Digital Commons Network^™

“Intimacy In The End Means Trouble”: Interracial Relationships In Britain From Interwar To Windrush, Stephanie Makowski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The interwar period, World War II, and the Windrush era present three major turning points in the evolution of what has become known as the making of a “multiracial” Britain. During these years, British public discourse became increasingly preoccupied with relationships between Black men and white women. This discourse became global in scope and Black activists across the Anglophone world took part in shaping the narratives and meanings projected onto these relationships. By charting the shifting boundaries of racial acceptance and gendered mores, this project demonstrates the predominantly performative and extremely conditional nature of Britain’s “acceptance” of men of color. …

Pol 241 Globalization Syllabus, Jeannette Graulau

Open Educational Resources

The syllabus offers meaningful, open-access academic texts, art expositions, interactive maps, timelines and conferences that introduce students to the study of the 16th-century birth of globalization. This was a period in which for the first time after A.D. 1492, trade connected Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, creating dynamic and enduring change everywhere. The Columbian Exchange took off and Spain became a global superpower. Europe spread 'Western civilization' to the rest of the world, carrying xenophobia, wars, and economic exploitation everywhere it went. Military conquests and crusading campaigns against aboriginal peoples of the Americas and religious and ethnic minorities gave …

Using Oral History To Explore The Migration Experience A Series Of Activities For Eng103: The Research Paper, Demetrios Kapetanakos

Open Educational Resources

This paper describes how I will implement an oral history component into my "ENG103: The Research Paper" course.

From “Total Destruction” To “Total Dictatorship”: The Influence Of Ernst Jünger’S Visionary Fascism, Nick Schiff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper seeks to answer one central question: How can the life and work of Ernst Jünger help illuminate the development of fascist ideas, culture, politics, and power across Europe from 1920-1945? The components of that question are: what were the core elements of Jünger’s aesthetics, morality, and politics? How did he synthesize these elements to create his influential vision of German fascism? What were Jünger’s interactions and exchanges with other European fascists, as well as influential Nazis including Carl Schmitt, Joseph Goebbels, and Adolph Hitler himself? How did Jünger’s new Fascist politics and aesthetics affect them? I argue that …

The Migration Of South Asians From India To Guyana: The Journey, Struggles In A New Land, Reasons For Changes Over Time And Their Cultivation Of A New Culture., Cynthia C. Harry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Indians from different regions of India arrived in Guyana through indentureship in 1838. They were under a five-year contract and had to work on the sugar plantations for the duration of their indentureship. While they tried to persist their Indian culture, assimilation in their new environments and interaction with people of different cultures, allowed them to develop a culture unique to Indo Guyanese heritage.

This thesis focuses on the history of Indian diaspora in Guyana. It evokes the struggles they faced on the ships, and during and after indentureship. It also touches on the political and racial issues they had …

Housing Displacement In Corlears Hook: From Naghtongh To One Manhattan Square, Don Macleod

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The displacement of residents from their homes in New York City began with the European settlement of New Amsterdam and continues to this day. This paper focuses on displacement in Corlears Hook, part of Manhattan’s Lower East Side from the violent extirpation of a Lenape settlement in 1643 New Amsterdam to the gentrification of a traditional working-class neighborhood along the East River propelled by the influx of luxury housing development. Throughout Corlears Hook’s long history, displacement has been caused by violence, well-meaning efforts to improve slum conditions, ham-fisted “urban renewal” projects that favored the wealthy and civic improvements that used …

The Four Seasons: Integrating The Big Four Sports, Joseph S. Brody

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

After World War II, even though many African Americans served their country, policies of segregation were rampant throughout the United States of America. The aim of this Capstone is two-fold. First, to shed light on the men who followed the path of Jackie Robinson and give them their due. The most appropriate way to convey my research of these four athletes was by putting them all in the same fictional setting and discussing their trials and tribulations that made them the men they were in their day. Second, I want to highlight the many things I found in my research …

Counter-Archives In Digital Spaces, Patricia Belen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As evidence of human activities and time periods, archives are invaluable resources for research and the historical record. Digital, public archives are powerful sites of memory and discourse. The New York Public Library (NYPL) Digital Collections platform has provided over 900,000 prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, and more on their public website. Recent calls for museums and heritage institutions to confront their legacies of colonialism have led to scholarly and activist work in the area of counter-archives that address inequalities and empower excluded voices. Counter-Archives in Digital Spaces (https://counterarchives.com) is an interactive website that explores history and visual literacy …

The Golden Age Of Mexican Cinema, Daniel Galindo

Publications and Research

This presentation is about the film called María Candelaria (1943), a film of the cinema of the golden age of Mexico that shows the lifestyle of the people of that time, more than anything it shows how women were reviled in the macho society. The Golden Age of Mexican Cinema is a period of brilliance in the history of Mexican cinema, which began in 1936-1956.

My Sauce! Living In The Polyrhythm, Zakiya Harris

Theses and Dissertations

This paper contextualizes “Ghana: The Place Where the Chief Sleeps,” for which Harris served as dance captain, rehearsal director, dancer, stager and choreographer. Harris details how her work living inside the polyrhythms of performance, practices, and pedagogies can produce a holistic West African dance education for students.

