Digital Commons Network^™

Fifty Years Of Underrepresented Student Advocacy At One Jesuit Secondary School, Sonya Cotero Arriola

Doctoral Dissertations

Across the United States Conference, Catholic and Jesuit secondary schools are experiencing tremendous change in their student demographics. Schools of today are being challenged to consider what true inclusion looks like within their community vis-à-vis students whose racial, economic, sexual and gender identities do not fit the traditional Catholic or Jesuit school mold. The racial and social order of the United States is replicated within Catholic and Jesuit schools, even when those same communities claim to promote values of inclusion and opportunity. History offers valuable insights to school communities grappling with these questions.

This qualitative study centers the efforts of …

Yaupon Drink: A Medicine Bundle In The Atlantic World, Steven P. Carriger Jr

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines yaupon drink, a tea made from yaupon holly along with other ingredients, as a medicine bundle in the Atlantic World. Originally a medicinal drink used by Native Americans across the what is today the American South, over time the tea became a trade good demanded by the Spanish and a medicinal herb sought by European botanists and medical practitioners. Chapter One traces yaupon’s origins across the southeast and bundles the drink into the many cosmic and social connections it held. Chapter Two shows how the Spanish colonial presence offered an alternative to yaupon in Florida, through Christianity …

Exploring Ways To Bring Culturally Relevant Pedagogy Into Rehabilitative Programs, Reginold P. Daniels

Doctoral Dissertations

The present study analyzes the effectiveness of a culturally relevant prison rehabilitation program carried out with 41 inmates at a California jail. The aspect of prison rehabilitation has not received enough attention by researchers previously. In this case, the author conducted an in-depth quantitative analysis on a survey with participants that he was teaching. Regression analysis was used to explore the data. The results of the regression indicated that the culturally-relevant instructor significantly enhanced violence prevention (r (37) = .410, p < 0.05). Furthermore, the study also found that cultural relevance significantly impacted communication and relationship skills (r (37) = .423, p < 0.05).

Books As Medicine: A History Of The Use Of Reading To Treat The Self And Its Diseases In The Anglophone World, 1800-1940, Mary Mahoney

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the history of the idea that books can serve as medicine. Focusing on the Anglophone world from 1800 to 1940, it traces the emergence of what became known as “bibliotherapy.” Readers have long conceived of their reading as therapeutic, but this dissertation examines the moment when experts inserted themselves between reader and book in the name of health and debated what books could treat, which books made the best medicine, and who should decide. Through a series of case studies, this dissertation explores the use of therapeutic reading to treat diseases of imagination in nineteenth-century asylums, the …

Alternative Biographies: (Re)Telling Feminine (Hi)Stories In Selected 20th-Century Texts By Québécois Women Writers, Jessica Mcbride

Doctoral Dissertations

The objective of this dissertation is to examine the tendency on the part of several québécois women authors from the 20^th century to create alternative feminine biographies for forgotten, undervalued, or misrepresented women from the past. Given the complex relationship the Québécois have with their provincial history, and the central role chauvinistic representations of women and the “Québec national text” play in safeguarding the québécois cultural identity, contemporary women writers from Québec are singularly poised to resurrect, recreate, revive, and rewrite the feminine historical experience into the traditional discourse of History. From Québec’s most famous woman writer, Anne Hébert, …

Privileged Killers, Privileged Deaths: German Culture And Aviation In The First World War: 1909-1925, Robert William Rennie

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines aviation’s influence on German cultural and social history between 1908 and 1925. Before the First World War, aviation embodied one of many new features of a rapidly modernizing Germany. In response, Germans viewed flight as either a potentially transformative tool or a possible weapon of war. The outbreak of war in 1914 moved aviation away from its promised potential to its lived reality. In doing so, the airplane became a machine which compressed time and space, reordered the spatial arrangement of the battlefield, and transformed the human relationship with killing. Germany’s fliers initially served as observers, noting …

Edward Channing’S Writing Revolution: Composition Prehistory At Harvard, 1819-1851, Bradfield Edward Dittrich

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation, building on the work of John Brereton, Robert Connors, and others returns to the Harvard University Archives to reconstruct the Harvard rhetoric program under the leadership of Edward Tyrrel Channing from 1819 to 1851. During that time, coincident with the industrial revolution, U.S. publishers experienced a period of rapid growth as the cost of production for books, newspapers, and magazines dropped, and demand for print grew among a nascent middle class. Against that backdrop, and in spite of considerable resistance, Channing engineered a substantial shift at Harvard from an oratory-based curriculum to a writing-based one, just as the …

