Digital Commons Network^™

'Our Sacred Rights': The Southern Baptist Convention And The Rhetoric Of Oppression, 1845 And Present Day, Katlyn Durand

Masters Theses

My master’s thesis focuses on the endurance of white supremacy and patriarchy in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), founded in 1845 and currently the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. I look at two moments in the SBC’s history and place these moments within their broader contexts to elucidate the political and cultural characteristics that shaped these moments: its founding in 1845 upon proslavery partisanship, as well as its current sexual abuse scandal. I argue that the Nullification Crisis of 1828-1834 and the cult of domesticity greatly influenced SBC policy and culture at its origins. Additionally, I examine the …

Imagining The “Day Of Reckoning”: American Jewish Performance Activism During The Holocaust, Maya C. Gonzalez

Masters Theses

Scholars of American Jewish history have long debated the complicity of the American Jewish community in the loss of six million Jewish lives in Europe during the Holocaust. After Hitler took power in 1933, American Jewish leaders took to the streets to protest the Nazi Party’s abuse of German Jews. Two central figures in this history are Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise and Revisionist Zionist Ben Hecht because of their wide-reaching protest movements that operated in competition with each other. Although the historiography presents Wise and Hecht's inability to unite as the product of difference, my examination of their protest performances …

Memories Of Hope And Loss: “Kerhi Maa Ne Bhagat Singh Jameya”, Sheher Bano

Masters Theses

My Masters thesis focuses on socialist Indian freedom fighter Bhagat Singh’s memory in contemporary Pakistani Punjab. I use the analytical category of memory to argue that Bhagat Singh is invoked by various groups and individuals, specifically those who identify as leftists or Marxists, in contemporary Pakistan to serve a range of political purposes. My analysis particularly sheds light on how activists and writers use the figure of Bhagat Singh to highlight the erasure of regional and lingual identities in Pakistan. Their remembrances underline a perceived historical injustice; the imposition of a national identity based on Urdu language and Sunni Muslim-ness, …

Cut Out Of Place: The Geography And Legacy Of Otto Ege's Broken Books, Melanie R. Meadors

Masters Theses

Otto Ege cut apart hundreds of medieval manuscripts during the first half of the twentieth century, claiming to do so to provide wider access to them. His destruction resulted in the loss of provenance, material history, and context of these manuscripts. Moreover, he made mistakes when identifying and dating the manuscript leaves he cut, and the loss of the bindings and front matter of the manuscripts makes it difficult to correct these. Much of the research concerning Ege focuses on his identity as a biblioclast, yet even scholars who denounce his book-cutting admit he allowed for places and people to …

Historic Houses And The Food Movement: Casey Farm And Coastal Growers' Market, Allison L. Smith

Masters Theses

Community engagement and relevance are topics prominently discussed in the museum field. Conversations about public history and social justice, however, are less common. Combining these two ideas and thinking broadly about how museums, particularly historic houses, can stay relevant in their community by adopting a community-centered mission, this thesis uses Casey Farm as a case study. By conducting interviews with the site managers and market manager alongside surveying market vendors and visitors, this thesis compares the museum’s perspective of their relevance with the lived experiences of visitors. Ultimately arguing that historic houses should prioritize community interests when creating programming to …

Heavy Metal In Medieval Europe, Sean M. Klimmek

Masters Theses

How and why did plate armor come to be widely used in Medieval Europe? I trace the historical development of armor in Europe from antiquity to the middle ages, and then identify the main causes that pushed European warriors to develop and adopt plate armor from the 14th to the 16th centuries. I rely on prior research by scholars and historians of arms and armor, as well as primary source documents that describe arms and armor and their use in tournaments and on the battlefield. I conclude that a combination of social, political, military, and technical factors pushed European warriors …

Memory Vague: A History Of City Pop, Jeffrey Salazar

Masters Theses

This thesis gives a definition and chronology of city pop and places it within the context of Japanese history. City pop can be traced from the 1960s folk movement in Japan until its demise in the early 1990s, coinciding with the end of the bubble economy. This thesis also examines the mid-2010s resurgence of interest in city pop among English-speaking internet users, beginning with a nostalgic rediscovery and curation of city pop around the turn of the century by DJs in Japan known as “crate diggers.” City pop was then transmitted to the West through sampling in hip-hop and especially …

Benjamin Smith Lyman: Geologist At The Intersection Of Hokkaido, Japan, And The United States, Benjamin Ashby

