Institutional Scholarship :: Browsing by Author "Saler, Bethel"

Browsing by Author "Saler, Bethel"

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“A Female Band Despising Nature’s Law”: Contesting the Subversive Early Legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft
(2013) Bailinson, Emily; Saler, Bethel; Graham, Lisa Jane, 1963-
This thesis aims to recreate the sphere of public discourse surrounding the life of Mary Wollstonecraft and her legacy in order to understand the limitations faced by women in constructing their gendered subjectivity in Britain in the 1790s and how this individual agency could have subversive repercussions. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft counterpoised the dominant construction of womanhood as sentimental domesticity with an unsexed (and simultaneously masculine) form of subjectivity grounded in reasoned virtue. Through both her style and the disembodied nature of writing, Wollstonecraft unsexed herself while admitting the challenges women face in overcoming the dominant sexed model of subjectivity. Upon Wollstonecraft’s early death in 1798, her husband, William Godwin, wrote a memoir of her exemplary life. This memoir defended Wollstonecraft’s legacy against perceived calumny, casting Wollstonecraft in strictly gendered terms. While he admitted she had masculine attributes, he also attempted to silence her critics by depicting her as a properly feminine sentimental mother. Subsequent reviews of Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman constructed their own mini-biographies of Wollstonecraft’s life. Conservative journals attacked Wollstonecraft for her fanciful and licentious Jacobin philosophy and sexual impropriety. They saw Wollstonecraft’s life as a didactic example; critics used the tragedy of Wollstonecraft’s torturous affair with Gilbert Imlay and early death to demonstrate the dangers inherent in overthrowing convention—especially the conventions of sexual propriety. While critics suggested ways of constraining the “wanton philosopher,” supporters attempted to redeem Wollstonecraft as a woman too advanced for her time. By holding Wollstonecraft’s legacy up to the standards of female propriety, her critics sought to contain the subversive implications of her example for other women. Ultimately, Godwin and his reviewers limited Wollstonecraft’s ability to write herself out of her gender. Though Wollstonecraft lost her ability to construct an ungendered image of herself, her prominence gave Wollstonecraft’s legacy the power to deconstruct conventional standards of femininity and foment revolution through her counterexample. Thus, Wollstonecraft’s life became a site for debate about the conventional model of femininity in the 1790s, embodying the threat of revolution.
"A Theater of Perpetual War": Administrative Anxiety and Knowledge Production in Colonial Suriname, 1749-1762
(2014) Jacobs, Alex; Saler, Bethel; Graham, Lisa Jane, 1963-
Fought intermittently between 1749 and 1762, the First Saramaka War was a primal moment in the history of Maroon relations with the Dutch colonial Surinamese state. The war was part of the violent history between Suriname's Maroon communities–-formed by slave refugees in the bush–-and its governmental authorities. During the war, the relationship between colonists, slaves, and Maroons was defined by a condition of fear and contingency. In this thesis, I argue that colonists created and indexed information specific to the condition of the colony as a means of combating both the Maroon threat and its attendant anxieties. For colonists, the impulse to create and disseminate such information intensified over the course of the First Saramaka War and was compounded by a concern that the information they cataloged was either untrue or of unreliable origin. In response, colonists-–both planters and administrators-–deployed literary, diplomatic, and clandestine methods of knowledge production in an attempt to secure their hold on the colony. These methods of knowledge production proved unsuccessful in the conduct of war, though they were also used to reinforce the political and economic foundations of the colonial state. Colonists ultimately suffered defeat in the First Saramaka War and recognized full Saramaka independence in 1762. I argue that their defeat was the result of living in a colony whose conditions proved resistant to European attempts at "knowing": where maps, ordinances, poems, plays, secret codes, and treaties were insufficient means of understanding the threat posed by slaves and Maroons to the stability of colonial Suriname.
