Date

8-20-2026

Department

College of Arts and Sciences

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)

Chair

Gregory Jones

Keywords

United States Life-Saving Service, Gender, Kinship, Outer Banks, North Carolina, Nineteenth-Century

Disciplines

History

Abstract

The Outer Banks of North Carolina is both a beautiful and dangerous place. Its region is filled with descendants of the Keepers and Surfmen who once manned the lifesaving stations that the federal government built along America’s coastlines. It is also home to one of the most dangerous stretches of American coastline known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. The United States Life-Saving Service, established in 1871, was a government solution to the growing public outcry over the staggering number of deaths by shipwreck during the nineteenth century. While the Life-Saving Service has fostered a small but detailed historiography, its focus has largely been on maritime histories of dramatic shipwrecks and rescues or military histories of the lifesaving service’s specialized training and equipment as the forerunner to the United States Coast Guard. The historiography overwhelmingly relies on moments of heroism, danger, and extraordinary risk to explain the service, but little about the men who undertook these heroic acts. Historians have thus far ignored Keepers and Surfmen as masculine figures operating within American society, culture, and politics during the transformations happening at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, this dissertation reexamines the United States Life-Saving Service using a combined cultural, gender, and kinship perspective to focus on the everyday experiences of the men who chose this honored way of life – and the women and families who served alongside them – who together left an indelible stamp in the coastal communities along America’s shorelines. Using a case study of North Carolina’s Outer Banks and the Sixth District of the United States Life-Saving Service, this study introduces readers to the social fabric of the lifesaving service and to the caliber of men and women who undertook and supported its livelihood and created interconnected communities of service and engagement. It situates the men and women of the lifesaving service within the broader nineteenth-century contexts of gender and the family. Essentially, this is a study about the people – not the shipwrecks.

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