Masters Theses

Benjamin Smith Lyman was a geologist from Northampton, Massachusetts, who was contracted by the Japanese government in 1872 to carry out coal surveys on the island of Hokkaidō 北海道. What started out as a standard geological survey, quickly evolved into a lifelong interest in Japan for Lyman. The large collection of letters, books, photographs, and other documents housed under the Benjamin Smith Lyman Collection at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, serve as a primary source on both early relations between the Japanese and the West and the beginnings of the large network of academic writings which today can be classified …

“A Constant Surveillance”: The New York State Police And The Student Peace Movement, 1965-1973, Seth Kershner

Masters Theses

Historians recognize that there was an increase in political repression in the United States during the Vietnam War era. While a number of accounts portray the Federal Bureau of Investigation as the primary driver of repression for many groups and individuals during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly those on the left, historians typically overlook the role played by local and state law enforcement in political intelligence-gathering. This thesis seeks to advance the study of one aspect of this much larger topic by looking at New York State Police surveillance of the Vietnam-era student peace movement. Drawing extensively on State Police …

Cumulative Grief, Xuan Pham

Masters Theses

A written thesis to accompany the M.F.A. Exhibition Cumulative Grief, in which the artist's personal and familial narrative explores the complexity and nuances of racial grief.

Stop Making Sense: Hegel’S Critique Of Common Understanding, Daniel A. Burnfin

Masters Theses

This thesis presents Hegel’s account of abstract ‘understanding’ (Verstand) and asserts that his thought is to be read as primarily presenting a critique of abstract understanding. Verstand involves the methodological supposition of a self-subsistent fundament of what it speaks of, and hence the critique of understanding is the critique of the supposition of self-subsistent fundaments. Grasping his account and reading him in its critical light yields a very different image of Hegel than the caricature of ‘totalizing systems’. The dimension of the Verstandeskritik has been relatively neglected in Hegel-reception and misunderstandings result from trying to ‘understand’ Hegel, by …

Becoming Quasi-Colonial Political Subjects: Garveyism And Labor Organizing In The Tennessee Valley (1921-1945), Ashley Everson

Masters Theses

My research aims to highlight the way in which Black political mobilization in the Southeastern United States specifically is linked to the movement for decolonization throughout Africa and the Caribbean in this time period. This project will include an examination of the thoughts and writings of many of the aforementioned key figures of the Pan African movement on the question of race and coloniality of Black people in the United States. I will organize this examination around the question of Black labor at this time period and the way in which it was (re) organized leading up to the Second …

Kofifi/Covfefe: How The Costumes Of "Sophiatown" Bring 1950s South Africa To Western Massachusetts In 2020, Emma Hollows

Masters Theses

This thesis paper reflects upon the costume design process taken by Emma Hollows to produce a realist production of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company’s musical Sophiatown at the Augusta Savage Gallery at the University of Massachusetts in May 2020. Sophiatown follows a household forcibly removed from their homes by the Native Resettlement Act of 1954 amid apartheid in South Africa. The paper discusses her attempts as a costume designer to strike a balance between replicating history and making artistic changes for theatre, while always striving to create believable characters.

The Art Of Not Seeing: The Immigration And Naturalization Service’S Failed Search For Nazi Collaborators In The United States, 1945-1979, Jeffrey Davis

Masters Theses

From 1945 to 1979, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was responsible for identifying and prosecuting Nazi collaborators and potential war criminals in the United States. It failed in this task for a number of reasons. The first of these was that the agency was severely disorganized and mismanaged. Reliance on interagency cooperation, lack of manpower and resources, and lack of institutional support for “Nazi hunters” posed further problems. Morale crises among employees and the legal difficulties of actually prosecuting Nazi collaborators also hampered the agency’s effectiveness. Most importantly, the agency was overwhelmingly focused on policing the southern border and preventing …

Our Souls Are Already Cared For: Indigenous Reactions To Religious Colonialism In Seventeenth-Century New England, New France, And New Mexico, Gail Coughlin

Masters Theses

This thesis takes a comparative approach in examining the reactions of residents of three seventeenth-century Christian missions: Natick in New England, Kahnawake in New France, and Ohkay Owingeh, New Mexico in New Spain, to religious colonialism. Particular attention is paid to their religious beliefs and participation in colonial warfare. This thesis argues that missions in New England, New France, and New Mexico were spaces of Indigenous culture and autonomy, not due to differing colonial practices of colonizing empires, but due to the actions, beliefs, and worldviews of Indigenous residents of missions. Indigenous peoples, no matter which European powers they interacted …

Treating The Revolution: Health Care And Solidarity In El Salvador And Nicaragua In The 1980s, Brittany Mcwilliams

