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Advisor: Scott Sandage and Edda Fields-Black

Private Wrongs: A Hidden History of the American Civil War's First Black 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: John Soluri

Downstream from the Locks: The Politics of Water and Wastewater Infrastructures in Panama City’s Borderlands, 1890- 1953

This dissertation argues that since the mid-19th century, the transformation of Panama City and Colon, Panama’s most strategic cities at the termini of the Canal,  into cities that fit within a model of sanitation and governmentality depended on the control of the water supply and the ways water flowed in and out of the urban sphere. Whereas previously the regional hydrography had limited the city’s prospects and constrained global and local infrastructure projects, by the early twentieth century, the arrival of US technology and capital began to intervene at multiple levels in the remaking of the fluvial environment for the benefit of their canalization project. The remaking of the relationship between the city and its metropolitan environment was crucial in the growth changes that affected these cities, especially their sanitary infrastructure, demography, and municipal control.

The development of a networked water supply system, as integral part of the construction of the navigational complex of the Canal, altered longstanding relations between humans and waterways in Panama´s historic interoceanic corridor. This dissertation aims to demonstrates the ways that public authorities, engineers, firefighters, ordinary residents, and the Canal Zone borderlands contributed to the making of urban Panama´s waterscape through the mid-twentieth century. Piped supply and distribution networks, sewer systems, treatment facilities, artificial reservoirs and other infrastructural elements came to define the Canal´s sprawling waterscape and shape its borderlands character. These efforts were also shaped by a conjuncture in which Panamanians had developed a habitus of carrying out sanitation and other civilizing urban projects, negotiating partisan matters at the municipal scale and with other transnational companies at a more national scale. The waterscapes that emerged in central Panama could dominate water flows in the region but still remained vulnerable to drought, flooding, and waterborne pollution. This dissertation contributes to understandings of Panamanian urban history and environmental histories of Latin America by highlighting the expansion of water and related infrastructure as constitutive of a distinct urban environment, emerging across the Americas during the same period. Panama City, Colon, and the urbanization of the greater Canal Zone serve as a case study for thinking about the roots of contemporary water crises in cities and giant infrastructure works built or developed during the last century.  

Advisor: Lisa Tetrault

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