Arts and Humanities Commons^™

'Gave His Life For The Empire': Memory, Memorials, And Identity In The British Empire After The First World War, Bryan Mcclure

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This dissertation examines the construction of personal memorials after the First World War across the British Empire nations of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, to understand how individuals sought to make their own memorial to remember their loved one killed in the conflict. In comparison to other studies on the construction of national or other community memorials, this dissertation explores how individuals accepted or rejected dominant discourses in creating their own memorials that spoke to how they remembered the war. It is based on a large database of more than 2,000 private memorials to individuals that …

Christian Mass Movements In South India And Some Of The Critical Factors That Changed The Face Of Christianity In India, Philip Joseph Mathew

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The main reason for Christian growth in India was not individual conversions but rather Christian mass movements (CMMs). Since the late 1700s, a series of independent CMMs among non-Christians and a mass reformation movement within the Suriani community have occurred in the southern end of India. These MMs culminated in a mass emancipation movement against caste-imposed segregation of Dalits in the late 1800s, an event of national significance. In the early 1900s, Pentecostalism evolved from these CMMs and transformed the religious landscape of Christianity in South India and later in India as a whole. The Thoma Christians were the early …

Moral Subjects: The Girls' Friendly Society, Empire, And Modern Girlhood In Canada, C.1920s, Marshall Cosens

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In 1875, Mary Townsend founded the Girls’ Friendly Society (GFS) to reinforce in young girls the qualities of self-control, purity, and their responsibility to become dutiful mothers and wives. By the 1920s, the Society had established itself across the British Empire and promoted imperial unity through emigration, social service, and missionary work. In white, self-governing dominions like Canada, the organization played a pivotal role in shaping young girls through social purity campaigns and educating members about their imperial responsibilities. In the face of rapid social change, the GFS represented a conservative counterattack to shifting definitions of morality, femininity, and womanhood …

You Go To My Head: Women's Prescription Pill Use In Postwar America, Erin K. Brown

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During the postwar era, US pharmaceutical companies grew their production and distribution of prescription pills, which included barbiturates, minor tranquilizers, and amphetamines for mass consumption. Middle- and upper-class women were the majority users of these pills, finding assistance with the aid of prescribed drugs that helped correct difficulty with sleeping, eased anxiety, provided energy, and reduced the users’ size. This dissertation works to bring drug history and women’s history together to integrate the impact prescription pills had on women’s lives, positive and negative, and how and why consumers sought these drugs and the effects they promised. This project uncovers interactions …

Women And Western Mission: A Case Study On The Christian Khasi And Garo Tribal Women, Rosemary Philip

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Western mission justified a mission to the Global South that was ingrained with the dominance of its culture and values. Women’s mission, as a tool of this mission, patronized themselves as the ‘care-taker’ of the ‘subjugated’ women of the Global South. This mission promulgated new ways of thinking and prescribed new gender roles and values to the Global South. In doing so, it framed the traditional roles and cultural values of the non-Western world as oppressive and replaceable. Subsequently, Women’s mission along with Western feminism and Feminist theology as a broad idea has been challenged by feminists from the Global …

Smugglers And Excisemen: The History Of Whisky In Scotland, 1644 To 1823, Sandra White

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This thesis aims to fill in gaps in the study of whisky history that exist and explore how whisky culture was used by Scots to protest taxes, the Act of Union, the British government, English influence in Scotland, and to assert nationality. Throughout the 18th century, whisky was used as a political tool by the illegal and legal whisky trades and the Scottish and British governments for political and financial gains. How whisky was politicised and used is examined throughout this study to understand better how whisky moved from a cottage handicraft to a commercial industry. Excisemen played a critical …

‘Phantom Limb’: Russian Settler Colonialism In The Post-Soviet Crimea (1991-1997), Maksym Dmytrovych Sviezhentsev

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Where does the myth that ‘Crimea has always been Russia’ come from? How did the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union ‘make’ Crimea Russian? This dissertation shows how the they applied settler colonial practices to Crimea, displacing the indigenous population and repopulating the peninsula with loyal settlers and how Crimean settler colonial structures survived the fall of the Soviet Union. It argues that this process defines post-Soviet history of the peninsula.