"An Acquaintance with that Dear Country: "Emma Willard on American History, Womanhood, and Nationalism
(2021) Denegre, Mathilde; Saler, Bethel; Graham, Lisa Jane, 1963-
Emma Willard published the first two editions of her bestselling textbook History of the United States in 1828 and 1829. Willard had already gained fame as an educational reformer and advocate for female education. She was the headmistress and founder of Troy Female Seminary, one of the earliest secondary schools for women in the United States. It offered an education similar to that received by men at secondary institutions. History of the United States was one of Willard's first attempts to educate the broader public. History education was popular in the 1820s, as Americans became more interested in a national identity following the War of1812. Education and literacy rates for both genders steadily rose throughout the antebellum period. Advocates for female education in the republican and antebellum period argued that women were the moral guardians of the nation and needed knowledge and mental exercise to fulfill this role. Willard was familiar with these arguments, and she advanced them many times herself as she sought support for her school and other endeavors. Education was also important for all citizens because it could protect from corrupting influences. Willard's position as an educated woman granted her the authority to moral pronouncements about United States history. She intended to be a moral guardian on a national scale and shape the next generation of Americans. Willard wrote History so that her readers would grow to love the United States as she did. She knew her readers could be the future political and military leaders of the country. She hoped they would model themselves off of the virtuous men and women she presented in the text. In order to convince her readers of the lovability of the United States, she had to iron out many complexities. Willard attempted to explain and justify the abhorrent treatment of Native Americans by generations of settlers. She blamed the worst atrocities on European monarchies and claimed Native Americans were congenitally incompatible with Anglo-American civilization. Willard considered it the duty of all citizens, including moral guardians like herself, to try and find peaceful solutions for the nation's problems. She proposed creating a Native American nation in the northwest of the continent, where they could form their own society. Willard's arguments rested on the conviction that the existence of the United States was ordained by Providence. She took the smallpox plague which wiped out so many people as proof that God prepared the continent for the establishment of British, and eventually American, settlement. Therefore, Willard was part of a holy plan. She had an obligation to educate the next generation of American leaders and convince them of the virtue of their nation.
“An Alien or a Frenchman or an Irishman:” William Duane, the Federalists and Conflicting Definitions of National Identity in Early American Politics
(2008) Wiencek, Henry; Saler, Bethel
In 1798, William Duane, an American who spent much of his youth abroad in Ireland and England, became editor of the firebrand Republican newspaper the Aurora General Advertiser. Throughout his career at the newspaper's helm, Duane sought to narrow the distinction between revolutions in Europe, notably in France and Ireland, and the American political ideology, framing them as common participants in the international struggle for republicanism. In contrast, his Federalist opponents castigated Duane as highly "foreign," linking him to stereotypes of ignorant, disorderly and violent "aliens" streaming from Europe into the United States. This starkly contrasting language permeated the Aurora and the Federalist press, revealing an ongoing discourse concerning America, international politics, especially in Europe, and the conflicting manner in which republicans and Federalists defined national character.
“Arbitrary, capricious, and without reasonable relation to any purpose:” Pérez v. Sharp, Miscegenation Law, and the Interracial Consciousness of Post-War Los Angeles
(2019) Paez-Coombe, Paloma; Saler, Bethel; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
In October of 1948, a young interracial couple from Los Angeles won the right to marry, and in doing so overturned California’s state miscegenation law. Andrea Pérez, a Mexican American woman, and Sylvester Davis, an African American man, had originally been denied a marriage license because Mexican Americans were legally considered white under California’s complicated legal system of racial classification, and whites were not allowed to intermarry with other races. The opinion on the case stated that the law was unconstitutional because it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and that in any case the definitions of race under the law were too vague to be enforceable. The case made visible the extreme arbitrariness of the systems of racial categorization that were used to uphold everything from school segregation to miscegenation law. But despite the pivotal role of Pérez v. Sharp in changing the way that race was defined in the law, it would be another 19 years before Loving v. Virginia (1967) would overturn miscegenation laws at the national level. The case’s radical departure from the traditional race theory that was still accepted in most of the country reflected the specific brand of interracialism that was developing in post-war Los Angeles. The multiracial landscape of L.A. made it a place where the black and white lines that were drawn around race issues in many other parts of the country became blurred and distorted. This thesis examines how a fundamentally multiracial city built a strategically interracial movement that was reflected in a case that called into question the construction of race in America.
