Digital Commons Network^™

Running With The Land: Racial Capitalism, Restrictive Covenants, And The Pre-Redlining Roots Of The Private Real Estate Market In Syracuse, New York, Michael Thomas Kelly

Theses - ALL

This thesis locates the roots of the private U.S. real estate market, and racially segregated housing geographies, within a broader, multi-century project of establishing, racializing, and spatializing private property in land. Using archival methods, I examine and directly connect late 18th century land speculation and settlement, early 20th century real estate capitalist class formation, and the construction of all-white suburban sub-divisions based on racially restricted covenants. I investigate the city of Syracuse – a small, post-industrial city in Upstate New York on unceded Onondaga Nation land and one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States. I argue …

'A Deadly Menace To All Young Womankind': Seduction And Protective Legislation In America, 1850-1923, Elissa Michelle Isenberg

Dissertations - ALL

"A Deadly Menace to All Young Womankind": Seduction and Protective Legislation in America, 1850-1923 looks at sexual harassment before it was an actionable offense. Although female domestic servants have endured unwanted sexual attention for most of American history, the entry of women into wage labor in factories and offices during the late nineteenth century dramatically increased the number of girls and women that were subjected to what we today call harassment. Careful examination of American newspaper archives, court records, and reformers' personal papers have uncovered cases of unsolicited sexual advances toward women, and have demonstrated that sexual harassment was considered …

‘A Deadly Menace To All Young Womankind’: Seduction And Protective Legislation In America, 1850-1923, Elissa Michelle Isenberg

Dissertations - ALL

“A Deadly Menace to All Young Womankind”: Seduction and Protective Legislation in America, 1850-1923 looks at sexual harassment before it was an actionable offense. Although female domestic servants have endured unwanted sexual attention for most of American history, the entry of women into wage labor in factories and offices during the late nineteenth century dramatically increased the number of girls and women that were subjected to what we today call harassment. Careful examination of American newspaper archives, court records, and reformers’ personal papers have uncovered cases of unsolicited sexual advances toward women, and have demonstrated that sexual harassment was considered …

How The Classroom Schools: A Focused Ethnography Exploring The Built Classroom Environment And Its Inhabitants In One Kindergarten, Meredith Devennie

Dissertations - ALL

This study is a focused ethnography around the sociology of a classroom’s built environment and its young inhabitants. I spent three months immersed in a kindergarten classroom where I used child-centered research methods (ie. the kids created collaborative and individual classroom maps and conducted child-led video tours) alongside participant observation to gather data related to how young children perceive and experience the materiality and spatiality of their classroom.

As a result of grounded visual and multi-modal analysis, I centered the young children’s voices and perspectives and discovered how the kids picked up on certain physical and symbolic markers bounding zones …

“Saved To Citizenship”: The Rhetoric Of Delinquency And Industriousness In The New York Catholic Protectory, 1902-1911, Lucas Joshua Hann

Theses - ALL

In recent years, rhetorical scholars have been increasingly interested in questions of borders and citizenship. Scholars such as J. David Cisneros, Karma Chávez, Lisa Flores, and D. Robert DeChaine have tended to contemporary struggles at the southern U.S. border, while others, such as Jeffrey Bennett and Robert Asen, have articulated theories of citizenship that are tied to notions of belonging. To complement this ongoing work in the field, there is a need for additional historic work that seeks to understand the underpinnings of contemporary debates. In this thesis, I argue that the New York Catholic Protectory, in its mission to …

Operating Outside Of Empire: Trading Citizenship In The Atlantic World, 1783-1815, Mark Dragoni

Dissertations - ALL

Operating Outside of Empire: Trading Citizenship in the Atlantic World, 1783-1815, looks at markets and ships as spaces for negotiation between merchants and the state. The dissertation follows the experiences of former British colonists in America who won independence and then immediately tried to find a way to get back into the British empire. For American merchants, such as Nicholas Low, William Constable, and Thomas Handasyd Perkins, the inconsistently-governed Caribbean provided an entry point to the greater British Atlantic and the markets of the empire. These merchants won access by exploiting the opportunities offered by environmental catastrophes, slave rebellions and …

Stretching The Circle: First-Generation College Students Navigate Their Educational Journey, Nicole Zervas Adsitt

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation is a qualitative study that explores how first-generation college students experienced their educational journey in a private four-year institution of higher education. Using data from in depth interviews with 19 first generation college students from three private four year institutions, this study looked at how participants made sense of race, class, gender, and Socioeconomic Status (SES) as it intersects with their first-generation status as part of their lived experience within a private educational setting. It also examined how first-generation students traversed the borders and margins of different communities as they pursue higher education and the kinds of cultural …

