'A rigid government over ourselves': Transformations in ethnic, gender, and race consciousness on the northern borderlands, Michigan, 1805-1865.

Abstract

This work focuses on the comparative emergence of ethnicity among Michigan residents from Michigan's establishment as a distinct territory in 1805 through the Civil War. It employs a multidisciplinary approach that incorporates the insights of historians, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, and literary historians to understand how the Yankee-Yorkers, Native Americans, mixed-race Metis, African Americans, and Irish and German immigrants who inhabited early Michigan created notions of ethnicity and used those notions to advance their social and political goals. This dissertation answers the following questions: How does ethnicized, gendered, and racialized identity emerge and change in a region experiencing rapid political, social, and cultural transformations? How did the influx of Yankee-Yorkers, a relatively homogeneous group of newcomers intent on imposing their hegemony, alter the limits of such identities? The work has broad implications for the study of the early national period in that the construction of an individual's ethnic self-identity--seen through the prism of social, religious, economic, and political cleavages--served as the touchstone via which women and men throughout the US strove to comprehend their social roles. This is only one of many ways in which issues important in the Old Northwest overlap with broader issues transforming the early US. The work also engages the historiographies of republicanism, Jacksonianism, the new Western history, Native American Studies, African-American Studies, gender studies, immigration, urbanization, and the emerging field that examines the cultural construction of race and ethnicity.