Digital Commons Network^™

Humanitarian Capitalism: Displaced Persons Resettlement In America, 1948-1952, Andrew Joseph Marion

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines an American resettlement program for displaced Eastern and Central Europeans following World War II. Between 1948 and 1952, nearly 395,000 displaced persons (DPs) resettled to the U.S., and each resettled individual or family had an American sponsor who committed to providing housing and employment. The lobbying and creation of the resettlement legislation and the implementation of the program reflected the political, social, economic, religious, and cultural tensions both at home and abroad in these early Cold War years. DP resettlement occurred at a time when the U.S. and international community considered and adopted emerging human rights language …

A Labor Of Love: Extensive Exploitation Of Contract Music Workers, Malia Odekirk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Workers across the United States are reckoning with unfair labor conditions by unionizing and speaking out. Systemic undervaluing of many workers has created a climate of fear, hidden agendas, and pervasive labor misconduct. The pageantry/marching arts are no exception. As a cultural insider, I conducted interviews, had many informal conversations, and ran a large survey that uncovered how the marching arts exploit instructors extensively despite their experience, education, and efforts. A systematic proclivity toward late payments, abused contracts, egregiously low compensation, and free labor begs the question: how can programs continually mistreat instructors this way? I explore this question through …

Ledgers Of The W.T. Carter And Brother Lumber Company: An Archival Processing Project, Christopher Cameron Cotton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The W.T. Carter and Brother Lumber Company began in 1898 and operated until 1968 when it was sold to the U.S. Plywood Corporation. The Polk County, Texas company harvested longleaf pine during a crucial period of development for the Texas economy. The lumber industry was the state’s first large scale commercial enterprise not dependent on farming and provided a model for future extractive industries in the state. The W.T. Carter and Brother Lumber Company town of Camden, Texas exemplifies rural implementations of the company town system in the Texas lumber industry. This public history thesis provides a brief history of …

Nursing Perceptions For Utilizing Essential Oil Application In Labor And The Effect Of Targeted Education, Joni R. Beckham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This Doctor of Nursing Practice project was implemented to determine how a nurse’s perception of aromatherapy influences their decision to provide aromatherapy for patients during labor and the effect of targeted education on a nurse’s perception. The purpose of this project was to determine how nurses view the use of aromatherapy resources at their disposal and the likelihood that they would offer the intervention to their patients. This project provided education to increase nurses’ confidence in providing optimal care to patients using a traditional and holistic avenue of aromatherapy while determining if education can positively influence nurses to support essential …

Subjects Of Economy: Social Documentary Poetics And Contemporary Poetry Of Work, Michelle B. Gaffey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although the term “documentary” originated in film and photography studies, it has been used to describe a range of compositional and research strategies in discussions of twentieth and twenty-first century poetry as well. A study of such documentary poetics, however, requires us to distinguish between documentary poetics in general and social documentary poetics in particular. To illustrate this distinction, I discuss five contemporary books of poetry and photographs: C.D. Wright’s and Deborah Luster’s One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, Cynthia Hogue’s and Rebecca Ross’s When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina, Chris Llewellyn’s Fragments from the Fire: …

Worker-Owned Cooperatives As Urban Economic Development., Nick Conder

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the topic of urban policies relating to worker-owned cooperatives, and the political conditions surrounding worker-owned cooperatives in American cities. The topic is studied through a comparison between two case study cities: Cleveland, Ohio and Jackson, Mississippi. Through the collection of public records and interviews with policymakers, analysts, and community activists, this study details the current policy status towards worker-owned cooperatives and the political context for the worker-ownership movement in each city. The study also offers preliminary assessments of existing worker-owned cooperatives and explores the obstacles facing worker-owned enterprises in the selected cities. The findings of the case …

The Life And Political Career Of Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Dylan Mcnutt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Hubert Horatio Humphrey never reached the Oval Office, but his accomplishments during his tenure as mayor, senator, and Vice President are just as noteworthy. During Humphrey’s political career he played a pivotal role in the most influential period of liberal American politics. During his youth and college years Humphrey became learned how to remain loyal to the people around him, and about the racial divisions of the South. Most research on Vice President Humphrey analyzes his time as a Senator, Vice President, and the 1968 Presidential election. The Life and Political Career of Hubert Humphrey, examines Humphrey’s life in its …