For centuries Crimean existed within the discourse of Russian imperial control. This dissertation challenges the dominant view by applying settler colonial theory to Crimea’s past and present for the …

The Grand Experiment: Jerome Dwight Davis And The Young Men’S Christian Association’S War Prisoner Aid Sports Programing For German Pows In Canadian Camps During World War Two, Courtney Hope Van Waas

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Jerome Davis, head of the Young Men’s Christian Association War Prisoner Aid program, was a devout Congregationalist dedicated to providing for the basic sport and recreation endeavours of German Prisoners of War interned in Canadian POW camps during the Second World War. Having worked with German Prisoners of War in Russia during the First World War, Davis firmly believed that WWII Allies the world over needed to change their generally antagonistic point of view towards German POWs, indeed, a point of view that required “moral revisionism.” Davis believed that the vilification and demeaning status of German POWs was not only …

Arrival Of The Fittest: German Pows In Ontario During The Second World War, Jordyn Bailey

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Over 35,000,000 soldiers, sailors and aviators, statistically one in three combatants, were taken prisoner during the Second World War. Some 35,000 of these prisoners were members of the German army, navy and air force, imprisoned in twenty-five internment compounds and 300 small, isolated labour camps across Canada. Once on Canadian soil, German POWs were treated with remarkable hospitality in lieu of their status as the “Nazi” enemy. Canada’s excellent treatment of German POWs was a product of many things: a desire to adhere to the Geneva Convention; concern for the well-being of Canadian and other Allied POWs in German hands; …

"I Need To Fight The Power, But I Need That New Ferrari": Conspicuous Consumption, New-School Hip-Hop And "The New Rock & Roll", Emmett H. Robinson Smith

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2017 marked the year in which hip-hop officially became the most listened-to genre in the United States. This thesis explores hip-hop music’s rise to its now-hegemonic position within the music industry, seeking to provide insight into the increasingly popular sentiment that hip-hop is “the new rock & roll”. The “new-school” hip-hop artists of the last six years or so have also been the subject of widespread critical disdain, especially for their heightened degree of emphasis on conspicuous consumption. This study will track hip-hop’s ascent from the mid-1980s through to its current position as both a political vehicle and a commercial …

The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

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What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to …

Welcoming Strangers: Race, Religion, And Ethnicity In German Lutheran Ontario And Missouri, 1939-1970, Elliot Worsfold

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This dissertation examines how German-American and German-Canadian Lutherans in St. Louis, Missouri, and Waterloo County, Ontario, constructed their ethnic identities from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 to 1970. Did German Lutherans understand their ethnicity as an identity to overcome, or as an identity worth preserving? What role did religion and race play in how they constructed their ethnic identities? It argues that German Lutherans in the Missouri and Canada Synods constructed a hybrid identity that sought to balance their competing ethnic, religious, racial, and national identities. It charts their experiences negotiating discrimination during the Second World …

“And, Needless To Say, I Was Athletic, Too:” Southern Ontario Black Women And Sport (1920s – 1940s), Ornella Nzindukiyimana

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This dissertation presents a two-part study of sporting practices of Southern Ontario Black women, between the 1920s and the 1940s, aimed at developing a socio-cultural history of sport that includes narratives from marginalized groups. Given sport’s traditional position as a masculine domain, as well as Canada’s status as a patriarchal White supremacy, the accounts presented in this work centre Black women’s sport experiences through an intersectional perspective. It is argued that, by virtue of their simultaneously racialized and gendered identities, Black women had distinct sporting experiences from those of White women and men and Black men.

The first study used …

The ‘Meanings’ And ‘Enactments’ Of Science And Technology: Ant-Mobilities’ Analysis Of Two Cases, Farrukh Chishtie

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In this work I study two cases involving practices of science and technology in the backdrop of related and recent curricular reforms in both settings. The first case study is based on the 2005 South Asian earthquake in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan which led to massive losses including large scale injuries and disabilities. This led to reforms at many levels ranging from disaster management to action plans on disability, including educational reforms in rehabilitation sciences. Local efforts to deal with this disaster led to innovative approaches such as the formation of a Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) model by a local NGO, which …

Remembering Rebellion, Remembering Resistance: Collective Memory, Identity, And The Veterans Of 1869-70 And 1885, Matthew J. Mcrae

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This dissertation analyses two of the Canadian state’s earliest military operations through the lens of personal and collective memory: The Red River conflict of 1869-70 and the Northwest Campaign of 1885. Both campaigns were directed by the Canadian state against primarily Métis and First Nations opponents. In each case, resistance to Canadian hegemony was centered on, though not exclusively led by, Métis leader Louis Riel.