"Authority Freed From Violence": Roberts Vaux's Anti-Slavery and the Creation of the Separate System at Eastern State Penitentiary
(2012) Giansante, Daniel; Saler, Bethel; Hayton, Darin
Between 1786 and 1835, Philadelphia played host to a revolutionary transformation in the methods and intentions of criminal punishment. Beginning with a shift away from sanguinary and public corporal punishments, and culminating in the opening of Eastern State Penitentiary, this transformation was spearheaded by the members of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. These wealthy and influential Philadelphians joined together in 1787 to advocate for penitential punishment; to incorporate the goal of reforming offenders into the state's penal code. In the antebellum period, the Society's advocacy coalesced under the leadership of Roberts Vaux, a Quaker philanthropist and archetype of the era's gentlemen reformers. In the 1820s, Vaux articulated the Separate System of prison discipline, in which inmates would remain in constant solitary confinement while laboring in their cells. Crucially, and in opposition to the contemporary Silent System originating in New York, Vaux insisted upon a complete lack of corporal punishment in the Separate System. This thesis analyzes Vaux's development of the Separate System in conjunction with his contemporary anti-slavery theory to shed greater light on the reasoning behind his aversion to corporal punishment. Although he certainly did find corporal punishment barbaric and inhumane, his opposition to its use in the Separate System stemmed more from its position in the economy of power inherent to Southern slavery. In his observations of slavery, Vaux saw how bodily coercion, especially when used to extract labor from unwilling subjects, failed to access man's most productive motivations and engendered feelings of anger and resentment. By examining the effect of Vaux's anti-slavery on the creation of the Separate System, we can better understand both how he hoped it would function and the kind of reformation he hoped it would achieve.
Balancing Virtue and Vice: Dueling Representations of the Proprietress in the London Coffeehouse
(2018) Fortier, Julia; Graham, Lisa Jane, 1963-; Saler, Bethel
Regarded as a setting for civilized debates and gentility, the coffeehouse in eighteenth-century London distinguished itself as the epicenter of political dissent, intellectual discourse, and the circulation of news. Contemporary prints and images of the coffeehouse challenge this depiction and present it as a boisterous space of debauchery, altercation, and prostitution. The emergence of the coffeehouse coincided with a demographic and commercial explosion at the turn of the eighteenth century. A rise in crime, a preference for celibacy, and an increase in the visibility of prostitution incited moral concern. To combat this perceived moral crisis, campaigns for moral reform such as the Society for the Reformation of Manners formed to expunge public vice from the streets. As a result, immorality retreated into private venues, such as the coffeehouse. As the symbolic figurehead for the London coffeehouse, the female proprietress was linked to the moral ills that pervaded her business. The anxiety concerning this debauchery converged on the coffeehouse’s female owner, revealing the distrust of single, working women. Thus, the association between the coffeehouse and the self-sufficient, unmarried business-woman crystallized the apprehensions that accompanied London’s transition to a commercial society and the demise of traditional structures of urban life like family, household, and work.
Beyond the Line of Redemption: The Philadelphia Waterfront in Urban Life, 1790-1820
(2002) Boyd, Caroline Stratton; Saler, Bethel
Blackface Minstrelsy and the Theater of Empire, 1838-1860
(2019) Johnson, Miranda; Saler, Bethel; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
In the early 1830s, blackface minstrelsy burst onto the American entertainment landscape and remained a dominant form of popular culture for the rest of the century. Unsurprisingly then, as the first United States naval voyages sailed into the Pacific Ocean, beginning with the United States Exploring Expedition in 1838, amateur minstrels were often present among the crews. They performed not only for their fellow sailors but also for the people they encountered abroad. This thesis explores the various roles blackface minstrelsy played in the first wave of US maritime imperialism in the Pacific, from the 1830s to the 1850s. It situates blackface minstrelsy within a landscape of other performances of the theatricality of early American imperial ventures in the Pacific, such as performatively brutal acts of violence, military pomp, and diplomatic ceremony in order to examine the ways in which minstrelsy both shaped and reflected how American racial norms impacted the United States’ early imperial ambitions in the Pacific. Through examinations of the United States Exploring Expedition (1838-1842) and the Perry mission to Japan (183-1856), this paper investigates how blackface minstrelsy was deployed in different contexts, and how these differences reflected developments in imperial strategy over the course of the mid-nineteenth century. The U.S. Ex. Ex. performances were not part of any cohesive strategy, but a single element of many, often contradictory, performances of American presence and power. At both Tahiti and Fiji, blackface was performed for a combined audience of Americans and indigenous people. Blackface minstrelsy was initiated by everyday sailors for entertainment value and as an extension or presentation of American culture. Commodore Matthew C. Perry, meanwhile, incorporated blackface minstrelsy as part of a strategy of pageantry in Japan which specifically emphasized representations of blackness as a uniquely American diplomatic currency.