Please Forget To Floss: Developing An Assay For Identifying Tuberculosis In Dental Calculus From The Smithsonian’S Huntington Collection (1893-1921), Soleil Young

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Tuberculosis is one of the most ubiquitous diseases in human history. Despite the long history of human interactions with the disease, tracking it retroactively is difficult because of its low rate of associated, diagnostic bony changes. Ancient DNA, also called aDNA, is a novel method for examining the presence of disease in the past. Currently, the only way to isolate tuberculosis aDNA is to drill and section bone, a method that is both invasive and expensive, limiting its use in the archaeological record. This capstone examines new ways of tracking and understanding tuberculosis in the past, utilizing the DNA trapped …

The Dynamics Of Conflict: Transforming Northern Ireland, Ronit Berger

Dissertations - ALL

The main goal of this project is to gain a better understanding of the process of conflict transformation. More specifically, I wish to examine what are the circumstances that push Dual Wing Resistance Organizations (DWRO), and particularly, the Irish Provisional Republican Movement to behave in one of four different ways: convergent towards violence, convergence towards cooperation, divergence and confusion.

My main argument is that in order to understand conflict transformation processes and what pushes an organization to behave in a particular way one must look into the interaction between factors at three levels of analysis: the context, organizational dynamics and …

Profit Shifting And Manipulation, Byron Dela Rosa

Honors Capstone Projects - All

As of late, many U.S. firms have made their way overseas in ways many feel are unethical. U.S. multinationals have taken note of the unimaginable domestic corporate income tax rate the United States has set for these U.S. corporations. Similar to an individual paycheck you may receive, you must pay a portion to the U.S. government in taxes. And even more similarly, you wish that you did not have to pay it either. U.S. multinationals have the same mindset, as they have found ways to avoid the corporate income tax through foreign activity strategies. Using scholarly research papers and well-renown …

Making Fenians: The Transnational Constitutive Rhetoric Of Revolutionary Irish Nationalism, 1858-1876, Timothy Richard Dougherty

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation traces the constitutive rhetorical strategies of revolutionary Irish nationalists operating transnationally from 1858-1876. Collectively known as the Fenians, they consisted of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the United Kingdom and the Fenian Brotherhood in North America. Conceptually grounded in the main schools of Burkean constitutive rhetoric, it examines public and private letters, speeches, Constitutions, Convention Proceedings, published propaganda, and newspaper arguments of the Fenian counterpublic. It argues two main points. First, the separate national constraints imposed by England and the United States necessitated discursive and non-discursive rhetorical responses in each locale that made it near impossible to sustain …

In Search Of A Single Voice: The Politics Of Form, Use And Belief In The Kernewek Language, Jesse Owen Harasta

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation is based upon fieldwork performed between 2007 and 2011 in Cornwall, a region of Southwestern Britain notable for its ambiguous ethnic identity - caught between England and the Celtic nations - and its unique, revived Celtic language, Kernewek. During the course of the research, work focused upon the role of the language revival movement as a tool for ethnic identification: hardening boundaries, shoring up faltering communities and nationalist purification. However, the language movement is divided into three primary factions, which take differing approaches to the language, and to their corresponding language ideology based upon their relationship to Cornish …

Paper Towns: Sense Of Place In Industrial, Small-Town New England, 1869-1927, David William Deacon

History - Dissertations

After the Civil War, new technologies and business structures transformed the American economy and society. One area that has received much attention in the antebellum period but much less after the Civil War, is small town New England. In the late 1860s, the introduction of wood pulp paper technology transformed formerly small market and manufacturing communities into centers of heavy industry. This dissertation is a study of this transformation. It focuses on three communities: Bellows Falls, Vermont, Franklin, New Hampshire, and Turners Falls, Massachusetts.

This study examines four broad areas: the historical background of the towns, and townspeople's awareness of …

The "Troubles:" Northern Irish Political Contention From Sunningdale To The Good Friday Agreement, Daniel J. Foley

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This paper looks to answer the question: Can the contentious politics thesis of Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly explain why the Good Friday Agreement (1998) (GFA) successfully produced a lasting peace in Northern Ireland, when the Sunningdale (1973) and the Anglo-Irish (1985) agreements failed to do so? I set out to study the buildup and aftermath of each agreement and subsequently examine each through the lens of the contentious politics thesis, searching for causal mechanisms and processes that explain the success of the GFA. The purpose of the contentious politics thesis is not to examine various forms of …