This project focuses on the various veteran communities that were created in the aftermath of these two events. On one side, there were the Canadian government soldiers who had served in the campaigns and were …

La Vida Y Andanzas De Un Libro Antiguo En Nueva España Y La Península Ibérica. Cultura Escrita En La Obra Hierofánica Del Doctor Don Alonso Alberto De Velasco, Raul Manuel Lopez Bajonero

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In 1688 a legal text, Renovación, was printed in Mexico City, the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, that explains a twelve year trial that focuses on determining if a 16^th century sculpture miraculously renewed itself. The final decision came from the Archbishop of Mexico City. A year after the book’s publication, the sculpture was recognized as miraculous. In 1699, ten years after this event, the author of Renovación wrote another book that narrates the same sculpture's history, Exaltación, but addressed a wider audience, and from a religious and pious perspective. The Exaltación was republished a …

The Ruin Of The Past: Deindustrialization, Working-Class Communities, And Football In The Midlands, Uk 1945-1990, Neil Stanley

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As a social history of deindustrialization in the Midlands (U.K.), this study explores how loss informed working-class conceptions of identity, culture, and community. By shuttering factories, disrupting social networks, defamiliarizing the landscape, and relegating thousands to the unemployment lines, deindustrialization marooned the Midlands working class in a world they struggled to recognize. Using oral histories to interrogate the ways loss informed everyday life, this study examines how the meanings attached to football transformed the sport into a metonym for the past. The dynamics and values specific to working-class communities are analyzed through the lens of four key working class relationships. …

The Happy Secret: Alexandra Of Denmark And Ireland, 1863-1925, Shawn J. Mccarthy

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For many years the notion of Princess Alexandra of Denmark’s political sympathy with Ireland has persisted among her biographers, while historians have been much more reserved in their endorsement and aware that the historical basis for Alexandra’s image as a supporter of Ireland is very tenuous. Nevertheless, Alexandra’s supposed feelings toward Ireland have never been discussed in-depth and have rather been taken for granted as having been useful to her husband for a time. The origin of this affinity has never been fully explained, short of suppositions concerning her political sensibilities and similarities between Denmark and Ireland. What follows is …

La Identidad Cultural A Través Del Espacio Urbano Y Arquitectónico En La Ciudad De México: El Caso De La Villa De Guadalupe, Jamil Afana

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Today, the revered sanctuary of Tepeyac where the Virgin Mary of Guadalupe appeared in 1531, is one of the most visited sites in Mexico and one of the most culturally characteristics spaces of Mexico City. The urban and architectural space of guadalupanista sacred enclosure has continuously transformed since the sixteenth century. This focuses primarily on the years 1976 to 2011 to analyze the Mexican cultural identity that has developed during that time. Both dates are important because they represent the last two built interventions within the sanctuary and they mark the urban image of the sacred space and surroundings. In …

'Fought The Good Fight, Finished My Course': George Dixon Amid The Rising Tide Of Jim Crow America, Jason A. Winders

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Fought the Good Fight, Finished My Course explores the forces that fueled the ascension of Canadian-born, Boston-raised boxer George Dixon (1870-1908) from a remote racial enclave in Nova Scotia to the heights of multi-continent fame during a suffocating era for black advancement, and how those same forces failed to prevent his early, tragic demise.

Dixon parlayed an early passion for boxing into a career as a pioneering world champion, barnstormer, showman and ambassador for a sport just finding its place in North American culture in the 1880s/1890s. At 20, he became the World Bantamweight Champion in 1890 – the first …

Femininity And Higher Education: Women At Ontario Universities, 1890 To 1920, Marilla Mccargar

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This dissertation examines the experiences of women studying at six institutions of higher education from 1890 to 1920. The universities include Queen’s University in Kingston, The University of Western Ontario in London, the University of Toronto and its affiliates Victoria University, University College, and Trinity College in Toronto. While pioneering women who attended universities in the 1880s were opposed by people who believed a belief that women’s intellects were inferior to men’s, women in this study faced the belief that by engaging in the “masculine” pursuit of higher education they risked their future as wives and mothers and thus jeopardized …

And The Men Returned: Canadian Veterans And The Aftermath Of The Great War, Jonathan Scotland

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The Great War was a formative event for men who came of age between 1914 and 1918. They believed the experience forged them into a distinct generation. This collective identification more than shaped a sense of self; it influenced understanding of the conflict’s meaning. Canadian historians, however, have overlooked the war’s generational impact, partly because they reject notions of a disillusioned Lost Generation. Unlike European or American youths, it is argued that Canadian veterans did not suffer postwar disillusionment. Rather, they embraced the war alongside a renewed Canadian nationalism. This generation was proud of their nation’s wartime achievements, notably those …

More Than Plumbing: The History Of Sexual Education In Ontario, 1960-1979, Michelle K P Hutchinson Grondin