Invisible Suburbs: Privatized Growth In Suburban Metropolitan Denver, 1950-2000, Kevin Weinman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation studies the causes and effects of rapid and uncoordinated suburban growth in metropolitan Denver, Colorado after the Second World War. The region experienced sprawling, low-density residential development on its periphery despite a powerful wave of anti-growth sentiment and that swept the state in the sixties and seventies. This study argues that this resulted from the difficulties experienced by Coloradans in reconciling a number of their cherished ethics: individual freedom and the sanctity of property rights versus a nascent environmentalism, fervent pursuit of wealth and economic opportunity versus an enduring celebration of the state’s traditional ranching heritage and rural …

Beyond Boston: Catholicism In The Northern New Borderlands In The Nineteenth Century, Molly Gallaher Boddy

Doctoral Dissertations

This study uncovers the religious and ethnic history of northern New England- Maine and Vermont- which has remained for too long on the periphery of scholars’ attention. In 1836, the Vermont Catholic missionary priest Jeremiah O’Callaghan warned members of the New England Catholic Church that “our own Catholicks (are) every where scattered in the woods,” writing not only of the hostile outside Protestant world faced by Catholics in Vermont during the nineteenth century, but also of the difficulty of ministering to such a geographically removed or “scattered” rural population. Still today, the story of these northern New England Catholics that …

“Those Events Really Happened!” How Elementary Students Transact With History And Historical Fiction While Reading The American Girl Series, Sarah Lewis Philpott

Doctoral Dissertations

This qualitative study examines how elementary readers transact with history and historical fiction while reading the American Girl series. A review of literature revealed a lack of educational research about the AG series and a need for research concerning how elementary students transact with historical fiction. The researcher attempted to answer the following questions:

1. How do fourth grade students transact with history while reading the AG series of historical fiction?
2. How do fourth grade students transact with the AG series of historical fiction?

The researcher interviewed, observed, and participated in a book club with seven public school females. Data were …

"An Ill-Judged Piece Of Business": The Failure Of Slave Trade Suppression In A Slaveholding Republic, Sarah A. Batterson

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the U.S. suppression of the slave trade from the ratification of the Constitution in 1789 to the onset of the Civil War in 1861. Instead of studying the slave trade in isolation, this dissertation evaluates U.S. slave trade policy within the context of the development of federal power during the early republic and antebellum period. This work assesses the disconnect between the harsh laws against the slave trade and the United States' ineffectiveness at suppressing the trade, especially since, at its founding, U.S. involvement in the African slave trade seemed to have a looming expiration date.

By …

A “Christian America” Restored: The Rise Of The Evangelical Christian School Movement In America, 1920-1952, Robert G. Slater

Doctoral Dissertations

Finding the origins and causes of the twentieth century evangelical Christian school movement in America during the years 1920-1952 was the subject of this study. Numerous primary and secondary sources were utilized. Primary sources consisted of original minutes of the proceedings of the National Education Association, the National Union of Christian Schools, and the National Association of Evangelicals. In addition, numerous evangelical publications of this era such as Moody Monthly, The Sunday School Times, and United Evangelical Action were consulted. From within the movement original sources such as Christian School Statistics, The Christian Teacher, and The National Association of Christian …

Gothic Modernism: Revising And Representing The Narratives Of History And Romance, Taryn Louise Norman

Doctoral Dissertations

Gothic Modernism: Revising and Representing the Narratives of History and Romance analyzes the surprising frequency of the tones, tropes, language, and conventions of the classic Gothic that oppose the realist impulses of Modernism. In a letter F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about The Great Gatsby, he explains that he “selected the stuff to fit a given mood or ‘hauntedness’” (Letters 551). This “stuff” constitutes the “subtler means” that Virginia Woolf wrote about when she observed that the conventions of the classic Gothic no longer evoked fear: “The skull-headed lady, the vampire gentleman, the whole troop of monks and monsters …

Shifting Alliances And Fairweather Friends: Luso-American Relations, 1941--1951, Paula Celeste Gomes Noversa. Rioux

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the diplomatic relations between Portugal and the United States from 1941 to 1951, a decade that resulted in a tremendous and permanent shift in Luso-American relations. It examines the wartime and postwar goals of both Portugal and the United States. It reveals how these two nations overcame their differences during the war and worked towards mutually beneficial ends after the war. Moreover this dissertation asserts that Antonio Salazar, Portugal's Prime Minister, permanently altered Portuguese-American relations and managed to supplant the assurances found in the flagging AngloPortuguese alliance with a series of American initiatives--the European Recovery Program, the …

Inventing George Whitefield: Celebrity And The Making Of A Religious Icon, Jessica M. Parr

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the making of the public image of eighteenth-century Anglican missionary George Whitefield through his use of trans-Atlantic public print networks. Whitefield, who was a consummate self-promoter and publisher of his own work, played a central role in the development of his image. The success of his publishing campaign meant that he reached iconic status, his every move seemingly documented in newspapers and pamphlets around Great Britain and its American dominions.