"Brought Up Among Their Own People": Mixed Race Families and Custody in the Post-Civil Rights Era
(2020) Garbarini, Brooke; Saler, Bethel; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
Although the United States' legal system has always contended with families which crossed racial boundaries, the legalization of interracial marriage in 1967 and the accompanying civil rights era significantly altered the legal and social status of these families. In the era that followed, family courts across the country struggled to account for the racial composition of these families when they became involved in custody disputes. The mid- to late-1970s and the early-1980s provide a number of informative court cases which dealt with questions about mixed race families in custody disputes. In 1984, one case even rose to the level of the United States Supreme Court. These cases are largely notable for their diversity and inconsistency, so it is difficult to make definitive statements about what these cases demonstrate about race in this period. That said, the cases do reveal a debate about how to evaluate the harms of racial discrimination when determining a child's best interests. While some courts deemed the harms of racial discrimination to be important in deciding a child's living situation, others suggested that ignoring the issue of race would result in better outcomes for both society and for children themselves. Using evolving doctrines of social science and changing terminology, courts did their best to offer definitive legal standards on the use of race in custody cases but, in the end, often left the questions they confronted unanswered.
Burning Down the House: The Destruction of Pennsylvania Hall, the Construction of Identity, And the Crisis of Abolition in Antebellum Philadelphia
(2012) Hooper, Rosalie; Saler, Bethel
In 1838, Pennsylvania Hall was constructed on the corner of Sixth Street and Race Street in Philadelphia. The managers of Pennsylvania Hall, the Pennsylvania Hall Association, intended for the building to serve as a testament to "the principles of Pennsylvania: 'Virtue, Liberty, and Independence.' They believed that Pennsylvania Hall would facilitate free discussion of slavery and other issues "not of an immoral character." Pennsylvania Hall opened to the public on May 14, 1838 with lyceums, abolitionists, and temperance groups scheduled to use the Hall as a forum for dialogue throughout the week. Three days later, a mob burned Pennsylvania Hall to the ground. The destruction of Pennsylvania Hall decisively changed how antebellum Philadelphians thought about slavery and abolition. Philadelphians used retellings of the events of Pennsylvania Hall's destruction to create and perform their own identities, incorporating the notion of slavery as an intrinsic part of their sense of self. Examining how members of the mob that destroyed Pennsylvania Hall, the Pennsylvania Hall Association, the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, and officers of Philadelphia's municipal government used Pennsylvania Hall's story to advance their interests forms the basis of this project. Each group refracted Pennsylvania Hall's story through a lens of their own interests and biases, thus creating many different interpretations of the singular events of the Hall's destruction and establishing their own understandings of the contentious and unstable categories of race, class, gender, and citizenship.. The wide variety of appropriations made of the events of the Hall's destruction reveals the complex and numerous attitudes towards slavery that coexisted in the city. Philadelphians who would become leading decision makers on both the local and national level during the Civil War grew up in Philadelphia under the shadow of the ruins of Pennsylvania Hall. The discourses about Pennsylvania Hall that filled Philadelphia after its destruction were a testimony to the inflammatory nature of questions about who should have a voice in American society and what freedom meant in the Early Republic. The undeniable physical presence of the Hall's ruins extended the building's impact far beyond its four day existence. Pennsylvania Hall's ruins lingered in a central part of the city for at least two years after a mob attacked the building, an untouched reminder of the strong reactions provoked by abolition and slavery in Philadelphia, the Southernmost Northern city in the United States.
