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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Quiet River, Heavy Waters: Un-Silencing Narratives Of Social-Environmental Inequalities In The Cradle Of Soviet Plutonium, Rosibel Roman Jun 2019

Quiet River, Heavy Waters: Un-Silencing Narratives Of Social-Environmental Inequalities In The Cradle Of Soviet Plutonium, Rosibel Roman

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In December 1948, the Soviet Union’s first plutonium production facility, Mayak Production Association (PO Mayak), began operation in the Southern Urals region of Russia, at the western edges of Siberia, near the restricted city of Chelyabinsk-40, known in the present day as Ozyorsk. Since then, rural communities located downstream from PO Mayak have experienced health, economic, ecological and social impacts of contamination from high-level radioactive wastes released by the facility into the Techa River and its surrounding ecosystem. My research, drawing from archival research conducted in Russia and the United States, as well as secondary sources in English and Russian, …


The Racial Equation: Pan-Atlantic Eugenics, Race, And Colonialism In The Early Twentieth Century British Caribbean, Christopher Anderson Davis Nov 2018

The Racial Equation: Pan-Atlantic Eugenics, Race, And Colonialism In The Early Twentieth Century British Caribbean, Christopher Anderson Davis

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the intellectual discourse on race in the early twentieth century, particularly from 1919 to 1958, examining how British and American eugenicists and Caribbean nationalists debated the limits of colonial politics in the British Caribbean using academic and scientific language. These discussions emerged in the aftermath of World War I, the economic crises that led to the Great Depression, the political and labor unrest in the British Caribbean, and consequences of the Second World War. The dissertation’s goal is to examine how residents of the British Caribbean understood, appropriated, and challenged some of the principles of eugenics, particularly …


Truffles Have Never Been Modern: An Actor-Network Theorization Of 150 Years Of French Trufficulture, Eric Van Vleet Mar 2018

Truffles Have Never Been Modern: An Actor-Network Theorization Of 150 Years Of French Trufficulture, Eric Van Vleet

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary scholars seeking to increase Tuber Melanosporum truffle production rely almost exclusively on technological advancements to increase yields, while failing to place the cultivation of truffles, trufficulture, in its historical or local landscape contexts. In this dissertation, I describe how truffle scholars’ conceptualization of trufficulture and landscapes has changed over 150 years in France, while focusing on the French département of Lot. I examine changing relations between humans and nonhumans and how they impact truffle harvests. I analyzed the history of French trufficulture through a close reading of historic truffle manuals, archival research and the classification of remotely sensed …


Developing Medicine: Cuba, Modernization, And Public Health, 1898-1945, Jessica Leigh Allison Mar 2018

Developing Medicine: Cuba, Modernization, And Public Health, 1898-1945, Jessica Leigh Allison

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the modernization of aspects of Cuba’s public health programs through the influence of the Rockefeller Foundation. As a result of its sponsorship of projects, the Rockefeller Foundation contributed to the spread of modernizing practices and policies from 1913 through 1945. An evaluation of medical modernization remains an important chapter in the study of post-colonial development. Current research has often portrayed public health modernization efforts as unidirectional with the United States imposing its ideas and practices onto developing nations. By examining institutional records, personal correspondence, and reports, this dissertation provides a more nuanced analysis of the relationship between …


Jewish Women’S Transracial Epistemological Networks: Representations Of Black Women In The African Diaspora, 1930-1980, Abby S. Gondek Mar 2018

Jewish Women’S Transracial Epistemological Networks: Representations Of Black Women In The African Diaspora, 1930-1980, Abby S. Gondek

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates how Jewish women social scientists relationally established their gendered-racialized subjectivities and theories about race-gender-sexuality-class through their portrayals of black women’s sexuality and family structures in the African Diaspora: the U.S., Brazil, South Africa, Swaziland, and the U.K. The central women in this study: Ellen Hellmann, Ruth Landes, Hilda Kuper, and Ruth Glass, were part of the same “political generation,” born in 1908-1912, coming of age when Jews of European descent experienced an ambivalent and conditional assimilation into whiteness, a form of internal colonization. I demonstrate how each woman’s familial origin point in Europe, parental class and political …


Britain Can Take It: Civil Defense And Chemical Warfare In Great Britain, 1915-1945, Jordan I. Malfoy Mar 2018

Britain Can Take It: Civil Defense And Chemical Warfare In Great Britain, 1915-1945, Jordan I. Malfoy

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the origins of civil defense are to be found in pre-World War II Britain and that a driving force of this early civil defense scheme was fear of poison gas. Later iterations of civil defense, such as the Cold War system in America, built on already existing regimes that had proven their worth during WWII. This dissertation demonstrates not only that WWII civil defense served as a blueprint for later civil defense schemes, but also that poison gas anxiety served as a particular tool for the implementation and success of civil defense. The dissertation is organized …


Haiti And The Heavens: Utopianism And Technocracy In The Cold War Era, Adam M. Silvia Jun 2016

Haiti And The Heavens: Utopianism And Technocracy In The Cold War Era, Adam M. Silvia

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examined technocracy in Haiti in the Cold War era. It showed how Haitian and non-Haitian technicians navigated United States imperialism, Soviet ideology, and postcolonial nationalism to implement bold utopian visions in a country oppressed by poverty and dynastic authoritarianism. Throughout the mid-to-late twentieth century, technicians lavished Haiti with plans to improve the countryside, the city, the workplace, and the home. This study analyzed those plans and investigated the motivations behind them. Based on new evidence discovered in the private correspondence between Haitian, American, and Western European specialists, it questioned the assumption that technocracy was captivated by high-modernist ideology …


Atlantic Threads: Singer In Spain And Mexico, 1860-1940, Paula A. De La Cruz-Fernández May 2013

Atlantic Threads: Singer In Spain And Mexico, 1860-1940, Paula A. De La Cruz-Fernández

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the role of Singer in the modernization of sewing practices in Spain and Mexico from 1860 to 1940. Singer marketing was founded on gendered views of women’s work and gendered perceptions of the home. These connected with sewing practices in Spain and Mexico, where home sewing remained economically and culturally important throughout the 1940s. "Atlantic Threads" is the first study of the US-owned multinational in the Hispanic World. I demonstrate that sewing practices, and especially practices related to home sewing that have been considered part of the private sphere and therefore not an important historical matter, contributed …