chihuahua provides an ideal site to study cattle across their political and ecological borderlands. While most of the state is covered in a desert biome because of the shadow effect from the Sierra Madre Occidental, the mountain range itself at higher altitudes provides “sky islands” that supply enough moisture for the pasture of cattle ranches.  However, these altitudes also are home to endemic apex predators such as pumas and jaguars, a known menace to ranchers.

At the same time, Chihuahua’s proximity to the United States put cattle at the center of debates over binational disease control.