Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Suppression Of National Identities: Ukrainian And Baltic Cultures In The Soviet Union, Jonathan H. Mastman

Master's Theses

This thesis defines the formation and consummation of Soviet Bolshevism as another imperialist force rather than its stated objective of freeing the people of the United Soviet Socialist Republics from the clutches of an inequitable elite. Through the policies and objectives of the Soviet government the workers and citizens of Ukraine and the Baltic republics were not liberated or given autonomy over their lives and labor, as Marxist-Leninism would have them believe. I review the Russification efforts found first in the Tsarist Russian Empire and then continued by Soviets in the nature of pursuing or denying cultural, political, and economic …

The Women Of Justice: Narratives Of Women Attorneys In California During The 1960s And 1990s, Sarah Zion

Master's Theses

This thesis interviews two women attorneys who have not previously shared their stories to relate their experience of going to law school and entering the field after graduation. The study of women lawyers and their stories is not a new topic, however, there is a focus in the scholarship to only explore the tales of the women who reached the big firsts, such as first female lawyer or first female judge. By providing interviews of women who have not reached these big accomplishments, the field gains a more rounded understanding of the history of female lawyers. The two women interviewed …

Reconstructing Identity: Carlton Burgan, Patient Zero In The Development Of Plastic Surgery, Civil War Through World War I, Teresa M. George

Master's Theses

Plastic surgery has played an integral role in helping people achieve societal expectations of appropriate physical appearance since its inception. Through the story of Carlton Burgan, a Union soldier during the American Civil War, who suffered severe facial trauma by mercury poisoning, this thesis hopes to reconstruct the conversation around plastic surgery’s origins as it is influenced by societal standards of the day. Specifically, this thesis argues that the seminal moments leading to plastic surgery being seen as a worthwhile medical specialty was during the Civil War, not World War I as so many scholars have put forth. Violent acts …

Los Zetas, Neoliberalism, And Popular Opposition: A Study In Linkages, Gina R. Lyle

Master's Theses

Los Zetas are considered by security analysts to be a transformative force within transnational criminal organizations (TCO), exporting their unique model throughout Mexico. Los Zetas’ idiosyncratic interventions include their diversification of criminal operations, professionalization of TCO security, sophisticated use of media and technology, extreme forms of violent coercion, and decentralized command structure. This project aims to complicate the narrative that Los Zetas emerged because of top leaders’ sadistic tendencies or due to an inherently violent culture in Mexico by reframing the group’s evolution within historical processes. Moving beyond Los Zetas, this project examines how persons affected by Los Zetas’ indiscriminate …

Upending The "Racial Death-Wish": Black Gay Liberation And The Culture Of Black Homophobia, Kailyn Pope

Master's Theses

This thesis analyzes the origin and impact of Black homophobia found in activist spaces of mid- to late-twentieth-century American society. Black gay Americans were subjected to intersecting forms of systemic and cultural oppression that were exceedingly hard to escape due to both the homophobia in Black spaces and the racism in gay spaces. Black gay activists and artists thus had to create their own avenues of expression where they and others could fully embrace what it meant to be Black and gay. This work utilizes a Black feminist framework to explore the roots of Black homophobia and how this type …

The Ill-Treatment Of Their Countrywoman: Liberated African Women, Violence, And Power In Tortola, 1807–1834, Arianna Browne

Master's Theses

In 1807, Parliament passed an Act to abolish the slave trade, leading to the Royal Navy’s campaign of policing international waters and seizing ships suspected of illegal trading. As the Royal Navy captured slave ships as prizes of war and condemned enslaved Africans to Vice-Admiralty courts, formerly enslaved Africans became “captured negroes” or “liberated Africans,” making the subjects in the British colonies. This work, which takes a microhistorical approach to investigate the everyday experiences of liberated Africans in Tortola during the early nineteenth century, focuses on the violent conditions of liberated African women, demonstrating that abolition consisted of violent contradictions …

Real-Time Body Tracking And Projection Mapping In The Interactive Arts, Sydney Baroya

Master's Theses

Projection mapping, a subtopic of augmented reality, displays computer-generated light visualizations from projectors onto the real environment. A challenge for projection mapping in performing interactive arts is dynamic body movements. Accuracy and speed are key components for an immersive application of body projection mapping and dependent on scanning and processing time.

