"Materialities of Government: A Historical Archaeology of Infrastructure in Annapolis and Eastport, 1865–1951" by Matthew Palus

Matthew Palus

Deposited 2010

Abstract
This dissertation explores the relationship between expanding public utilities infrastructure and changes in the mode of governance in Annapolis, Maryland, and the specific engagements with new governmental apparatuses among residents in the Eastport neighborhood, a suburb that was annexed into the City of Annapolis in 1951. Municipal government in Annapolis underwent a transformation over the period of this study, roughly from the end of the Civil War until the 1951 annexation. I characterize that transformation as an intensification of government, which plays out in the expansion of apparatuses that are both discursive and materially extant, in some instances remaining as archaeological traces of this historical pattern of governmentalization. Governmentality is a social theory that originates with Foucault and addresses a shift from pre-modern forms of rule premised in sovereignty or patronage, towards a form of rule that promotes rational management of the economy and security for the population. Governmentality registers at the municipal level with the expansion of the apparatus of security, seen in the provision of gas or electric street lighting, improved sanitation, municipal reservoirs for clean water, and similar measures, as well as the bureaucratic and discursive apparatuses accompanying them. In that sense, governmentality implies a distinctive materiality; taken to its conclusion, governmentality is one of the defining characteristics of 20th-century material life, just as public utilities are nearly ubiquitous in 20th-century archaeological contexts.

I ask how broadly-applied electrical and sanitation infrastructure contributed to the expansion of authority and the apparatuses for governing, which not only penetrated more deeply into the lives of Annapolis residents, but consolidated suburban neighborhoods under municipal government. As a consequence of these changes, citizens were also transformed, owing to new materialities entering into common use and familiarity, which were also materialities that submitted governance as their premise. While the expansion of public services is clearly apparent in the archaeological and documentary records, these data also reveal the partiality of coverage and the uneven application of the apparatuses for governing, connecting these developments with notions of race and privilege that are still very powerful in American life and politics. Governmentalization in Annapolis both confirmed and expanded the meaning of racial identifications, by giving new materiality to racial difference. The resulting archaeology of public utilities uncovers the historical and ongoing production of race-based inequalities in urban communities during the 19th and 20 th centuries.