Aguaaaa!!!, Cory Villegas

Theses and Dissertations

“AGUA” is a call for new models of learning and sharing, celebrating the diasporic as a place of global revolution. Salsa, rooted in Latin American and Afro-Caribbean histories, is choreographer Cory Villegas’s expression of cultural legacy. As an Afro-diasporic dance, Salsa carries the wealth and variety of African and Indigenous roots. Villegas contextualizes her thesis event “Las Leyendas: An Afro Cuban Suite,” presenting herself and her troupe Soul Dance Co. as evidence that contradicts the erasure of Latin & Caribbean Culture in US dance history. The paper uses English and Spanish, written, visual, and oral materials with an accompanying webpage.

Italians Inside American Government: New York Politicians & Black Equality In The United States, From The 1920s-1950s, Nathanael Geraci

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the Italian-American fight for Black civil rights from New Yorkers in government. As congressmen, mayors, and governors during the 1920s-1950s, politicians of Italian descent worked consistently for the cause of African-American equality. Despite extensive documentation of their pro-Black action, the work of these Italian-Americans has remained hidden.

Wordflight, Joey Gonnella

Theses and Dissertations

Exploring subjects revolving around the nature of images, language and their subsequent disseminationn through time, this paper weaves together seemingly unrelated topics from the hot air balloons of the Franco-Prussian war to the envelope poems of Emily Dickinson.

Judaism, Conversion, And The Limits Of Christian Orthodoxy: The Jewish Identities Of Joseph Wolff And Michael Solomon Alexander As Detailed In Their Memoirs And Missions To Palestine, Michael Iodice

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the Jewish identities of the Anglican missionaries Joseph Wolff and Michael Solomon Alexander by examining their conversion memoirs and evangelical missions to Palestine. It argues that they used Protestant biblical exegesis to emphasize their Jewish heritage and its importance in Christian prophecy.

“Liberté, Égalité, Sororité”: The Revolutionary All-Female Studio Of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Julia Oxman

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis offers the first in-depth exploration of French portraitist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s all-female studio. It argues that her efforts toward expanding access to women’s arts education played a key role in the foundation of a larger movement for gender equality in the wake of the French Revolution.

Chaucer’S Contradictory Representations Of Fourteenth Century Knighthood In The Canterbury Tales, Nicholas Cabrera

Theses and Dissertations

Differences in interpretation have long dominated scholarship regarding knighthood in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. But these differences fail to consider the nuance of the text and the historical realities of the period in which Chaucer wrote. Chaucer’s depiction of knighthood represents the institution as filled with tensions and contradictions.

Mixed Feelings: The Emotional Appeals Of Zitkala-Ša’S American Indian Stories, Kayla Joan Baur

Publications and Research

Zitkala-Ša (Lakota: Zitkála-Šá, meaning Red Bird) was among the first to write about the experiences of Native American children in the U.S. Indian boarding school program to an English-speaking audience. As a writer and political activist, Zitkala-Ša uses emotional appeals and cultural ideas she learned through her white education to expose the very boarding school institutions that taught her. In American Indian Studies (1921), Zitkala-Ša critiques the violence that the Indian boarding school system inflicts on young Native Americans. She presents these critiques through emotional appeals that take two forms: one, a more traditional sentimental appeal associated with middle-class white …

The Mazdakites, The ʿAyyārs And The Mithraists, Parvaneh Pourshariati

Publications and Research

No revolutionary movement in Iranian Late Antiquity has attracted as much attention as the fascinating and enigmatic Mazdakite uprising of the late fifth century. The scholarly consensus about these has it that 1) they engaged in ibāḥat al-nisā, sharing of wives; 2) advocated the sharing of property and 3) that their past time was wine imbibing and merrymaking. I shall argue here that, as Shaki correctly suspected but did not pursue the topic, the description of the Mazdakite in our primary sources (the Letter of Tansar, Ibn Qutayba, Ṭabarī, Dīnkard, Shahrestānī), actually follows the praxis of the ʿayyārs, chivalrous men …

Neh Oral History Seminar Lesson Plan, Composition I: An Introduction To Composition And Research / Accelerated Composition I, Kelly I. Aliano

Open Educational Resources

In English 101, we begin developing an academic voice for writing and learn how to conduct research. For this project, we thought about those topics in relation to Oral History: How do we tell our own stories? What do we gain from telling our own stories? What might be the problems with everyone’s own story? This project involved writing a personal narrative essay, developing questions for an interview, conducting an interview, summarizing an interview, and writing an essay comparing the interview to the personal narrative essay.

Informal Family Archives & Oral History, Nichole M. Shippen

Open Educational Resources

Informal Family Archives & Oral History was modeled on and meant to complement the Oral History in Interdisciplinary Community College Pedagogy Funded by NEH for 2023-2025. Therefore, the description is taken from the NEH description except I modified my class to be focused on informal family archives. Students picked a family member they wished to interview for this project. They started with a cultural object exercise and built from that starting point. The class was inspired by Nairy Abdelshafy’s Informal Archives: Capturing Family Memories.

