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- All Subjects: American History
- Creators: Fessenden, Tracy
Description
Although one finds much scholarship on nineteenth-century music in America, one finds relatively little about music in the post-Civil-War frontier west. Generalities concerning small frontier towns of regional importance remain to be discovered. This paper aims to contribute to scholarship by chronicling musical life in the early years of two such towns in northern Arizona territory: Prescott and Flagstaff. Prescott, adjacent to Fort Whipple, was founded in 1864 to serve as capital of the new territory. Primarily home to soldiers and miners, the town was subject to many challenges of frontier life. Flagstaff, ninety miles to the north-northwest, was founded about two decades later in 1883 during the building of the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad, which connected the town to Albuquerque, New Mexico in the east and southern California in the west. Although the particular resources of each town provided many different musical opportunities, extant newspaper articles from Prescott's Arizona Miner and Flagstaff's Arizona Champion describe communities in which musical concerts, dances and theatrical performances provided entertainment and socializing for its citizens. Furthermore, music was an important part of developing institutions such as the church, schools, and fraternal lodges, and the newspapers of both towns advertised musical instruments and sheet music. Both towns were home to amateur musicians, and both offered the occasional opportunity to learn to dance or play an instrument. Although territorial Arizona was sometimes harsh and resources were limited, music was valued in these communities and was a consistent presence in frontier life.
ContributorsJohnson, Amber V (Author) / Oldani, Robert W. (Thesis advisor) / Holbrook, Amy (Committee member) / Saucier, Catherine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Though some scholars have written about place and history, few have pursued the use of place theory in length in relation to the connections between race, religion, and national identity. Using the writings in the United States and Louisiana in the years surrounding the Louisiana Purchase, I explore place-making and othering processes. U.S. leaders influenced by the Second Great Awakening viewed New Orleans as un-American in its religion and seemingly ambiguous race relations. New Orleanian Catholics viewed the U.S. as an aggressively Protestant place that threatened the stability of the Catholic Church in the Louisiana Territory. Both Americans and New Orleanians constructed the place identities of the other in relation to events in Europe and the Caribbean, demonstrating that places are constructed in relation to one another. In order to elucidate these dynamics, I draw on place theory, literary analysis, and historical anthropology in analyzing the letters of W.C.C. Claiborne, the first U.S. governor of the Louisiana Territory, in conjunction with sermons of prominent Protestant ministers Samuel Hopkins and Jedidiah Morse, a letter written by Ursuline nun Sister Marie Therese de St. Xavior Farjon to Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington Cable's Reconstruction era novel The Grandissimes. All of these parties used the notion of place to create social fact that was bound up with debates about race and anti-Catholic sentiments. Furthermore, their treatments of place demonstrate concerns for creating, or resisting absorption by, a New Republic that was white and Protestant. Place theory proves useful in clarifying how Americans and New Orleanians viewed the Louisiana Purchase as well as the legacy of those ideas. It demonstrates the ways in which the U.S. defined itself in contradistinction to religious others. Limitations arise, however, depending on the types of sources historians use. While official government letters reveal much when put into the context of the trends in American religion at the turn of the nineteenth century, they are not as clearly illuminating as journals and novels. In these genres, authors provide richer detail from which historians can try to reconstruct senses of place.
ContributorsBilinsky, Stephanie (Author) / Fessenden, Tracy (Thesis advisor) / Moore, Moses (Committee member) / Feldhaus, Anne (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
My dissertation project, Mormons at the World's Fair: A Study of Religious and Cultural Agency and Transformation looks at a pivotal period of transition within the American religious and political national culture (1880-1907). Using Mormonism as an important focal point of national controversy and cultural change, this dissertation looks at the interconnections between Mormon transitions and the larger national transformations then under way in what historians call the "progressive" era. Prominent scholars have recognized the 1893 World's Fair as an important moment that helped initiate the "dawning" of religious pluralism in America. This national response to American religious diversity, however, is limited to a nineteenth-century historiographical framework, which made real religious pluralism in the next century more difficult. Bringing together into one narrative the story of the anti-polygamy crusades of the 1880s, the ambivalent presence (and non presence) of Mormonism at the World's Fair of 1893, and the drawn-out US Senate Hearings and ultimate victory of Mormon apostle and Senator Reed Smoot in 1907, this dissertation offers new insights into the meaning and limitations of American religious liberty, the dynamics of minority agency, as well as a deeper understanding of America's developing national identity.
