America has a rich history of commitment to democratic values and ensuring that our public has a voice in how our communities provide public education. Ensuring public participation is especially true in the rural parts of our nation as they have a strong connection to the schoo…
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This thesis serves as an archaeological perspective of a Nipmuc family and their land at Hassanamisco, combining documentary and archival research with archaeological, environmental, and conservational methods. Hassanamisco was the third Indigenous community in New England to ac…
From the 1891 establishment of the Trustees of Public Reservations, a private statewide landscape preservation organization, to America’s 1941 entry into World War II, a citizen-led effort to safeguard and improve Massachusetts’s woodlands resulted in the establishment of a mult…
Though this infamous period in American history has been examined numerous times, this paper aims to analyze the role in which “soft culture,” in particular dress and clothing, played in the search for witches amongst Salem women in 1692. Of necessity to this analysis is a thoro…
This dissertation contributes to the study of American Christianity by tracing the apocalyptic thought of New England evangelical Calvinism from Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) to Lyman Beecher (1775-1863). Covering the period of the First Great Awakening in the eighteenth century …
This dissertation examines Unitarian and Congregational religious societies in northern New England port cities from 1790–1850 and argues that pew proprietorship created a plutocracy, which resulted in the development of a corporate character for Protestant churches and a priori…
This dissertation explores how people transform “new” and unfamiliar environments through colonization. While adaptationist perspectives typically stress how the environment shapes human behavior and communities, I integrate historical ecology and settlement ecology to examine h…
There are many mechanisms by which landraces evolve in a contemporary agricultural setting; however, the influence of forced human migration on landrace redistribution and evolution has received little attention in comparison to the stochastic effects of drift, mutation, and gen…
In studies of early New England architecture, Southeastern Massachusetts and Plymouth Colony have received significantly less attention than the Massachusetts Bay Colony and region. This study aims to shed some new light on early houses in this region, through a synthetic analys…
By the 1840s the American Whaling industry in the Pacific had reached its zenith with hundreds of ships crewed by thousands of men plying the waters from the Artic to the Antarctic seeking out whales to kill and turn into precious barrels of whale oil. These floating factories o…
This project gives Stephen King and Pet Sematary full consideration through applying a multi-faceted ecocritical approach to a novel so clearly founded on the relationship between the land and its inhabitants. Through my analysis of the environment’s role in Pet Sematary, I will…
Jonathan Edwards Jr. (1745–1801) is often portrayed as a spiritless preacher who drove away his congregation with metaphysical abstractions. Accordingly, this received caricature describes Edwards Jr. as distorting the Edwardsean legacy. This negative caricature of Edwards Jr wa…
In 1901, J.K. Milliken and his uncle Frank Knowles obtained the financial backing to start a textile finishing plant in Massachusetts. Knowles and Milliken settled upon the small town of Dighton, Massachusetts for the location of their finishing operation. In June of that year t…
Genealogy is essentially history through an anthropological lens. However, the online community is flooded with instances of inaccurate information. Often, this information comes from previously published family histories. These older publications frequently have frequently misi…
The widely accepted portrait of antebellum female moral reform, as a middle-class campaign against the sexual double standard and the rise of commercialized sex, is based on research into the movement in urban settings and does not explain its appeal to the vast majority of acti…
Globalization, the process of rendering a culture world-wide, only recently became a buzzword, especially after the September 11, 2001 terrorists attacks. But it is not new; it has a history—particularly among that group often cited as the forebears of the ethic that brought us …
Early nineteenth-century America witnessed a crusade to end all war and establish a peaceful culture. The energy behind the movement came from New England, not from mid-Atlantic Quakers. Made up of military veterans, liberal and conservative Christians, entrepreneurs and merchan…
This study is based on a two-year study of the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), a community of both native-born and immigrant Muslims from many national backgrounds. The thesis investigated the maintenance of cohesion despite the high degrees of variation within the ISB. Methodo…
Apocalyptic millenarian beliefs swayed puritans and separatists, who left England between 1620 and 1642 for settlement in the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies. Derived from Daniel, Canticles, and the Book of Revelation, the biblically-based ideas must be included among a …