Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Tangled Web: Quakers And The Atlantic Slave System 1625 – 1770., Kate Freedman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation re-contextualizes the Quakers’ history as anti-slavery pioneers by exploring the crucial economic role that the slave-based economies of the British West Indies played in establishing the Quakers as a powerful sect in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Atlantic world. Quakers were driven by their faith to foster a spirit of equality inside and outside of their meetings. They were among the first European religious sects to allow women to preach, to oppose violence and war, and, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth-century, to ban the practice of enslaving other human beings within their membership. Yet the Quakers …

"The Whole Nation Will Move": Grassroots Organizing In Harlem And The Advent Of The Long, Hot Summers, Peter Blackmer

Doctoral Dissertations

“The Whole Nation Will Move” provides a narrative history of grassroots struggles for African American equality and empowerment in Harlem in the decade immediately preceding the era of widespread urban rebellions in the United States. Through a street-level examination of the political education and activism of grassroots organizers, the dissertation analyzes how local people developed a collective radical consciousness and organized to confront and dismantle institutional racism in New York City from 1954-1964. This work also explores how the interests and activities of poor and working-class Black and Puerto Rican residents of Harlem fueled the escalation of protest activity and …

The Privilege Of Blackness: Black Empowerment And The Fight For Liberation In Attala County, Mississippi 1865-1915, Evan Ashford

Doctoral Dissertations

Post-Civil War historiography paid minimal attention to the rural Afro-American impact on Southern social, economic, and political institutions prior to the 20^th century. This dissertation addresses this deficit. The Privilege of Blackness: Black Empowerment and the Fight for Liberation examines how Afro-Americans in rural Mississippi empowered themselves via their mentality, interracial interactions, landownership, labor diversification, education and suffrage as a means to fight for individual and racial liberation. The Privilege of Blackness: Black Empowerment and the Fight for Liberation in Attala County, Mississippi 1865-1915 makes the claim that freedom grounded Afro-American peoples claim to their inalienable rights guaranteed by …

Creating A Symbol Of Science: The Development Of A Standard Periodic Table Of The Elements, Ann Robinson

Doctoral Dissertations

It is probably a surprise to most people that the periodic table they remember from high school chemistry is not the only periodic table – and never has been. Currently there are probably over a thousand different forms. The table in your chemistry textbook or on the wall chart in your chemistry classroom is not the periodic table. It is simply the most commonly used form. In fact, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the international standards-making body for chemistry, has stated that although they encourage the use of this form, they will not endorse any one …

Literary Culture In Early Christian Ireland: Hiberno-Latin Saints’ Lives As A Source For Seventh-Century Irish History, John Higgins

Doctoral Dissertations

The writers of seventh-century Irish saints’ Lives created the Irish past. Their accounts of the fifth-and-sixth century saints framed the narrative of early Irish Christianity for their contemporary and later audience. Cogitosus’s Life of Brigit, Muirchú’s and Tírechán’s accounts of Saint Patrick, and Adomnán’s Life of Columba have guided the understanding of early Irish history from then until now. Unlike other early texts these Lives are securely dated. Composed as tools in the discourse regarding authority in seventh-century Irish ecclesiastical and secular politics, they provide historical insights not available from other sources. In the seventh century Armagh and Kildare …

"No Seas Can Now Divide Us": Captains' Wives, Sister Sailors, And The New England Whalefishery, 1840-1870, Amanda L. Goodheart

Doctoral Dissertations

Between 1840 and 1870, nearly three hundred whaling captains’ wives accompanied their husbands at sea aboard New England whaleships. Unlike previous scholarship which has analyzed these women solely within the context of mid-nineteenth century domesticity, this study argues these women effected real and lasting change within their communities and the New England whalefishery. By going to sea with their husbands, women like Mary Brewster, Susan Veeder, and Elizabeth Marble defied longstanding gendered traditions wherein men hunted whales at sea and women supported those efforts ashore. In doing so, they joined the ranks of the sister sailors, a term first created …

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 …

The History Of Massachusetts Transfer And Articulation Policies In Contexts Of Evolving Higher Education System Structure, Coordination, And Policy Actors, Daniel De La Torre, Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations

Community colleges carry out dual missions providing occupational and collegiate preparation in local communities across the United States. These institutions prepare students for advanced study via transfer policies that lead to enrollment in baccalaureate institutions. State higher education systems use transfer and articulation policies to strengthen academic pathways between two-year and four-year institutions. These policies rely on established governance to facilitate student transfer between sectors. The transfer and articulation literature stresses the importance of statewide policy guidelines, yet little has been written about the process of transfer policy development involving state higher education governance and policy groups and actors. The …

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.

