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The aim of this thesis is to explore the relationship between architecture and history in Virginia from 1607 to the eve of the American Revolution to create a complete historical narrative. The interdependency of history and architecture creates culturally important pieces and projects the colonist's need to connect to the

The aim of this thesis is to explore the relationship between architecture and history in Virginia from 1607 to the eve of the American Revolution to create a complete historical narrative. The interdependency of history and architecture creates culturally important pieces and projects the colonist's need to connect to the past as well as their innovations in their own cultural exploration. The thesis examines the living conditions of the colonists that formed Jamestown, and describes the architectural achievements and the historical events that were taking place at the time. After Jamestown, the paper moves on to the innovations of early Virginian architecture from Colonial architecture to Georgian architecture found in Williamsburg. Conclusively, the thesis presents a historical narrative on how architecture displays a collection of ideals from the Virginian colonists at the time. The external display of architecture parallels the events as well as the economic conditions of Virginia, creating a social dialogue between the gentry and the common class in the colony of Virginia.
ContributorsChang, Hosu (Author) / Gray, Susan (Thesis director) / O'Donnell, Catherine (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor)
Created2015-05
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This study is a cultural history of danger, disaster, and steam-powered transportation in nineteenth-century America. The application of steam power to transportation, a globally transformative innovation, had particular influence in the early United States. A vast American continent with difficult terrain and poor infrastructure posed significant challenges, both to individual

This study is a cultural history of danger, disaster, and steam-powered transportation in nineteenth-century America. The application of steam power to transportation, a globally transformative innovation, had particular influence in the early United States. A vast American continent with difficult terrain and poor infrastructure posed significant challenges, both to individual mobility and to a nation eager to build an integrated economy, a unified culture, and a functional republican government. Steamboats and locomotives offered an apparent solution, their speed and power seemingly shrinking distances between places and expanding mobility and access across space, a process contemporaries and scholars have described as a sort of space-time compression. However, these machines that overcame space also blew up, caught fire, wrecked, collided, derailed, and broke down, killing tens, and often hundreds, of Americans at a time. This dissertation analyzes the ways Americans encountered, interpreted, and adapted to these new dangers, all the while making the technology that created them an ever more essential aspect of their lives. I argue that Americans’ responses to disasters, filtered through the transportation and communication networks created by steam power, constituted a deep, shared reflection about the nature of expanded mobility in a fast-evolving modern America. Though few suffered disaster directly, Americans collectively framed the danger of steam as both a profound national problem and an evocative symbol of modernity. Through public conversations mediated by print, Americans identified susceptibility to danger as inherent to high-speed travel, and, alongside practical safety measures, developed distinctly modern cultural adaptations to understand and manage that danger. By century's end, Americans had cultivated a modern mentality on mobility, technology, and danger: though most Americans never experienced disaster they were intimately aware of it, and though familiar with catastrophe they understood it as unlikely and accepted it as a feature of their modern technological lives.
ContributorsKuenker, Paul (Author) / Gray, Susan (Thesis advisor) / Thompson, Victoria (Committee member) / O'Donnell, Catherine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016