Digital Commons Network^™

Being Careful : Progressive Era Women And The Movements For Better Reproductive Health Care, Sarah Patterson

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

ABSTRACTFor American and British women, the definition of being healthy changed in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Previously, there had been a resigned acceptance of the fact that a woman’s reproductive capacity often relegated her to a lifetime of suffering and ill health. Certainly, individual women sometimes sought out solutions to their health problems, but there was no concerted social movement to help all women. Then in the Progressive Era that changed. The professionalization of medicine, combined with scientific breakthroughs, such as using Salvarsan to treat syphilis and urine testing to identify eclampsia meant that women could …

The Agrarian Gentleman: Elkanah Watson And The Birth Of The Agricultural Society In Early National New England, John Ginder

History Honors Program

Elkanah Watson is an overlooked figure in the early national period of the United States. A direct descendent of the Mayflower Pilgrims, Watson was a well-connected, well-traveled businessman who was receptive to any idea that he thought would benefit the new nation. This paper argues that Watson played an important role in forging a new American definition of progress, one that built on his experience in the American Revolution, borrowed heavily from Europe, and was inextricably tied to the American landscape. During the age of Enlightenment, he believed that one could improve oneself as well as society. That was evident …

Reenivisioning War Through Children’S Eyes: Northern And Southern Literature In Post-Civil War America, Hannah Cast

History Honors Program

In post-Civil War America, the sectional divide between Northern and Southern states continued to cause conflict even after the fighting had ended. In order to uphold their memory of the conflict, authors from both sides used the publication of children’s literature as a vehicle to spread their perspective. The Southern states wrote myths about the “Lost Cause” of the Civil War, a post-war invention to explain the South’s defeat in the Civil War and to maintain a predominantly white political system. In the Northern states, authors illustrated a romantic view of the war in order to spread tales of patriotism …

“No Popery! No French Laws!”: Anti-Catholicism During The American Revolution, Nicholas Dorthe

History Honors Program

This paper analyzes how widespread anti-Catholic sentiment unified the colonies against the British Crown during the early stages of the American Revolution. Also, this paper explores how loyalists utilized fear of Catholicism in order to undermine the Revolution, showing that anti-Catholic fearmongering played a vital role to both causes. Overtime, historians have placed varying emphasis on certain reasons behind the American Revolution. Since the Progressive Era, there has been a shift from economic reasons, like class conflict and the Crown’s restrictive trade policies, to a more ideological stance, one that emphasizes philosophical influence and constitutional interpretations. Instead, this essay asserts …

“Learned From Black Friends”: The Asian-American Struggle For Housing And Equal Employment In New York City, 1969 – 1974, Shouyue Zhang

History Honors Program

The size of New York’s Chinese community surged after 1968, in turn leading to shortages in affordable housing and insufficient employment opportunities. The urban crisis of New York City exacerbated these problems. This thesis will explore New York’s Asian-American collective struggles against landlords’ eviction and employment discrimination.

The housing story began in 1969. The New York Telephone Company bought buildings in Chinatown and evicted all tenants. Tenants used various strategies to resist. Finally, their efforts secured a long-term lease. The employment story mainly occurred in 1974. The developer of Confucius Plaza in Chinatown hired two Asian construction workers to accommodate …

Imperial Evolution: Walter Lippmann And The Liberal Roots Of American Hegemony, Lukas Moller

History Honors Program

When Walter Lippmann became a founding editor of the New Republic in 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, he began to advocate for heightened United States involvement in global affairs. Lippmann argued that the global power vacuum generated by the war presented the ideal opportunity for American values to spread to places like Eastern Europe and South America, the latter under the veil of “Pan-Americanism.” The Pan-American movement would disguise the U.S. as a “big-brother” to the Latin American nations creating a seemingly symbiotic relationship, when realistically it would seize the open markets caused by the war …

The Era Of The Era: Defining Liberal And Conservative Equality Through The Fight For The Equal Rights Amendment In New York, Chloe Ross

History

The Equal Rights Amendment was first proposed by suffragist and life-long feminist Alice Paul in 1923 and it intended to create equality of the sexes under the law. It was passed by Congress in 1972, but ultimately was not ratified by enough states. During that time was second-wave feminism, a movement that claimed to seek out equality but had a divisive nature. This thesis looks at how the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment in New York during the 1970s and 80s helped shape the definition of equality for each side of the newly polarized political spectrum. The bulk of …

