Early Americans defined themselves, and the nation, through their relations with the world. This dissertation explores a crucial aspect of these relations, examining how global commerce, and Americans' ideas about global commerce, produced theories and practices of power. It approaches…

Over the course of the twentieth century, how were real estate developers and architects involved in transforming their own professional practices and the built form of American cities? My dissertation uses historical, architectural, and urban analysis to show how real…

During the twentieth century, tobacco farmers in rural North Carolina quietly changed the relationship between the government and citizen in America . Flue-cured tobacco growers produced not only the finest cigarette leaf, but also new systems of marketing, regulating, and…

Michel Foucault, Thomas Mann, and more recently, Sven-Olov Wallenstein have argued that the modern European hospital of the early twentieth century acted as a research laboratory for a new way of governing human populations. This dissertation studies a subsequent phase…