Masters Theses

Health care played an important role in the revolutions of El Salvador and Nicaragua. Both the Sandinistas and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) prioritized popular health throughout the 1980s. Clinics and hospitals served as sites of revolution that drew healthcare solidarity activists from the United States. These health internationalists worked to build community-level networks that relied upon trained medical volunteers. In both El Salvador and Nicaragua, women comprised a bulk of the community health workers. These women chose to interact with revolution by building on radical promises of universal healthcare access. Healthcare solidarity activists trained community volunteers and …

“Nothing Material Occurred”: The Maritime Captures That Caused Then Outlasted The United States’ Quasi War With France, Emma Zeig

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the French maritime seizures during the eighteenth-century US Quasi War with France (also called the half war, or the United States’ undeclared war with France), encompassing events on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, in France, the United States, and the Caribbean, particularly Haiti. The analysis focuses on the captured ships, telling the stories of seamen who feared for their lives and merchants who lost their ships. This point of view allows the thesis to explore an area of the Quasi War that are less documented in other histories: how civilian participants experienced violence and the indifference …

Interpreting Access: A History Of Accessibility And Disability Representations In The National Park Service, Perri Meldon

Masters Theses

This thesis illustrates the accomplishments and challenges of enhancing accessibility across the national parks, at the same time that great need to diversify the parks and their interpretation of American disability history remains. Chapters describe the administrative history of the NPS Accessibility Program (1979-present), exploring the decisions from both within and outside the federal agency, to break physical and programmatic barriers to make parks more inclusive for people with sensory, physical, and cognitive disabilities; and provide a case study of the Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site (HOFR) in New York. The case study describes the creation of …

Die Bedeutung Der Defa Film Library Im Ostdeutschen Erinnerungsdiskurs, Konstanze Schiller

Masters Theses

The relation between memory and identity is significant, particularly if an identity-establishing entity such as a state has vanished. In the context of GDR memory, this pertains to the type of memory discourse: what is remembered, how, and by whom? What are the differences in the discourse about East German memory between the US and Germany?

Based on approaches of the Aleida Assmann’s approaches to individual, collective, and cultural memory this thesis seeks to examine the notion and impact of archives in collective memory processes and to analyze the extent to which the medium of film as a concrete and …

Wanderers Of Empire: The Tropical Tramp In Latin America, 1870-1930, Jack Werner

Masters Theses

U.S. public and private imperial interests confronted the problem of labor and labor power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as the U.S. empire expanded into Latin America and the Caribbean. The question of how to make an empire work spurred the creation of new labor regimes reliant on black West Indians who traveled to work in the Panama Canal Zone and on United Fruit Company (UFCO) banana plantations. Just as importantly, new labor regimes engendered new categories for troublesome laborers. One of these classifications, “tramp,” surfaced in the United States after the U.S. Civil War as a …

Infants Of The Spring: Disrupting The Narrative, Ifa Bayeza

Masters Theses

This written portion of my thesis will document and codify how I as dramaturg, writer and director adapted and staged the classic Harlem Renaissance novel Infants of the Spring by Wallace Thurman. I walk the reader through how seeing as a director influenced my creative choices through key aspects of production: script development, design, and building the ensemble. The thesis will conclude with a post-production reflection and summary.

Conformity And Digression: Change Of Narrative In A Chinese Peasant's Personal Writing, Danping Wang

Masters Theses

Rural China has gone through dramatic transformation from the Mao era to the post-Mao era. China scholars have been studying the institutional changes closely in the past few decades. However, Chinese peasants’ living experience and their memory and understanding of the past have not yet received enough attention and discussion. By examining personal writings of a peasant named Luo Xuechang in Jiande, Zhejiang province, this paper discusses the complex interactions between the state and the individual. This paper attempts to unfold the juxtaposition of state narratives and personal narratives embedded in Luo’s unpublished memoir, almanacs from 1972 to 1980, notebooks …

Springing Forth Anew: Progress, Preservation, And Park-Building At Roger Williams National Memorial, Sara E. Patton

Masters Theses

The process of local preservation, urban renewal, and national park building at Roger Williams National Memorial in Providence, Rhode Island, reveals important facets of the urban park idea. In 1958, the Providence Preservation Society and the Providence City Plan Commission jointly released the College Hill Study, which called for renewal of the College Hill neighborhood through preservation of the architecturally significant homes, selective demolition, and the creation of a new National Park Unit dedicated to Providence’s founder, Roger Williams. The new park, established in 1965, went through a lengthy planning process before opening in 1984. The planning process revealed concerns …

