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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
By University | By Year
McKiernan, John. "Fevered Measures: Race, Communicable Disease and Community Formation on the Texas-Mexico Border, 1880-1923," Michigan State University, April 2002.
This dissertation examines legal and medical tensions on the Texas-Mexican border that accompanied communicable disease outbreaks during an age of heightened labor mobility and state formation. The dissertation argues that the measures taken to resolve these tensions shaped new, legal, cultural, and geographic boundaries among individuals and communities in the post-Reconstruction United States. This dissertation uses diplomatic records, public health records, press accounts, congressional records, and manuscript sources to analyze the process of disease definition and community formation. Long-term residents, black expatriates, Mexican sojourners and religious dissenters articulated common-law principles of bodily autonomy and due process against forcible re-vaccination and other newly intrusive public health practices. The erosion of local democratic participation, an increased popular faith in professional authority, the stricter policing of racial and national boundaries and changes in constitutional law exemplified by Plessy v. Ferguson, Lochner v. New York and Buck v. Bell restricted the scope and reception of these rights-claiming practices. These unsuccessful claims expose often hidden conflicts among federal authorities and politically marginal communities over the relationship between the realms of communicable disease and citizenship in the Progressive era.
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