ContributorsSmith, Konden Rich (Author) / Moore, Moses N (Thesis advisor) / Cady, Linell (Committee member) / Fessenden, Tracy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Ambivalent Blood examines the unsettled status of religious language in the semiotic construction of HIV/AIDS in America. Since public discourse about HIV/AIDS began in 1981, a variety of religious grammars have been formulated, often at cross-purposes, to assign meaning to the epidemic. The disease's complex interaction with religion has been used to prophesize looming apocalypses, both religious and national, demand greater moral solicitude among the citizenry, forge political advantage within America's partisan political landscape, mobilize empathy and compassion for those stricken by the disease, and construct existential meaning for those who have already been consigned to physical and social death. Several studies fruitfully have explored specific registers of religious discourse and the AIDS epidemic, particularly in regard to processes of social stigmatization and combating its very effects. However, assumptions about the secular aims of scientific inquiry as well as the presumably secular trajectory of American national culture have dampened a more robust consideration of religion within the history of HIV/AIDS. In most synoptic histories of AIDS, religion is constructed as either a wincing footnote to the Religious Right or as an occasional and bland example of salubrious Christian charity posed against the backdrop of disease and death. Ambivalent Blood seeks to extend such analysis beyond a digestible footnote by disinterring the often polysemous and ambivalent interaction of HIV/AIDS and religious discourses within American culture. Though not a historiographic work, the current project illuminates the complicated ways in which religious and HIV/AIDS discourses coalesced around the very definition of America itself. Like the Cold War that preceded and the Global War on Terror that followed, the AIDS crisis precipitated significant and contested recourse to the religious imaginary in the effort to forge conceptions of Americanness and citizen belonging.
ContributorsCleworth, Brandon (Author) / Fessenden, Tracy (Thesis advisor) / Cady, Linell (Committee member) / Martinez, Jacqueline (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This study examines how a populist religious leader, Alexander Campbell, altered the economic value system of religious material production in the early United States and, subsequently, the long-term value structure of religious economic systems generally. As religious publishing societies in the early nineteenth century were pioneering the not-for-profit corporation and as many popular itinerants manufactured religious spectacles around the country, Campbell combined the promotional methods of revivalism and the business practices of religious printers, with a conspicuously pugilistic tone to simultaneously build religious and business empires. He was a religious entrepreneur who capitalized on the opportunities of American revivalism for personal and religious gain. His opponents attacked his theology and his wealth as signs of his obvious error but few were prepared for the vigor of his answer. He invited conflict and challenged prominent opponents to grow his celebrity and extend his brand into new markets. He argued that his labor as a printer was deserving of compensation and that, unlike his “venal” clerical opponents, he offered his services as a preacher for free. As Americans in the early national period increasingly felt obligated to find the “right kind of Christianity,” Campbell packaged and sold a compelling product. In the decades that followed his first debate in 1820, he built a religious following that by 1850 numbered well over 100,000 followers. This dissertation considers the importance of marketing, promotion, investment capital, distribution networks, property law, print culture, and ideology, to the success of a given religious prescription in the nineteenth century American marketplace of religion. Campbell’s success reveals important social, political, and economic structures in the nineteenth century trans-Appalachian west. It also illuminates a form of religious entrepreneurialism that continues to be important to American Christianity.
ContributorsDupey, James (Author) / O'Donnell, Catherine (Thesis advisor) / Critchlow, Donald (Committee member) / Fessenden, Tracy (Committee member) / Schermerhorn, Calvin J (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018