The Unaccustomed Vanishing Point, Procheta Olson

Masters Theses

The Unaccustomed Vanishing Point is an exhibition of miniature paintings and installations that explore the irregular and fluid terrains of multicultural exchanges in India. Although drawing heavily from Mughal and Persian painting traditions, the paintings are rife with allegories of the postcolonial history, politics, and visual and material culture of contemporary India in the age of globalization. The installations, on the other hand, navigate the intersection of sensory experience and memory while simultaneously examining the dynamics of transnational experiences. Together they map the overlapping boundaries of the personal and social to probe into the complex interplay of cultural hybridity, class, …

The Economy Of Evangelism In The Colonial American South, Julia Carroll

Masters Theses

Eighteenth-century Methodist evangelism supported, perpetuated, and promoted slavery as requisite for a productive economy in the colonial American South. Religious thought of the First Great Awakening emerged alongside a colonial economy increasingly reliant on chattel slavery for its prosperity. The records of well-traveled celebrity minister and provocateur of the Anglican tradition, George Whitefield, suggest how Calvinist-Methodist evangelicals viewed slavery as necessary to supporting colonial ministerial efforts. Whitefield’s absorption of and immersion into American culture is revealed in his owning a plantation, portraying a willingness to sacrifice the mobility of the disfranchised for widespread consumption of evangelical thought. A side effect …

"The Fate Which Takes Us:" Benjamin F. Beall And Jefferson County, (West) Virginia In The Civil War Era, Matthew Coletti

Masters Theses

This thesis analyzes the editorial content of a popular regional newspaper from the Shenandoah Valley, the Spirit of Jefferson, during the height of the Civil-War Era (1848-1870). The newspaper’s editor during most of the period, Benjamin F. Beall, was a white, southern slaveholder of humble origins, who spent time serving in the Confederate military. Beall, however, had also quickly established himself as one of the preeminent Democrats in his home county of Jefferson, as well as both the Shenandoah Valley and the new state of West Virginia. Beall firmly believed in the institution of racial slavery and fought to …

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof: 60 Years Of American Dialogue On Sex, Gender, And The Nuclear Family, Amy Brooks

Masters Theses

This thesis is a two-part work. Its components, a written paper and a one-night symposium/film screening event entitled Tennessee Williams: Gender Play in 2015 and Beyond, have been closely coordinated with my dramaturgical research for the February 2015 University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Theater production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The written inquiry is structured around a chronological, selected American production history of Cat; this history, rendered in a series of three case studies, will (1) synthesize preexisting analyses of Cat’s dramaturgical profile, its impact on American theater, and its position in Williams’s oeuvre; …

La Imposible Serenidad De Michi Panero. Una Historia Y Análisis De El Desencanto, Documental Creativo En El Tiempo De La Transición, Albert Asuncion Benedito

Masters Theses

El Desencanto es una pelicula de tipo documental creativo dirigida por Jaime Chavarri en 1976 que retrata a la familia Panero. Por su tematica y estetica contrasta con la ideologia franquista, y fue leida como un simbolo de su tiempo. A traves del analisis de sus personajes y distintas obras de ese periodo historico, este trabajo trata de analizar este componente simbolico y ofrece una lectura politica de la obra.

Combating Slavery And Colonization: Student Abolitionism And The Politics Of Antislavery In Higher Education, 1833-1841, Michael E. Jirik

Masters Theses

During the early 1830’s, the nascent American Antislavery Society needed support at the local level. This thesis argues that college and seminary students were a crucial demographic that helped garner support for, and spread, abolitionism. Examining the proliferation of radical abolitionism at three locations, Lane Seminary, Andover Theological Seminary, and Amherst College, reveals that students developed intellectual and moral arguments to justify their abolitionist sentiments. Typically, student abolitionists rhetorically battled with faculty, administration, and other students, who all supported colonization, over competing solutions to the problem of slavery. At all three locations, faculty and administration sought to suppress student abolitionism …

An Eerie Jungle Filled With Dragonflies, Sniper Bullets And Ghosts: Changing Perceptions Of Vietnam And The Vietnamese Through The Eyes Of American Troops, Matthew M. Herrera

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the changing perceptions of Vietnam’s landscape and the Vietnamese in the eyes of American troops throughout the Vietnam War. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Vietnamese were depicted as a people misguided by the French and in need of political mobilization by the American media and government. Following heavy investment and a rigged election in 1956, South Vietnam was painted as a beacon of democracy in Southeast Asia and an example of what American aid is capable of. As an increasing American military presence was being established in South Vietnam in the early 1960s, American …