This thesis presents a novel technique to achieve real-time body projection mapping utilizing a state of the art body tracking device, Microsoft’s Azure Kinect DK, by using an array of trackers for error minimization and movement prediction. The device's Sensor and Bodytracking SDKs allow multiple device synchronization. We combine …

The Irish Republican Army: An Examination Of Imperialism, Terror, And Just War Theory, Avery R. Barboza

Master's Theses

Analysis of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and their actions in the 1970s and 1980s offer insight into their use of just war theory in their conflict with the British government and ultra-loyalist Protestant forces in Northern Ireland. The historiography of Irish history is defined by its phases of nationalism, revisionism, and anti-revisionism that cloud the historical narrative of imperialism and insurgency in the North. Applying just war theory to this history offers a more nuanced understanding of the conflict of the Troubles and the I.R.A.’s usage of this framework in their ideology that guided their terrorism in the latter …

Abalone Fishermen, Changing Management Practices, And The Creation Of A False Dichotomy, Tyler G. Hoyt

Master's Theses

This thesis traces the history of the abalone fisheries on the California Coast and how those fisheries have been understood and shaped by humans over time. An overarching interest that guides this effort is how indigenous populations used abalone and otters (as well as other marine resources) purposefully for millennia prior to European arrival. However, this work is not entirely focused on prehistory. Instead, it shows how a lack of understanding of this prehistory shaped the conservation efforts of the California Department of Fish and Game and its ultimate decision to close the commercial fishery in 1997. In this sense, …

The Yanks Are Striking: Kern County, The 1921 Oil Strike And The Discourse On Americanism, Peter F. Hussey

Master's Theses

In the fall of 1921 oil workers of the San Joaquin Valley faced a post-war economic slump, wage cuts across the board and an increasingly hostile attitude of oil operators towards consultation with the federal government on labor relations. They voted to strike, and the next day eight thousand workers walked off the fields. Strikers crafted an image of “patriotic unionism,” underpinned by a faith in the federal government and the ideology of the American Legion. The strike did not end in gruesome class warfare like had been seen months earlier in the coal mines of West Virginia, but rather …

Custodians Of Memory: A History Of American Archival Science With Suggestions For Future Digital Preservation Efforts, Courtney Thompson

Master's Theses

The archive and the historian are symbiotically dependent on one another. The archive relies on the historian to make use of the records it houses, and the historian looks to the archive to reconstruct history. But can a historian responsibly reconstruct history when the archive is fraught with relativity and bias? This thesis serves two purposes; one, pulling from seminal archival science and collections management texts, it chronicles the monumental, intellectual changes to American archival sciences, theories, and institutions, and two, it shows how these early conversations pertaining to archival theories are both not far removed from digital preservation efforts …

Dynamic Procedural Music Generation From Npc Attributes, Megan E. Washburn

Master's Theses

Procedural content generation for video games (PCGG) has seen a steep increase in the past decade, aiming to foster emergent gameplay as well as to address the challenge of producing large amounts of engaging content quickly. Most work in PCGG has been focused on generating art and assets such as levels, textures, and models, or on narrative design to generate storylines and progression paths. Given the difficulty of generating harmonically pleasing and interesting music, procedural music generation for games (PMGG) has not seen as much attention during this time.

Music in video games is essential for establishing developers' intended mood …

Fifth Aeon – A.I Competition And Balancer, William M. Ritson

Master's Theses

Collectible Card Games (CCG) are one of the most popular types of games in both digital and physical space. Despite their popularity, there is a great deal of room for exploration into the application of artificial intelligence in order to enhance CCG gameplay and development. This paper presents Fifth Aeon a novel and open source CCG built to run in browsers and two A.I applications built upon Fifth Aeon. The first application is an artificial intelligence competition run on the Fifth Aeon game. The second is an automatic balancing system capable of helping a designer create new cards that do …

New England Slave Trader: The Case Of Charles Tyng, Paul J. Michaels

Master's Theses

Charles Tyng has been heralded as an American hero after the posthumous publication of his memoir, Before the Wind: The Memoir of an American Sea Captain, 1808-1833, in 1999. Recent research involving British Treasury report books from the nineteenth century suggest otherwise – that Tyng actively promoted and was engaged in the illicit trade of African captives. A Boston Brahmin, Tyng applied the lessons of his time at sea with Perkins & Company, the opium trading firm, to his occupation as an agent of notorious slave trading firms in Havana. This paper uses as evidence records of the captures …

Modifying Succession: A History Of Vegetation Alliances On Swanton Pacific Ranch, Jill Wilson O'Connor

Master's Theses

This thesis conducts historical research into Swanton Pacific Ranch in the County of Santa Cruz, an interdisciplinary facility for education and research managed by Cal Poly’s College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences. The study seeks to determine whether there have been discernable changes in vegetation alliances (communities), spatially or in type, within a 110-acre Study Area from the early twentieth century to the present day and how the changes compare with other similar historical analyses in California. Historical farming and ranching uses of the area are researched, and two family case studies are presented as paradigms of potential changes …

Women With A Cause: Art, Representation, And Feminist Progress In Eighteenth-Century France, Darby Marie Leahy

Master's Theses

Throughout the eighteenth century the Age of Enlightenment transformed public discourse across Western Europe. In France, the salons of Paris became the primary institutions of Enlightenment thought. Hosted by women, the salons possessed a unique atmosphere in which men and women were regarded as intellectual equals. My thesis focuses on the role the female hostesses, salonnières, had in initiating French movements for gender equality that continued with great momentum throughout the French Revolution. By using popular artwork, literature, and memoirs I show how the efforts of French women to achieve gender equality helped give early rise to feminism.

