Home Rule: A Domestic Archaeology of Citizenship in Gilded Age Washington, DC

This dissertation is a historical archaeology of Washingtonians’ efforts to claim local and national citizenship in the decades following the Civil War. Analyzing a site that I helped excavate and re-analyzing two collections excavated in the 1980s, I compare consumption practices across Gilded Age households inhabited by immigrant, Southern migrant, and District-born Washingtonians. I contextualize detailed artifact analysis with archival evidence including maps, census records, city directories, advertisements, and newspaper articles. Understanding domestic consumption as central to negotiating Gilded Age citizenship, I use the concept of home rule to analyze how Washingtonians exercised sovereignty to claim citizenship in their city and country. I consider how the capital’s lack of home rule impacted daily life in D.C. and how Washingtonians exercised individual and community autonomy in their households, neighborhoods, and city. Both in claiming the right to home rule through the state’s settler colonial logics of sovereignty and by exercising versions of home rule against and outside of the state, Washingtonians made everyday claims to belonging that extended nationally.

U.S. citizenship rapidly expanded and contracted over the period from 1865 to 1914, from Reconstruction and the naturalization of millions of European immigrants to the Chinese Exclusion Act and Jim Crow laws. Simultaneously, the late Industrial Revolution expanded mass consumption. New consumption practices blurred the ways people had previously used material goods to assess and demonstrate differences of class, race, gender, and immigration status. Anxieties over changing markers of power and belonging collided with contests over who should be included in citizenship and what it entailed. Washington, D.C. – both the capital of a democracy and a place where, after 1874, residents were not granted the right to vote – served as a symbolic battleground for these debates. This was not only because it was the nation’s capital but because it was home to large numbers of the U.S. residents at the center of contests over citizenship: immigrants from other countries and Black and white migrants from Southern states.

When and how are the actions of everyday life, from cooking a meal to taking out the trash, practices of citizenship? I argue that to understand how daily life both maintained and destabilized citizenship, archaeology must engage with citizenship’s foundation and corollary: sovereignty. I follow the state’s attempts to assert and maintain sovereignty over Washingtonians as the federal government and local leaders tried to make the capital into a symbol of national reunification after the Civil War. Examining the material record of Washingtonians’ everyday practices, I consider how households exercised autonomy through the relationships they created with family, friends, and neighbors. I demonstrate how the daily actions of making the capital into a home allowed Washingtonians with varying access to citizenship to change the terms of belonging and refashion national citizenship in the process.

Washingtonians once again find themselves living in a laboratory for the federal government’s attempts to limit citizenship. These attempts explicitly draw on Gilded Age assertions of white supremacy and visions of U.S. empire. This dissertation examines how the legacies of the homes immigrant and migrant Washingtonians created in the Gilded Age capital extend into the present-day District. I ask what possibilities for home rule Washingtonians have inherited and what kinds of citizenship this alternative version of the Gilded Age past allows us to imagine.