Owing to Whitefield's successful use of the trans-Atlantic public print networks and his itinerant preaching, Whitefield's influence extended well beyond national, denominational, racial and ethnic boundaries. The …

From Sweetwater To Seawater: An Environmental History Of Narragansett Bay, 1636--1849, Christopher L. Pastore

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines environmental change on and around Narragansett Bay from first European settlement in 1636 to the dissolution of the Blackstone Canal Company in 1849. It uses one of the largest estuaries on the East Coast and one situated at the heart of early English settlement in New England as a means to write estuaries into Atlantic history. Examining the ecological and epistemological complexities that arose at the nexus of land and sea, where improvable space and the push of "progress" met an eternal or "profound" ocean, this study reframes estuaries as watery borderlands that people used but never …

The Origins Of American History In The Early Modern English Atlantic World, Ian J. Aebel

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is the story of how the English wrote the history of America between c. 1500 and c. 1700. Utilizing printed and manuscript sources, it argues that writing American history allowed English writers to navigate, negotiate, and contest the terms of a developing Atlantic empire. In doing so, the English created a vision of America to compete with the dominant Spanish narrative by the end of the seventeenth century.

The existence of America gave the English an opportunity to explore the prospect of overseas empire. After the Columbian encounter, English thinkers and writers transformed their historical methodology to accommodate …

Campaigning For Authenticity, Erica J. Seifert

Doctoral Dissertations

In the fall of 1976 Jimmy Carter wanted to be "an American President... who is not isolated from our people, but a President who feels your pain and who shares your dreams." With humble, hopeful, homey images of Plains, Georgia, campaign advertisements sold Carter as a fresh-off-the-farm, peanut-picking Cincinnatus---an authentic American to whom voters could relate.

Authenticity became increasingly important to candidate selection in the late twentieth century for multiple reasons. As a priority of the Babyboom Generation, the value of authenticity informed Americans' relationships to own another and evaluations of their cultural products. Political and cultural upheaval resulting from …

Creek Diplomacy In An Imperial Atlantic World, Deena L. Parmelee

Doctoral Dissertations

"Creek Diplomacy in an Imperial Atlantic World," argues that Creek leaders saw opportunities for Creek peoples to play an important political and economic role in the Atlantic world even while the Confederacy itself was still forming. This study explores Creek participation in the Atlantic world in two ways. First, it traces Creek diplomatic travel to European centers. Second, it examines Creek reception of European traders and diplomats in Creek towns. In this way, it traces Creek diplomacy in its external and internal forms, as Creeks moved outward to establish diplomatic relations with others, and dealt with outsiders who came to …

Slavery Exacts An Impossible Price: John Quincy Adams And The Dorcas Allen Case, Washington, Dc, Alison T. Mann

Doctoral Dissertations

On August 22, 1837, a Georgetown resident sold Dorcas Allen and her four children to James H. Birch, a District of Columbia slave trader He transported them across the Potomac to Alexandria, Virginia to hold them in the largest slave pen in the District. They faced, most likely, passage on a slave coffle to Natchez or New Orleans. That same evening, Allen, who had married and been living unofficially in the District as a "free Negro" for a number of years, killed the two youngest children and was restrained from harming the others, after their terrified shrieks alerted someone nearby. …

Making A "Black Beverly Hills": The Struggle For Housing Equality In Modern Los Angeles, Jennifer Mandel

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the black struggle for housing equality through mid-twentieth century Los Angeles, California. Alongside the rise of Los Angeles as a major metropolitan center, residential discrimination became embedded in the fabric of the city and African Americans found themselves forced to live on the increasingly run down Eastside. In response, a number of middle- and upper-class blacks led a campaign against housing discrimination by migrating to the Westside. While they were accused of abandoning low-income blacks and adopting white norms, affluent blacks defied racial restrictive covenants, endured white intimidation, and pursued lawsuits in an effort to live in …

"This Wilderness World": The Evolution Of A New England Farm Town, 1820--1840, Mary Babson Fuhrer

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation uses the extraordinary conflict that roiled one rural town in central Massachusetts during the second quarter of the nineteenth century as a lens through which to observe communal relationships in transition. Using the Amish as a model, the dissertation identifies traditional communal social organization as agrarian, patriarchal, communal, homogeneous, localistic, and consensual -- as well as closed, conformist, and suspicious of difference and innovation. The dissertation argues that conflict arose in Boylston during the 1820s and '30s as these traditional relationships gradually gave way to more modern ways of belonging, associating, and envisioning one's place in the wider …

The Maritime Revival: Antimodernity, Class, And Culture, 1870--1940, Glenn Michael Grasso