Learning Lessons And Being Schooled: The Relational Lessons Of Young Women In An Alternative High School, Michelle Renee Maher

Cultural Foundations of Education - Dissertations & Theses

This dissertation is a qualitative investigation of 12 female high school graduates who had previously dropped out or were pushed out of public high school and who attended and graduated from "Conservation High School" (CHS), located in the Pacific Northwest. CHS is an alternative high school organized around an environmental conservation theme. In this study, participants describe how their relationships with peers and teachers in each school affected their commitment to finish school. I analyze participants' awareness of how power dynamics were communicated to students through social organization, school practices, meaning making systems, constructions of identity, and others' behavior. The …

Penance: A Novel, Rachel Anne Weiser

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Penance is a fictional novel written both as an Honors Capstone project and as a work that will be further revised and eventually submitted for professional publication.

The novel is set in modern day, in the fictional southern city of Avington. Avington, like the rest of the world, is home to a group of terrifying creatures called the nephilim, a name derived from Hebrew, meaning “the fallen.” The nephilim are humans who once died and were reborn as undead creatures; because of their insatiable thirst for human life energy, they are considered demons with the faces of men. Despite the …

Dancing With A Literary Devil: The Rushdie Affair In Britain, Arjun Mishra

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This paper studies the Rushdie Affair, which gripped the world from 1988-1990 and at its height included a death sentence from the Ayatollah of Iran to a British subject. The Rushdie Affair was a series of events that began with the publication of The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, a critically acclaimed British-Indian novelist. The situation spiraled out of control from there, as Muslims throughout the world claimed offense to what they perceived as insults to Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. The Rushdie Affair came to be characterized by violent riots in Pakistan and India, censures throughout the world, and …

The Settlers Of Catan And A Study Of Trade In Non-Cooperative Games, Dmitriy Ioselevich

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Free trade has long been hailed as the world’s answer to increased competitiveness, greater overall wealth and a higher standard of living. Adam Smith’s ideas on the foundations of capitalism assert that open market policies lead to global economic growth, and conversely that protectionist measures stunt growth and inflate prices. Critics argue that protectionism helps protect developing markets and industries and prevents unfair competition. But in the debate over trade which economic policy is actually best?

To answer this question I conducted an experiment using the board game, The Settlers of Catan, as an economic model. I isolated trade …

Partings—A Short Film, Alicia Atterberry

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Love is a powerful force, but the inability to give love to the fullest extent can be an influential force as well. For my capstone, Partings—a Short Film, I wrote a short film centered on the theme of unreciprocated love. Within the context of the film, unreciprocated love means not being able to return the sincerity or the full extent of the love felt, and my short film shows the consequences of a friendship that lacks mutually-expressed love.

Partings, depicts the end of a friendship between two characters: Frank and Angie. Frank is an independent, young woman; she …

Fueling Ukraine’S Future: Using Microfinance As A Tool For Reducing Energy Dependency And Changing Lives, Justin Cole

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Ukraine is a country heavily dependent on other countries for its natural gas supply, leaving it vulnerable to interruptions in supply. One of its largest suppliers, Russia, has twice taken drastic means of physically closing the pipelines, thereby cutting off this supply and illustrating to Ukraine and the world the leverage that it can exercise. While at the present time the cut-offs have lasted no longer than a few weeks, future cut-offs could become more common and longer in duration. When compounded with the troubled history between the two countries, one can quickly see the precipitous situation that has the …

Beneath The Waves, Allison Nast

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Beneath the Waves is an original, feature-length screenplay. It is a fairy tale set in Ireland, where a woman dives to the bottom of the ocean to reclaim her husband, who had been taken by mermaids. She succeeds in rescuing her husband, and in doing so discovers that mermaids are not the beautiful women of legend, but rather man-eating deep-sea creatures. I wrote the short story Brigid and the Mermaids in my junior year in order to get the basic storyline down in an understandable form. In writing the screenplay I used the free screenwriting program Celtx, which formats easily …

True You Magazine, Amanda Romaniello

Honors Capstone Projects - All

True You Magazine was created because of the turmoil and conflict that today’s media creates for young girls between the ages of 10 years old and 14 years old. Girls of this age are highly susceptible to influences of any media form, including magazines, television shows, and movies. In the magazine industry, there are many women’s and teen fashion and health magazines. Unfortunately, the majority of these publications lack healthy representation of female bodies. Some of these magazines also discuss and advise on topics, like sex or dieting, that girls in this young age range should not be reading.

Knowing …

Drive Magazine, Shannon Sweeney

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Abstract Not Included