Imperial Pubs: British American Taverns as Spaces of Empire, 1700-1783

Imperial Pubs: British American Taverns as Spaces of Empire, 1700-1783 employs the North American tavern space to investigate how colonists connected with the British Empire, and in turn, understood their position(s) in local and global networks. Utilizing taverns as microcosms of colonial society, the dissertation argues that British American taverns were far more than small drinking establishments on the fringe of Empire--they were centers of Imperial connection, understanding, and ultimately contestation. Colonial taverngoers read tracts from London and beyond; consumed beverages made of products from around the world such as coffee, tea, chocolate, rum punch, and wine; conversed with foreigners and fellow Britons; sent and received transatlantic mail; booked trips to far off places; debated myriad cosmopolitan topics; penned politically charged manifestos; and attended balls, concerts, lectures, clubs, and art exhibitions. Taverngoers also appropriated the tavern space around them to reposition themselves in the colonial hierarchy by retiring into exclusive tavern rooms, enacting exclusionary drinking rituals, opening their own taverns, and sometimes fighting. More than any other public space, early American taverns helped colonists assert themselves initially as ardent British subjects and later as revolutionary Republicans. Understanding early American taverns as both reflections of and influences on colonists' Imperial desires advances our understanding of early American society in multiple ways. First, by revealing colonial taverngoers' intense urge for global connections, the dissertation challenges colonial American historians to broaden their geographical and ideological canvas beyond the thirteen colonies. As the colonies erupted into Revolution, however, Patriots transformed American taverns into centers of resistance against the Empire they had previously embraced. Second, then, the dissertation urges historians of the revolutionary era to more seriously consider taverns as fundamental in the transformation from imperial to republican society. Third, the international direction of the dissertation pushes historians to reconsider the "Atlantic world" model as a process of imperialism and globalization more than a geographically limited field of study. A transatlantic perspective, "Imperial Pubs" contends, is more useful when understood within and in conjunction with global processes and networks, almost all of which were made possible by imperialism

Parallel Evolution of Tobramycin Resistance Across Species and Environments

Different species exposed to a common stress may adapt by mutations in shared pathways or in unique systems, depending on how past environments have molded their genomes. Understanding how diverse bacterial pathogens evolve in response to an antimicrobial treatment is a pressing example of this problem, where discovery of molecular parallelism could lead to clinically useful predictions. Evolution experiments with pathogens in environments containing antibiotics, combined with periodic whole-population genome sequencing, can be used to identify many contending routes to antimicrobial resistance. We separately propagated two clinically relevant Gram-negative pathogens, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Acinetobacter baumannii, in increasing concentrations of tobramycin in two different environments each: planktonic and biofilm. Independently of the pathogen, the populations adapted to tobramycin selection by parallel evolution of mutations in fusA1, encoding elongation factor G, and ptsP, encoding phosphoenolpyruvate phosphotransferase. As neither gene is a direct target of this aminoglycoside, mutations to either are unexpected and underreported causes of resistance. Additionally, both species acquired antibiotic resistance-associated mutations that were more prevalent in the biofilm lifestyle than in the planktonic lifestyle; these mutations were in electron transport chain components in A. baumannii and lipopolysaccharide biosynthesis enzymes in P. aeruginosa populations. Using existing databases, we discovered site-specific parallelism of fusA1 mutations that extends across bacterial phyla and clinical isolates. This study suggests that strong selective pressures, such as antibiotic treatment, may result in high levels of predictability in molecular targets of evolution, despite differences between organisms’ genetic backgrounds and environments

Strategies and Consequences of Indigenous and Invasive Freshwater Mussels Living in Cyanobacterial and Anthropogenic Impacted Waters

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