'A Dream Of Completion': The Journey Of American Working-Class Poetry, Lacy Snapp

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This survey follows the development of working-class poetry from Whitman to contemporary poets. It begins by considering how the need for working-class poetry emerged. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” sought to democratize poetry both my challenging previous poetic formal conventions and broadening the scope of included subjects. Williams also challenged formal expectations, but both were limited by their historical and socioeconomic position. To combat this, I include the twentieth-century poets Ignatow and Levine who began in the working class so they could speak truths that had not been published before. Ignatow includes the phrase “dream of completion” which encapsulates various feelings …

Eyes In The Field, A Seat At The Table, A Voice At The Ranch : A Study On Optimal Farm Labor Conditions., Christine Wiggins-Romesburg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The field of human resource development has twin obligations to promote the performance of organizations and the satisfaction and welfare of all workers. Nevertheless, agriculture appears to be an understudied industry in the field, despite this obligation and the potential for suffering experienced by workers performing crop work. This case study sought to understand the process through which a single agricultural operation fosters optimal conditions for workers engaged in labor-intensive crop production. This study found employees experienced better treatment compared to other agricultural operations, and that conditions were rich in both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Intrinsic factors were marked by …

Performance Evaluation Of Blocking And Non-Blocking Concurrent Queues On Gpus, Hossein Pourmeidani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The efficiency of concurrent data structures is crucial to the performance of multi-threaded programs in shared-memory systems. The arbitrary execution of concurrent threads, however, can result in an incorrect behavior of these data structures. Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have appeared as a powerful platform for high-performance computing. As regular data-parallel computations are straightforward to implement on traditional CPU architectures, it is challenging to implement them in a SIMD environment in the presence of thousands of active threads on GPU architectures. In this thesis, we implement a concurrent queue data structure and evaluate its performance on GPUs to understand how it …

Whistle Before You Work: Defining Paid Labor In The New Deal State, 1938-1947, Thomas Porter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis traces the conceptualization of work from the passage of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) through the Portal-To-Portal Pay Act of 1947. I argue that the FLSA created a new framework for industrial laborers to define what constituted work. This enables an understanding of work as defined by those in mines and on the industrial plants floor, allowing those who were closest to toil and exertion to create their own definitions. By 1946, Congress heeded to the complaints of the military and capitalists and codified their definition of work and the work week. This restricted the broadly …

Labor And Happiness., Tyler Reid Madden

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reflects my process and my development of performing Troy Maxson in August Wilson’s Fences. I will be exploring the parallels that I have found on the concept of labor, between the history of labor as a black man in America and the labor of an actor. More specifically, I will be explaining my process in finding happiness in the laboring process of building a character. This is also an exploration of how I transformed myself from a 29-year-old black man to a 53-year-old black man. Also, transitioning from a black man in the 21st century, to a black …

Constructing The World's Largest Prison: Understanding Identity By Examining Labor, Hubert J. Gibson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

A Civil War prison camp operated by the Confederacy known as Camp Lawton was once considered the largest prison in the world. This label was attributed to the fact that Lawton’s stockade enclosed 42 acres. The historical record does not have a clear picture of who built it. Newspaper interviews claim the construction was carried out by 500 impressed slave laborers and 300 Union POWs, but these lack the credibility of official orders. Unfortunately, many Confederate documents were lost when Sherman’s army came through Millen, GA. This study archaeologically examines construction techniques utilized for building stockades in an effort …

Future Work: Denver Metropolitan Area Jobs In A Globalizing Economy, Sharon Gabel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the past twenty years, globalization has had both observable and intangible impacts on business and labor markets at the local level, that are of critical importance to communities and the people who inhabit them. While impacts of global economic change on local labor markets have been anticipated, there is little insight in the research literature into the empirical dynamics of the interrelationship between global economic change and local labor markets. This study examined the impacts of globalization on local labor markets through three lenses: (1) quantitative analysis of employment change in the Denver Metropolitan Region local labor market, (2) …

The Discursive Commons: The Establishment, "Outside Agitators," And "Communist Subversives" In Gadsden's Depression-Era Political Environment, John Disque Agricola