Doctoral Dissertations

Between 1870 and 1940, Americans redefined their perceptions, ideas, and cultural meanings of seafaring under sail. The Maritime Revival---a cultural phenomenon that took the workaday nineteenth-century maritime world and converted it into an archetypical exercise in essential Americanism---selectively picked stories, symbols, and specific lifestyles and elevated them to heroic status. Part of larger nineteenth-century revivalism, the Maritime Revival created an image of seafaring that was a small subset of the entire experience-as-lived. By the 1930s, Americans recognized a heroic, but lost, golden age of sailing ships that did not correspond to the maritime world that had once been a ubiquitous …

A Wild Web: The Tangled History Of Attitudes Toward Wildlife In A Dynamic New England Culture, 1945--1985, Mary H. Hopkins

Doctoral Dissertations

Attitudes toward wildlife are considerably more complex than one might suspect. This dissertation started with a hypothesis that population growth would correlate with increasing negative attitudes toward wildlife, but historical evidence only partially supports this hypothesis. Information about the frequency and types of wildlife references appearing in newspapers between 1945 and 1985 was gathered from a systematic sampling of six New Hampshire newspapers that represented towns with differing growth trends. While analysis of quantitative data minimized any correlation between growth and negative attitudes, qualitative data from newspaper articles, archival sources, government reports, books and articles, and other sources provided evidence …

Prodigal Sons: Indigenous Missionaries In The British Atlantic World, 1640--1780, Edward E. Andrews

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the hundreds of black and Native American preachers who worked as Christian missionaries in the early modern British Atlantic world. While scholars have generally accepted the convention that most missionaries were white Europeans who knew little about the native peoples they were trying to convert, there were practical and theological explanations for why native preachers not only became ubiquitous, but often outnumbered their white counterparts in Protestant missions. The language barrier, the opportunity to tap into extensive kinship networks, and early modern interpretations of black and Indian bodies all catalyzed the formation of an indigenous evangelical corps …

The Taxpayer As Reformer: 'Pocketbook Politics' And The Law, 1860--1940, Linda Upham-Bornstein

Doctoral Dissertations

Taxes and the citizens' tax burden have always been at the hub of American politics. This dissertation opens up consideration of taxpayers as political and legal actors, who saw paying taxes as a source of political legitimacy and empowerment. It examines the powerful connection between organized taxpayer activity, political reform, and the law.

Organized taxpayers have relied heavily on the law in general, and on taxpayers' lawsuits in particular, to promote their interests and political reform. During the last half of the nineteenth century courts, and legislatures throughout the nation came to recognize the right of taxpayers to bring suit …

Home And Identity In Cambodia : Implications Of The Revolution And Internal Turmoil Of The 1970s On Children's Right To Education, Nadine Agosta

Doctoral Dissertations

unavailable

Negotiating For Nature: Conservation Diplomacy And The Convention On Nature Protection And Wildlife Preservation In The Western Hemisphere, 1929--1976, Keri Lewis

Doctoral Dissertations

In 1941, as the United States entered the Second World War, leaders from twenty American nations signed into effect a broad-based treaty for the protection of migratory wildlife at the Convention on Nature Protection and Wild Life Preservation in the Western Hemisphere. This dissertation examines the unique set of questions, problems, and concerns framers of the Convention dealt with in the development of a conservation program to ensure the protection of migratory wildlife as it crossed political borders. Although it provided no solid system of enforcement, the provisions of the Convention opened the door for new, more specific conservation treaties …

Dissecting The Pennsylvania Anatomy Act: Laws, Bodies, And Science, 1880--1960, Venetia M. Guerrasio

Doctoral Dissertations

When the Pennsylvania Legislature passed a mandatory anatomy law in 1883, they were conceding to medicine and science the need for human dissection "material." The legislature was also conceding authority, entrusting physicians and scientists to regulate the messy business of human dissection. In addition to providing bodies for dissection, the Pennsylvania Anatomy Act of 1883 created a modern, state-level bureaucratic entity run by medical experts empowered with self governance: the Anatomical Board of Pennsylvania. Scholars have paid scant attention to the post grave-robbing history of anatomy and dissection in the United States. When the state engaged in body procurement for …

32 In '44: A Management And Environmental Study Of Submarine Construction At Portsmouth Navy Yard During World War Ii, Rodney Keith Watterson

Doctoral Dissertations

After averaging the completion of less than two submarines a year in the 1930s, the Portsmouth Navy Yard completed an astonishing thirty-two submarines in 1944. The yard's outstanding performance during World War II was the product of a highly motivated work force and a management team that thrived in a decentralized wartime shipyard environment. Employing aggressive and innovative management techniques that included employee empowerment, small teams, and mass production techniques to the extent that they could be applied to submarine construction at the time, the shipyard delivered submarines at unprecedented rates.

There were downsides to the shipyard's crowning achievements during …