“But I am not ashamed of any act I have ever done:” the 1880 Apsáalooke (Crow) Delegation to Washington, D.C.
(2018) Cohen, Rosemary Ryden; Saler, Bethel; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
In April of 1880, six chiefs and headmen of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Indians traveled in a delegation to Washington, DC to meet with federal officials. In the city, they discussed a proposed land cession that would greatly diminish the Crows’ territory in order to clear land along the Yellowstone River for the Northern Pacific Railroad. The Crow leaders vehemently refused to sell their land and were held as political hostages in the national capital until they finally signed a “compromise” treaty that would wrest roughly one-third of their Western lands as well as transition the Crows from nomadic hunters to sedentary farmers through mandated family land allotments. While in Washington, the delegates occupied a unique positionality in which they were treated at once as honored diplomats and political hostages. They attended high society receptions, toured Mount Vernon, and “negotiated” the future of their people with the federal government. This thesis narrates the nuances of the Crow delegation’s journey to Washington in 1880 with the intention of complicating the historiographic binary of “assimilative” and “resistant” responses to settler colonialism from indigenous groups in the late nineteenth century.
Capitalizing on Socialism: The Berlin Wall and American Victory Culture
(2018) Albertson, Julia; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-; Saler, Bethel
When the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, Berliners and foreigners alike seized the opportunity to smash, chop, and haul away the barrier that had symbolized the global division of the Cold War for nearly three decades. Through the deliberate and powerful rhetoric of his conservative supporters, the historic destruction was immediately credited to American President Ronald Reagan, and the wall was promptly redefined as a kind of trophy for the broader American victory in the Cold War. Separated from its formerly unified structure, the wall gradually became a more flexible commemorative icon, allowing each segment’s owner to project their personal interpretation of the Cold War’s conclusion onto their specific piece. Over the course of the next decade, these segments emerged across the country to serve as trophies to a seemingly infinite series of secondary victories. From mass suburban sprawl and individual political success to academic prestige and economic freedom, this thesis outlines the evolution of the acquisition of Berlin Wall segments in the United States throughout the 1990s in an effort to illuminate the shifting interpretations of what it meant to win the Cold War.
Chicago 1968, The Riots and the Conspiracy Trial: A Study in Historiography
(2004) Moston, Rachel Kane; Saler, Bethel
Chimborazo Hospital: The Confederate Battle Against Morbidity and Mortality on the Hospital Front
(2006) Mullenhard, Nina; Saler, Bethel; Lapsansky-Werner, Emma
Coeducation and its Controversial Roots at Haverford College: Gender Politics in Quaker Pedagogy
(2005) Ansell, Sara; Saler, Bethel
Collages of Redefinition and Resistance: Scrapbooks, Memorial, and American Society during World War I
(2016) Gundy, Thomas; Saler, Bethel
The entry of the United States into World War I signaled a new internationalism for the American state. While the idealism of the Wilsonian era was not uniform throughout American society, the vision for which he advocated was influential, especially because of Wilson’s direct appeals to the American public. Meanwhile, the fighting of the war in faraway Europe was destroying a generation of men. Many Americans, including influential political and military figures, thought that the war would be an opportunity for heroic soldiers to fight a noble, glorious crusade, a perception that had long since given way to war-weariness and cynicism in Europe, but the American Expeditionary Force soon confronted the harsh realities of modern war on the western front. This thesis is concerned with the memorialization of the war in the United States within the scope of both American perceptions of the war and its brutal physicality on the front. It analyzes a series of World War I scrapbooks created by Americans with different relationships to the war: soldier, Red Cross worker, widow, town archivist. Each of these scrapbooks functioned as personal war memorials that commemorated certain aspects of the war, each supporting, challenging, and modifying social understandings of what it meant to be an American during World War I. This thesis argues that these scrapbooks constituted an act of resistance against the bodily anonymity the war wrought and represented a way in which Americans made sense of their place in both the United States and the world as the United States changed during the World War I period.