Eleanor Roosevelt And Charles Malik: Titans Of Peace And Architects Of Post-Wwii International Cooperation, Ankeith Prince Illiparambil

History

This thesis examines the impact that the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt and Charles Malik had on both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the greater trajectory of international cooperation as orchestrated by the United Nations. The study begins by looking at the “Big Three” conferences organized by the Allied Powers near the end of World War II and the hope that American President Franklin D. Roosevelt had for what could be accomplished by international cooperation. From there, we follow the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt and Charles Malik as members of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. …

The Chocolate Industry: Blood, Sweat, And Tears Is What Makes Chocolate Sweet, Gabriella Bartley

Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity

Forced labor is a form of human trafficking that affects hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Products that we enjoy, such as chocolate, are part of industries that are built on the exploitation of people. Forced labor allows traffickers to take advantage of people by not supplying a proper wage or needs for survival. The chocolate industry has had a history of causing economic hardships for those in the supply chain. Farm owners are responsible for costly supplies needed to operate a cocoa farm before farming begins only to gain small profits. Companies leading the chocolate industry do not want …

Empire State Interrupted : Seneca Sovereignty And Settler Debates Over Land, 1779-1889, Elana Krischer

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

New York’s western expansion began during the American Revolution. From then on, a variety of American settler groups and individuals attempted to possess and control Seneca land in what is now western New York. These American settler groups, such as missionaries, land speculators, state and federal officials, and land surveyors, carried out individual projects of dispossession and erasure throughout the nineteenth century. In the process, they shaped the space of the Seneca reservations and the trajectory of American expansion. In justifying dispossession, American settlers crafted elaborate sets of laws and rights. These conflicting claims became so entangled that dispossession was …

Making Good : World War I, Disability, And The Senses In American Rehabilitation, Evan Patrick Sullivan

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This study looks at how disabled American soldier-patients and the US Army used the senses as tools of rehabilitation after the Great War. Contemporaries argued that, when the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers came home wounded or sick after the Great War, the men needed to make good. The phrase “making good” meant that sacrifice in the war was not enough, and veterans had to become socially and economically independent, and return to heterosexual relationships. In an effort to return to normalcy, the US Army relied on rehabilitation, which aimed to medically and socially re-integrate the men into society.

The Last Step To Whiteness : American Jews, Civil Rights, And Assimilation, 1954-1988, Eric Morgenson

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation examines the relationship between American Jews and African Americans through the prism of evolving Jewish whiteness. In the post-World War II period, American Jews were an outsider group that were moving into the mainstream. American Jews interested in assimilating tied themselves to the cause of African American civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. This was partially motivated by a desire to help an oppressed minority work towards equality in the United States. However, it was also motivated in part by a desire to aid in their own assimilation process. The idea of creating a colorblind American society …

The Bourgeoisie And The Divine : Prophecy, Utopias, And Politics In The July Monarchy, Sarah E. Pace

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation analyzes the complexity of popular religious trends under a nominally secular government through the examination of prophecy during the French July Monarchy period (1830-1848). Throughout this era, several diverse individuals claimed to be the recipients of supernatural visions and visitations. These “prophets” attracted interest, and genuine belief, from a wide range of contemporaries. Studying the supernatural visionaries of this period, and those drawn to such phenomena, illustrates the nature of contemporary interests and values. Why were supernatural visitations so successful and appealing at this specific time? Attraction to these visionaries reveals political and social anxieties and upheavals that …

Proletarian Modernism : Aesthetic Intervention In Naturalist Epistemology In Steinbeck, Wright And Mccullers, Kenji Kihara

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation explores three proletarian novels published at the end of the Depression era—John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—in light of how their aesthetics complicates the inherited epistemology of literary naturalism in response to the changing political climates in the age of the Popular Front. Calling these texts “proletarian modernism,” I investigate how their aesthetics mediate the relations among Marxist ideas, political solidarity and the American value of individualism in an age when it became gradually difficult to fundamentally criticize capitalism and liberalism.