The Gods Have Taken Thought For Them: Syncretic Animal Symbolism In Medieval European Magic, Solange Nicole Kiehlbauch

Master's Theses

This thesis investigates syncretic animal symbolism within medieval European occult systems. The major question that this work seeks to answer is: what does the ubiquity and importance of magical animals and animal magic reveal about overarching medieval perceptions of the world? In response, I utilize the emerging subfield of Animal History as a theoretical framework to draw attention to an understudied yet highly relevant aspect of occult theory and practice. This work argues that medieval Europeans lived in a fundamentally “enchanted” world compared to our modern age, where the permeable boundaries between physical and spiritual planes imbued nature and its …

"For All Such, A Country Is Provided": Choctaw Removal, Slave Trading, And Law In Southwestern Mississippi, 1800–1841, Anthony Albey Soliman

Master's Theses

At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were few white settlers in the Mississippi Territory. Over the course of two decades, the United States used treaties to force the indigenous inhabitants, the Choctaw, out of this area by the United States to lands west of the Mississippi River. The United States’ goal in the region was to create a plantation economy in the Mississippi Valley based on the production of short-staple cotton sustained by enslaved African American labor. Focusing on the removal of the Choctaw and the subsequent installation of a plantation regime in the Mississippi Valley, this thesis …

Let's Talk Story: Waikiki And Its Social Displacements In Oral Histories And Print, 1901–1935, Alika Bourgette

Master's Theses

The everyday experiences of Waikiki’s residents of color often escaped official and semi-official records of historical events. When concerning Native Hawaiians and other nonwhite peoples, haole elite journalists and policymakers viewed their land, possessions, and bodies as opportunities for the cultural commodification, sexualization, and reimagination. As part of the redevelopment efforts of the Waikiki shoreline in the early twentieth century, state and commercial actors worked to affect the systematic erasure of Native Hawaiian and resident Asian spaces. This study utilizes extensive collections of oral histories from marginalized Waikiki residents of color to provide counterpoint to notions of indigenous passivity and …

Automatic Music Transcription With Convolutional Neural Networks Using Intuitive Filter Shapes, Jonathan Sleep

Master's Theses

This thesis explores the challenge of automatic music transcription with a combination of digital signal processing and machine learning methods. Automatic music transcription is important for musicians who can't do it themselves or find it tedious. We start with an existing model, designed by Sigtia, Benetos and Dixon, and develop it in a number of original ways. We find that by using convolutional neural networks with filter shapes more tailored for spectrogram data, we see better and faster transcription results when evaluating the new model on a dataset of classical piano music. We also find that employing better practices shows …

"Ye Sons Of Mars": British Representations Of The Sudan Campaign In Print Culture, 1884–1899, Crystal E. Smith

Master's Theses

From 1884 to 1885 the British were first engaged with the Mahdist forces of Sudan in an effort to first rescue the inhabitants of Khartuom, and later to rescue the rescuer Charles “Chinese” Gordon. The affair played out both in Parliament and the newspapers as journalists became the cheerleaders for Empire. My thesis focuses on Britain’s 1884-1890 Sudan Campaign through print culture using political debates, journalism, literature, memoirs, and art. I show how the activism of the press and the romanticism of the larger media reinforced ideas about imperialism and the British role within the Empire at large.

Pharaonic Occultism: The Relationship Of Esotericism And Egyptology, 1875–1930, Kevin Todd Mclaren

Master's Theses

The purpose of this work is to explore the interactions between occultism and scholarly Egyptology from 1875 to 1930. Within this timeframe, numerous esoteric groups formed that centered their ideologies on conceptions of ancient Egyptian knowledge. In order to legitimize their belief systems based on ancient Egyptian wisdom, esotericists attempted to become authoritative figures on Egypt. This process heavily impacted Western intellectualism not only because occult conceptions of Egypt became increasingly popular, but also because esotericists intruded into academia or attempted to overshadow it. In turn, esotericists and Egyptologists both utilized the influx of new information from Egyptological studies to …