Constructing History: The Tet Offensive and American Memory
(2004) Lavine, Nathalie; Jefferson, Paul; Saler, Bethel
Convicts, Trusties and Men: Expressions of Inmate Agency at the New Eastern State Penitentiary at Graterford, 1923-1935
(2014) Brown, Abigail; Saler, Bethel; Smith, Paul J., 1947-
This thesis examines the ways in which the inmate "voice" was represented, amplified, or controlled by prison officials, penal reformers and the press in eastern Pennsylvania from the early 1920s through the mid-1930s. In August 1934, 200 inmates rioted at the "New Eastern State Penitentiary" at Graterford, Pennsylvania, demanding time off their sentences for good behavior and better food. In this thesis I explore this riot through many of the voices involved in prison reform in eastern Pennsylvania as documented in newspapers, administrative records, and government reports. I consider this riot as a conscious, directed act of resistance that--while not tactically premeditated--was a means to a specific end sought by the rioters rather than a spontaneous outbreak as an inevitable consequence of poor social and environmental conditions of imprisonment. I analyze portrayals of and projections on inmates in these sources and construct a narrative of various representations of inmate agency and voice. Analyzing the rich array of sources discussing and responding to prisoner demonstrations and penal reform reveals the complexities of the perceptual and reactive dynamics between various officials and members of the incarcerated population.
Crosshair Dreams: Visions of American Character in Somalia, 1992-1993
(2020) Breault, Harry; Saler, Bethel; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
In December 1992, the United States invaded Somalia in response to catastrophic famine and violence. Yet, America's humanitarian mission there, Operation Restore Hope, has been remembered far more for how it ended—with the death of eighteen American soldiers in October 1993—than for how it began. A mission that ended in destruction was born in the grand rhetoric of the New World Order. The narrative of the mission was profoundly humanitarian. Today, however, it has been reduced to the war and death captured in the 2001 film Black Hawk Down. Neither narrative is adequate for telling the story of America's intervention in Somalia. The mission was neither manna from heaven nor fire from hell; it was far more complicated and nuanced than either manichaean binaries and social scientific structures could ever capture. The story of the intervention is the story of the American soldiers who carried it out. Yet, in order to understand them, we must reach into the social forces that gave meaning to their lives. This thesis draws on new archival material from these soldiers' lives to accomplish this. In their personal writings, we witness U.S. troops in Somalia forging complex relationships with humanitarian ideology. Bringing humanitarianism into a war zone forced U.S. troops to traverse complex emotional territory. In their attempts to navigate the national moral imperatives of the intervention in Somalia, soldiers brought both honor and disgrace to their country. The mission in Somalia also invoked motifs drawn from throughout American life. At the time of the invasion, only one devastating conflict—the Cold War—had recently ended. The assault on the nation's urban black communities continued, unabated. Indeed, only months before the intervention began, U.S. troops had deployed into the racial battlegrounds of the home front, responding to the Los Angeles riots and to Hurricane Andrew in South Florida. In Somalia, these two conflicts—humanitarian intervention and domestic war—intertwined in troops' minds, exporting American understandings of race, policing, and authority to distant shores. The manifold complexities and contradictions of the intervention crystallized around a court martial case in the spring of 1993. After two Somali boys were shot on the streets of Mogadishu by a Marine named Harry Conde, lawyers, journalists, and fellow Marines met in court to decide questions that went far beyond guilt and innocence. America itself was exposed in Somalia, bunkered in the breach with her guardians. The largest of questions were on the table. What, and why, was America? Who were Americans? And, most importantly, how should both enter the world stage in the post-Cold War era? Throughout the intervention, the nation's soldiers offered an array of answers to this last, crucial question. In Somalia, soldiers tried tapping emotional wells of hate and love in their attempts to process humanitarianism. When confronted with complex social dynamics and a mission to provide stability to the Somali people, they rallied around the banner of authority, modeling themselves after domestic police. And, in the legal domain of the court martial, they adjudicated American morality for the mission, even as they marginalized Somali victims in the process. In word and deed, American soldiers sought ways to understand themselves and the world around them in Somalia. In doing so, they touched profoundly on the moral questions that occupied the nation. During the intervention in Somalia, soldiers did nothing less than test visions of American character for the post-Cold War world.

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