Browsing by Author "Metcalf, Alida"

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    Building the Body: Gendered Space and Urbanization in Rio de Janeiro and New York City, 1890-1930
    (2017-10-20) Moehnke, Amanda Catherine; Metcalf, Alida
    In a comparative analysis of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Rio de Janeiro and New York City, this dissertation reveals how gendered space operated as a powerful structuring tool for the cities and for the bodies of inhabitants. As the physical geography of Rio and New York underwent significant growth and development from industrialization, immigration, and surging nationalism, it destabilized existing spatial divisions, and thus an important mechanism of social control. Consequently, urban development efforts sought ways to modernize the cities' appearance while maintaining hierarchies of sex, race, and class. By focusing on New York City and Rio de Janeiro- this dissertation argues that the gendering of space appealed to ideas of a biological, natural system in a time of rapid change and flux. Yet, the individual ways in which each city structured and enforced gendered space reveals the particular social values and moral codes inherent in these purportedly natural systems. This work also considers the spatial dimensions of body ideals for men and women, and it contextualizes the political, social, and symbolic implications of the movement and display of these bodies within city space, elucidating transnational commonalities and local differences.
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    Lowering Mortality: A Spatial History of Segregation, Environments, and Mortality Transitions in New Orleans, 1880–1915
    (2018-08-31) Kennedy, Wright; Metcalf, Alida
    Between 1880 and 1915, three forces changed New Orleans. City engineers drained the interior of the city, opening new land for settlement. Public health officials gained powerful tools and knowledge to fight and prevent infectious diseases. And white residents developed and increasingly enforced social, economic, and residential segregation by race. The mortality differentials show that the color line segregated health improvements as well. In 1915, black infants died at a rate 102 percent higher than white infants, and black adults died at a rate 185 percent higher than white adults. The mortality rate for black adults, moreover, increased by 25 percent, while the rate for white adults decreased by 42 percent. This dissertation uses new methods in spatial history to investigate the causes of the black and white mortality differentials in New Orleans during the Gilded Age (1880-1915). This study asks two basic questions: How did the New Orleans mortality terrain differ spatially and temporally for the black and white residents of the city? And what caused the differences in mortality terrains between the black and white populations? To answer these questions, this dissertation developed a novel analytical framework based on elevation and individual-level geospatial datasets. This framework, coupled with the transdisciplinary methods of spatial analysis, reveals the spatiality of the mortality transitions and the effects of uneven transitions. This approach is only recently possible due to advances in computing technology, in particular the development of geographic information systems (GIS). The results of this analysis uncover the process of the mortality transitions by race, the evolution of the urban disease terrain, and the consequences of these patterns. This study finds divergences in white and black mortality rates over the course of the mortality transition. Black infants and adults died at increasingly disparate rates from white infants and adults. High population density and flooding hazards in lower elevations directly caused these disparities in the black mortality rates. White efforts at oppression and segregation pushed black residents into areas of higher disease burdens, both due to high population density and increased risks of flooding. As such, this dissertation argues that at the turn of the twentieth century, white residents not only implemented a racially-based system (Jim Crow) of social and economic oppression, but they created a deeply embedded system of oppression at the intersection of disease, environment, and landscape. This system of environmental oppression has sustained social and economic oppression along the color line in New Orleans, even as community, local, and national reformers have worked to dismantle the overt structures of Jim Crow.
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    A Malungo Community within the Brazilian Internal Slave Trade, 1850–1888
    (2019-10-29) Oliveira, Joice Fernanda de Souza; Metcalf, Alida; Slenes, Robert W.; Duno-Gottberg, Luis
    This dissertation focuses on the uneven battle between slave traders and bondspeople in the Brazilian internal slave trade of the second half of the nineteenth century. It analyzes the commercial, financial and logistic strategies of merchants who, in breaking the family and social ties previously formed by bondspeople, attempted to shackle them even more firmly in enslavement. In turn, however, the men and women traded contested their commodification and created new alliances and solidarity networks sometimes capable of smashing the merchants’ plans. To follow this antagonistic struggle, the study examines a variety of sources, including trade disputes, purchase and sale documents, manumission proceedings, a trial record, police reports, passport applications for travelling within the country and other materials that reveal the actions of the contending subjects. These sources allow us to follow the path taken by thousands of enslaved migrants in the provinces of Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo, from 1850 to the abolition of slavery in 1888.