“Oral history is an interactive method and inquiry process on a topic, as well as …

Rachel Franks, Double Agent: A Librarian And A Crime Author - William Blick Interviews Rachel Franks (January 2024), William Blick

Publications and Research

The following is an interview from January 2024 with Librarian and Crime Scholar, Rachel Franks and was posted on the Captivating Criminality Blog:

Rachel Franks is the Coordinator, Scholarship at the State Library of New South Wales and an Honorary Associate Lecture at The University of Newcastle (Australia). She holds PhDs in Australian crime fiction (Central Queensland University) and in true crime texts (University of Sydney). A qualified educator and librarian, her extensive work on crime fiction, true crime, popular culture and information science has been presented at numerous conferences, as well as on radio and television. An award-winning …

"My First Best Love": Women's Writing On College Friendships 1880–1905, Alyssa J. Kayser-Hirsh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, American society encouraged strong bonds between women. As separate sphere ideology took hold, highly-structured female relationships were created and maintained through shared rituals, language, and expectations. The resulting friendships enabled women to build a range of emotional ties with one another. At the same time, an expanding array of gender segregated educational institutions further promoted homosocial networks. Women’s college students built community through their shared experience inhabiting a collective space, forging social circles as well as one-on-one intimate relationships. This thesis examines women’s experiences of friendship within the college setting between 1880 …

Containerization Of Seafarers In The International Shipping Industry: Contemporary Seamanship, Maritime Social Infrastructures, And Mobility Politics Of Global Logistics, Liang Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation discusses the mobility politics of container shipping and argues that technological development, political-economic order, and social infrastructure co-produce one another. Containerization, the use of standardized containers to carry cargo across modes of transportation that is said to have revolutionized and globalized international trade since the late 1950s, has served to expand and extend the power of international coalitions of states and corporations to control the movements of commodities (shipments) and labor (seafarers). The advent and development of containerization was driven by a sociotechnical imaginary and international social contract of seamless shipping and cargo flows. In practice, this liberal, …

Spain's Vision Of Empire Through Conquest, Ideology, And Law In The Sixteenth Century, Penelope Yau-Wen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines how the process of exploration, discovery, conquest and colonization of the Americas by Spain developed along with a vision of empire that involved the formulation of political theories, laws and policies by the governing elites, while responding to the actions by the conquistadors on the field. Although events on both sides of the Atlantic were not necessarily coordinated, the interests of the Court and the conquistadors intersected and were justified through a discourse that had been shaped by Humanist intellectual currents.

The thesis intends to show how the Castilian imperial vision was an experiment that began to …

Culturally And Socially Responsive Teacher Professional Learning At The American Museum Of Natural History, Jessica Correa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project consists of a series of professional learning sessions to support teachers in their implementation of Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education (CR-SE) using the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) as a resource and case study. Through the lens of Historically Responsive Literacy, the series also seeks to reestablish social science as a critical element of natural history for teachers. This series can help teachers see the museum as not only a place to explore life and physical science, but also a place to explore identity, social/emotional development, cultural studies and American History. The project includes resources and directions for …

Towards Sociobiogeochemistry: Critical Perspectives On Anthropogenic Alterations To Soil Nitrogen Chemistry Via U.S. Urban And Suburban Development, Christopher D. Ryan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ecological impacts of changes to land use are relevant to concerns about climate change, eutrophication of waterbodies, and reductions in biodiversity. As a foundational component of ecosystem functioning, changes to soil biogeochemistry have significant effects on overall ecosystem health. With cities continuing to grow and develop in extent, the impacts of urbanization and suburbanization on soils are of particular concern. Despite a wide range of natural climatic and geologic conditions, several factors have driven similar patterns of land transformation and management across the United States. In particular, federal initiatives including the Home Owners Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, …

Visualizing Ancient Empire In Tudor England: Imperial Monarchy, Reformation, And The Antique Soldier In The Title Page To Richard Grafton’S Large Chronicle (1569), Peter Nicholas Otis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes the iconography and visual sources of the title page to the first volume of A chronicle at large and meere history of the affayres of Englande (1569) by the Tudor author Richard Grafton. Representing the visual synthesis of several distinct but interrelated currents that developed in the preceding century, the title page to the Large Chronicle offers a rare glimpse into a transitional moment in the middle Tudor perception and visual representation of the British past. These currents include imperializing royal iconography, with origins in antecedent representations in the late fifteenth century; the entry of the ‘classicizing’ …

New York City’S Health Governance And Activism From The 1950s To The 1970s, Andres Valcarcel

Theses

New York City's expansive network of hospitals and preventative health services has an intense history outside of the popular narratives of biomedical and technological advancement. This thesis will discuss the period between the 1950s and 1970s and the various movements and parties that shaped the city's health and hospital system. During this period, New York City's healthcare delivery system became increasingly privatized and commercialized; processes that improved the quality of healthcare yet simultaneously barred the poorest from accessing it. Communities, healthcare workers, and civil rights organizations worked to address perceived faults and extend their agency in health and hospital policy; …