The Impact Of Cargo Bikes On The Travel Patterns Of Women, Jana E. Schwartz

Master's Theses

There are a number of issues preventing the rollout of cargo bikes as a transportation mode in the United States. One concern that has been raised is whether cargo bikes can function as a gender equitable transportation solution in the United States, given documented gender gaps in national bike riding statistics and ongoing inequities in childcare in 2-parent heterosexual households. The research is aimed at reviewing the practicality, enjoyment, and outcome of cargo bike use as a gender equitable transportation solution. This research contributes to new knowledge in gender equitable transportation in 2 ways — a) gender-focused analysis of survey …

Pacifying Paradise: Violence And Vigilantism In San Luis Obispo, Joseph Hall-Patton

Master's Theses

San Luis Obispo, California was a violent place in the 1850s with numerous murders and lynchings in staggering proportions. This thesis studies the rise of violence in SLO, its causation, and effects. The vigilance committee of 1858 represents the culmination of the violence that came from sweeping changes in the region, stemming from its earliest conquest by the Spanish. The mounting violence built upon itself as extensive changes took place. These changes include the conquest of California, from the Spanish mission period, Mexican and Alvarado revolutions, Mexican-American War, and the Gold Rush. The history of the county is explored until …

Pianote: A Sight-Reading Program That Algorithmically Generates Music Based On Human Performance, Drew Schulz

Master's Theses

Sight-reading is the act of performing a piece of music at first sight. This can be a difficult task to master, because it requires extensive knowledge of music theory, practice, quick thinking, and most importantly, a wide variety of musical material. A musician can only effectively sight-read with a new piece of music. This not only requires many resources, but also musical pieces that are challenging while also within a player's abilities.

This thesis presents PiaNote, a sight-reading web application for pianists that algorithmically generates music based on human performance. PiaNote's goal is to alleviate some of the hassles pianists …

Concatenative Synthesis For Novel Timbral Creation, James Eric Bilous

Master's Theses

Modern day musicians rely on a variety of instruments for musical expression. Tones produced from electronic instruments have become almost as commonplace as those produced by traditional ones as evidenced by the plethora of artists who can be found composing and performing with nothing more than a personal computer. This desire to embrace technical innovation as a means to augment performance art has created a budding field in computer science that explores the creation and manipulation of sound for artistic purposes. One facet of this new frontier concerns timbral creation, or the development of new sounds with unique characteristics that …

Una Legua Cuadrada: Exploring The History Of Swanton Pacific Ranch And Environs, Jeanine Marie Scaramozzino

Master's Theses

Swanton Pacific Ranch is an educational and research facility owned by the Cal Poly Corporation and managed by the Cal Poly State University (Cal Poly) College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences. Located about 180 miles north of campus and just 14 miles north of Santa Cruz, California on Highway 1, the property was first leased to and then donated to Cal Poly by the late Albert E. Smith in 1993. The rancho’s original inhabitants included Native Americans, Spaniards, Mexicans, as well as various European immigrants and their descendants; currently, the staff, faculty, and students of Cal Poly occupy the …

The Mexican American Vietnam War Serviceman: The Missing American, Teresa Moreno Jimenez

Master's Theses

The Vietnam War brought many changes to society in that it soon became one of the most controversial wars in United States history. There was a tremendous loss of life as well as a rift in the nation with the rise of anti-war protest. Those drafted for the war primarily came from low-income and ethnic minority communities. While all who served deserve to be recognized, there is one group that has gone largely unrepresented in the history of the war. Mexican American serviceman served and died in large numbers when compared to their population. In addition, they also received high …

Gods And Gurus In The City Of Angels: Aimee Semple Mcpherson, Swami Paramananda, And Los Angeles In The 1920s, Amy Hart

Master's Theses

This project focuses on two case studies as representative examples of Los Angeles’ progressive tolerance in the period of the 1920s: The Pentecostal mega-church of Aimee Semple-McPherson, and the Vedanta Ashram of Swami Paramananda. Both religious institutions opened in Los Angeles in 1923, just thirteen miles away from each other, and continued to thrive side-by-side throughout the twentieth century until present day. Each religious figure spoke to a part of the growing Los Angeles population: McPherson’s staunchly Christian, emotionally-driven, Hollywood-style ministry appealed to a large number of Los Angeles natives and newly-arrived immigrants, rocketing the emerging Pentecostal denomination into nationwide …

Using Spectral Analysis To Evaluate Flute Tone Quality, Ron Yorita

Master's Theses

Many skilled flutists place a high priority on "good" tone quality, or timbre. Timbre can be defined as the audible difference in character that a listener perceives for two notes played at the same pitch. Different timbres are determined by the combination and balance of harmonics that comprise a note. Unlike pitch and rhythm, timbre is difficult to objectively quantify. This project explores (1) how tone quality is described by skilled flutists, (2) whether the harmonic spectrum has some correlation with tone quality, (3) whether certain harmonic spectra are preferred, or considered "good".

Thirty-one flutists ranging from high school students …