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis addresses a turbulent and often violent political environment in Gadsden, Alabama during the Great Depression. Using a theoretical construct called the discursive commons my analysis suggests how very particular ideas such as the trope of the outside agitator, and the idea of the communist radical, were used by the establishment to incite violence against United Rubber Workers union organizers who came to Gadsden to enlist members in the 1930s and early 1940s. It is my contention that these discursive formations had affective power over the people who committed acts of violence against their own class interests. This thesis …

Home Sweet Home: An Infinite Grid Of Memory And Repressed Abuse Trauma, Melissa Bush

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Incorporating traditional craft mediums of crochet and embroidery, I use digital technology to experiment with wording to graphically represent my abuse trauma. Due to the severity of the subject matter and the work ethic I employ in my art practice, using my hands and being completely involved is a form of masochistic pleasure. My process takes on a Sisyphean approach of penance for the sins of others in my work. During my studio practice, my process reaches a meditative state where my mind is clear and free of the burden. Once I've completed a panel of trauma, the burden is …

Are Mbas And Master's Degrees Worth It? A Discussion Of Wages, Job Security And Business Cycles, Claire Foley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the 1970s, recessions have become more frequent and severe, causing major changes to the labor market and the importance of education. This study focuses on the problems for employees with master's degrees and MBAs, and asks three questions: 1) Do employees with graduate degrees have higher earnings than bachelor's degree recipients, 2) Do they experience greater job security as a result of their additional education, and 3) Is graduate school a way to avoid unemployment during a recession? Ordinal logistic regression analysis is conducted and finds that master's degrees and MBAs experience very different outcomes, with much higher returns …

Taking A Deep Breadth: The Rhetorical Construction Of Solidarity In The American Labor Movement, William O'Shannon Murphy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the rhetorical fragments in three case studies of the American Labor Movement constituting movement members in solidarity. Using Kenneth Burke's discussion of rhetorical substance, this project explores the possibilities for developing deep and broad forms of solidarity within the American Labor Movement. Rhetorical fragments of the Industrial Workers of the World, the United Farm Workers, and contingent faculty unionization efforts are explored.

I argue Burke's ideas of substance and identification provide a powerful lens through which we can examine the solidary practices of social movements. Through the examination of the case studies mentioned, I demonstrate that solidarity …

Modern Slavery: A Regional Focus, Amanda Gould

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Kevin Bales, through his study in Understanding Global Slavery: A Reader, provides an important quantitative analysis on the predictive factors of modern slavery. Upon examining his study though, several issues arise including too few observations for several of the variables and the lack of a regional variable. The author decided to rerun his study with replacements for the problematic variables used previously. Upon obtaining the results from this, the author examined development theory (development is believed to be closely liked to slavery), and began creating an alternative model, which eventually included the addition of a regional variable. This model differed …

Colonizing Schemes In An Integrated Atlantic Economy: Labor And Settlement In British East Florida, 1763-1773., Nathan Hill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The colonization of British East Florida in 1763 did not occur in a vacuum. Colonizers formulated different settlement plans based on their experience in the colonies and the Atlantic world in general. The most obvious differentiation was in their choice of labor. Some men chose to base their settlements on slave labor. Others imported white laborers either as indentured servants or tenant farmers. Historians have looked at this differentiation in labor as an important element in the downfall of the colony, but the key question should be: why did each man choose the labor and settlement scheme he did? The …

Dialogue As The Labor Of Care: Welcoming A Unity Of Contraries, Marie Baker-Ohler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dialogue as the labor of care unfolds a vision of how the philosophy of dialogue can assist us as human beings to enact care in our daily lives. In the end, caring is a unity of contraries; blessing and burden, joy and suffering, necessity and triumph. The invitation of dialogue into the communicative life of caring requires bravery and courage and thus creates strong and rare natures.

The impetus of this vision comes from the work of Martin Buber whose ideas have changed the way we view communication and enrich the way we view caring. The additional metaphor of labor, …

Laurel, Mississippi: A Historical Perspective., David Stanton Key

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Laurel, Mississippi, exemplifies the new southern development that occurred in the years following Reconstruction. Coinciding with continental rail building and the depletion of northern timber resources, Laurel emerged as one of Mississippi's great industrial centers. Laurel's survival after the early twentieth century timber boom predicated itself on the diversification of its industry coupled with the continued growth of its infrastructure. Although Laurel's industrial ascension is not unique in the annals of southern history, its duality regarding northern capitalistic impulses and southern labor and material serves as a successful industrial model in the era of "cut out and get out" sawmill …