"Al Gaucho Que Llevo En Mí, Sacramente, Como La Custodia Lleva La Hostia”: Ideología Política Y Literatura Gauchesca En El Contexto Cinematográfico De La Revolución Argentina, Ramiro Garcia-Olano

Doctoral Dissertations

This doctoral dissertation studies Manuel Antín’s Don Segundo Sombra (1969), the cinematographic adaptation of Ricardo Güiraldes celebrated “novela de la tierra” of the same title, in the context of the so called “Revolución Argentina”, the military dictatorship that ruled this country between 1966 and 1973. This investigation seeks to shed light on the political struggle for control of the “gauchesca” literary genre that was taking place at this time in the Argentinean cinematographic field. In a time of rampant nationalism, the different political actors that were vying for political power saw in the “gaucho”, who by then had come to …

Golden Palimpsests: America, Cervantes, And The Invention Of Modernity/Coloniality, Antonia Carcelen-Estrada

Doctoral Dissertations

While many theories of colonial discourse emphasize an imperial power imposing its way of thinking and modes of expression onto colonial cultures and peoples, in this dissertation I consider that this imposition affects members of the colonies and the metropolis in different but related ways. In core and periphery alike, the subjects of Spanish colonialism produced documents in which we recognize overlapping, conflicting narratives. I call this strategy for narrative resistance “golden palimpsests” because, as the epigraph suggests, they appear to tell the story of donkeys covered in gold, while in fact they hide the true story of noble horses …

Curating Heritage In The Digital Age: An Exploration Of How America’S National Heritage Areas Are Using Technology To Share Their Stories, Desiree Demski-Hamelin

School of Public Policy Capstones

Research Question

This capstone project answers the following two primary research questions: 1) how are America’s National Heritage Areas (NHAs) using technology to share their stories, and 2) what types of information are NHAs using technology to share? Additional secondary research questions are outlined in the Methodology section.

Data Source

Primary data was collected from the websites and social media accounts of each of the forty-eight active NHAs in the United States as of April 2018.

Methodology

Systematic observational content analysis of the websites and social media accounts was conducted by the author. Two rating schemes were developed to assess …

Memory And History In South Eleuthera: A Report To The People Of South Eleuthera, Elena Sesma

Archaeological Project Reports

Over the past 5 years, archaeologists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have made several short-term trips to South Eleuthera to research the history of this portion of the island. Our main interests have been in understanding how the landscape has changed over the past 150 years, and especially in the past few decades as tourism has fallen off in the south. Through a combination of ethnographic research and pedestrian survey of the South Eleuthera landscape, we have gained a clearer understanding of the history of this region, and of contemporary life today. This report offers a summary of findings …

The Limits Of Victorian Federalism: E.A. Freeman's History Of Federal Government, Timothy Lang

History Open Access Publications

In 1863, Edward Augustus Freeman published the first volume of his History of Federal Government, a study of ancient Greek federalism under the Achaean League. Though unknown today, Freeman was the most enthusiastic advocate of the federal idea that Victorian England produced. He is best considered a liberal nationalist who was drawn to federalism because it addressed the problems posed by continental nationalism. He endorsed nationalist movements in Italy, Germany and the Balkans, and opposed the Austrian and Ottoman empires on the grounds that they violated the principles of nationality and popular sovereignty. To help build these nation-sates, Freeman …

Rousseau And The Paradox Of The Nation-State, Timothy Lang

History Open Access Publications

The nation-state, as it emerged in Europe during the nineteenth century, was perhaps the most paradoxical political institution of its age. Liberals endorsed nation-states, believing they would lead to peace, prosperity, and good government. But all too often they did the opposite. Reading Rousseau’s Social Contract against the eighteenth-century state system reveals one way in which political thinking at the end of the Enlightenment anticipated this paradox. Neither nationalism nor the nation-state were fully developed concepts at the time, though the glimpses of them that appeared in Rousseau’s works suggest just how problematic the emerging nation-state might be. Rousseau set …

History & Sustainability, David Glassberg

Sustainability Education Resources

Americans debate whether their ever-rising consumption of natural resources and standard of living can continue indefinitely into the future. This is not a new question; since the mid-1800s, movements for the conservation of nature have challenged the primacy of unbridled development and met fierce opposition from those charging that these movements threaten the American dream of individual economic opportunity. Through exploring the history of these ideas, students will gain a better understanding of the meaning of sustainability in contemporary America, especially in response to the forces of global capitalism and the challenges of a changing climate. This course grows out …