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During the 1960s and 1970s, Ontario educators were concerned that the “sexual revolution” would encourage youths to engage in sexually promiscuous behaviour, become unwed mothers, and contract STIs. As parents were perceived as unreliable sex educators, school administrators and educators felt compelled to teach traditional sexual values, and the importance of the nuclear family through sexual education. This dissertation analyzes the creation and instruction of sexual education in physical and health education courses throughout the 1960s and 1970s in Ontario. This study provides the first comprehensive discussion of sexual education in Ontario during the sixties and seventies through an examination …

From Lion To Leaf: The Evacuation Of British Children To Canada During The Second World War, Claire L. Halstead

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From Lion to Leaf is a study of the evacuation of British children to Canada in the Second World War. While European refugee children were excluded purposely from Canada, Canadians anxiously called for Britain to send her children as a display of philanthropic, patriotic, imperial, and wartime sentiment. Yet overseas evacuation is often overshadowed, in both the historiography and social memory of the war, by Britain’s domestic evacuation. From Lion to Leaf contributes to the study of evacuation, the British home front, wartime Canada, Canadian childcare and immigration policy, and the changing British Empire. Reflecting the transnationalism of the movement, …

Embattled Communities: Voluntary Action And Identity In Australia, Canada, And New Zealand, 1914-1918, Steve Marti

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This dissertation examines voluntary mobilization during the First World War to understand why communities on the social and geographical periphery of the British Empire mobilized themselves so enthusiastically to support a distant war, fought for adistant empire. Lacking a strong state apparatus or a military-industrial complex, the governments of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand relied on voluntary contributions to sustain their war efforts. Community-based voluntary societies knitted socks, raised funds to purchase military equipment, and formed contingents of soldiers. By examining the selective mobilization of voluntary participation, this study will understand how different communities negotiated social and spatial boundaries as …

Green Berets And Gay Deceivers: The New Left, The Vietnam Draft And American Masculinity, Anna L. Zuschlag

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When masculinity is predicated on violence and military service is a man’s civic duty, then draft resistance becomes a doubly radical act. Men who refuse to take up arms for their nation threaten, at least potentially, both its political and gender order. This dissertation explores American masculinity during and after the Vietnam War, by analyzing cultural representations of, and responses to, the U.S. Selective Service System. At a time when mainstream Hollywood would not touch the Vietnam War, a generation of independent filmmakers, artists and agitators produced a number of remarkable films and documents dealing with the war, the draft …

Reading Boredom In Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, And Christina Rossetti, Rebekah Ann Lamb

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Focusing on the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poetry and paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the early poetry of William Morris and the poetry and prose of Christina Rossetti, this thesis examines how boredom emerges in Victorian aesthetic culture. Drawing from writings in visual culture, gender studies, social history, and recent returns to new formalism in Victorian studies, this thesis attends to how renderings of boredom open up our understanding of the relationship between poetry, art, temporality, embodiment, and explorations of everyday life and living in Victorian England.

Chapter One of my thesis is an introductory explanation of boredom …

Boxing In The Union Blue: A Social History Of American Boxing In The Union States During The Late Antebellum And Civil War Years, Greggory M. Ross

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This study explores the social history of boxing in the Civil War era Union States in both the martial and civilian contexts, focusing on issues of masculinity, ethnicity, race, and class. This dissertation is divided into four sections, each emphasizing a different boxing scene. First, boxing in is explained in the context of the Union Army, drawing upon accounts of military life from diaries, letters, official army correspondence, and newspapers to examine how soldiers used: gloved sparring for physical and mental exercise and camaraderie; bare-knuckle prizefighting for dispute resolution, entertainment, and gambling; and both forms of boxing to exhibit masculine …

Unmasking The Protester: The Meanings And Myths Of Collective Civil Resistance Movements In African American And Polish Postresistance Prose Fiction, Agnieszka Herra

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My contention is that the narrative framework of social movements, especially the ones deemed “successful” such as the American Civil Rights Movement and the Polish Solidarity Movement, reflects unity and collectivity within collective memory. During the period of the movements’ duration, this provides a clear rhetorical purpose: to give the appearance of unity in order to give effective voice to the demands. I argue that the voices that did not fit into the collective movements emerge subsequently to question this monologic language in literary form. This dissertation uses Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic language to argue that novels in the postresistance …

Day Of The Woman?: Feminism & Rape-Revenge Films, Kayley A. Viteo

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This thesis examines the horror film sub-genre of ‘rape revenge’ for the ways it reflects and helps to constitute broader public debates about women and feminism. In order to do so, it examines two well-known representatives of the sub-genre, Last House on the Left and I Spit On Your Grave. Both of these films were initially made in 1972 and 1978 respectively and were recently remade in 2009 and 2010. This thesis examines both the originals and the remakes of these films within and against their socio-historical context, with a specific focus on dominant discussions about feminism and women taking …