Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Grasping For The Ends Of The Earth: Framing And Contesting Polar Sovereignty, 1900-1955, Peter Kikkert

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

During the first half of the twentieth century, state officials, international lawyers and polar experts struggled to apply an underdeveloped and unclear international legal discourse on territorial acquisition and the establishment of state sovereignty to the harsh environment and unique conditions of the Arctic and Antarctic. Drawing upon fresh archival research undertaken in several countries, as well as a thorough interrogation and synthesis of existing historical and legal scholarship, this dissertation explores the knowledge production that occurred on terrestrial polar claims, thus reconstructing the transnational web of ideas, adaptations, strategies and best practices developed to address the confusion and uncertainty …

Building Canadian National Identity Within The State And Through Ice Hockey: A Political Analysis Of The Donation Of The Stanley Cup, 1888-1893, Jordan Goldstein

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Stanley Cup elicits strong emotions related to Canadian national identity despite its association as a professional ice hockey trophy. This strong link between the Cup and Canadian national identity emerged in its creation and donation. Lord Stanley, in addition to his love of ice hockey, donated the Cup partly as a political action. The cup stood as a physical symbol to unite the disparate Canadian population around a new national sport. Given Lord Stanley’s position as Governor General (1888-1893) this donation carried political authority. The purpose of this study is to investigate the donation of the Stanley Cup as …

Cityscape, Urban Nobodies And War: Modern Transformation Of Nianhua In Suzhou-Shanghai, Hua Huang

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This dissertation explores the continuities and ruptures of the nianhua practice and representations in the Suzhou-Shanghai region during the mid-18th – 19th century. It explores a city-based nianhua tradition in Jiangnan’s urban centers that supplements current scholarship, which focuses geographically on northern print centers, economically on village-based production, and thematically on religious, auspicious and moral subjects of universal value. Challenging current scholarship that treats nianhua as a folk tradition rigidly adhering to an established pictorial vocabulary and conventional symbols of religious and moral significance, this study demonstrates the adaptive and innovative energies within the nianhua industry. Taking nianhua as a …

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

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

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 …

Detective Policing And The State In Nineteenth-Century England: The Detective Department Of The London Metropolitan Police, 1842-1878, Rachael Griffin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis evaluates the development of surveillance-based undercover policing in Victorian England through an examination of the first centralized police detective force in the country, the Detective Department of the London Metropolitan Police (1842-1878). It argues that the Detective Department overcame British fears that detective police were incompatible with individual liberty and parliamentary democracy, making the English detective a familiar and reliable public servant. The Detective Department, which worked from Scotland Yard, was formed in 1842 in response to criticism that the Metropolitan Police was unable to successfully investigate homicide. This was a surprising development in a country where property …

Defending Liberal Education: Implications For Educational Policy, Christopher W. Lyons

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This thesis advocates for the inclusion of liberal education in discussions of the college and university missions and mandates in North America. It is conceived with the purpose of influencing policy thinking and generating the theory and ideas required for sound education policy decision making. Research into liberal education is a special and atypical kind of inquiry and requires innovative theoretical approaches. Liberal education is foremost a philosophical problem and requires philosophical approaches. The method used is, therefore, conceptual in nature and drawn from analytical philosophy.

My research approaches liberal education conceptually in three ways: historically, philosophically, and politically. Historically, …

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

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

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, …

Searching For Sakitawak: Place And People In Northern Saskatchewan's Île-À-La-Crosse, Signa A. K. Daum Shanks

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This presentation is a history of a small community, Île-à-la-Crosse, located in an area now part of Saskatchewan, Canada. With an historic reputation for cooperation and enviable trading circumstances, its residents traditionally have determined that protection of the community ensured the best opportunities for the advancement and security of individuals. As a result of this belief, residents reinforced their own understandings of sustainability as a means to ensure personal success. The community’s fame for hosting such a set of norms grew, particularly from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and outsiders often visited to improve their own efforts as a …

Impassioned Objects And Seething Absences: The Olympics In Canada, National Identity And Consumer Culture, Estee Fresco

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation critically analyzes the commercial practices and products of the 1976 Montreal, 1988 Calgary and 2010 Vancouver Olympics. The central questions I ask are: how did the Olympics in Canada become a platform for the intersection of patriotism and consumption? What were the key ideas about Canadian identity, history, and citizenship that Olympic organizers and corporate sponsors promoted? How did commodities symbolize these ideas? Finally, how do these ideas relate to political policies and practices?

This work contributes to an understanding of how branded commodities shape Canadian identity and citizenship norms by arguing that the objects sold during the …

Conduits Of Communion: Monstrous Affections In Algonquin Traditional Territory, Ian S.G. Puppe

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project investigates the legacies of shifting land tenure and stewardship practices on what is now known as the Ottawa Valley watershed (referred to as the Kitchissippi by the Omamawinini or Algonquin people), and the effects that this central colonization project has had on issues of identity and Nationalism on Canadians, diversely identified as settler-colonists of European or at least “Old World” descent and First Nations, Métis and Inuit (Lawrence 2012).

Focusing on historical and contemporary political and social issues related to Algonquin Provincial Park and its establishment, this project explores; 1) Competing claims levied by First Nations Peoples, local …

"There Are No Rules! Except These 108." The Multidirectional Flow Of Influence Between Sportication, Subculture, And Violence On The History Of Mixed Martial Arts, Jared V. Walters

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The sport of mixed martial arts (MMA), found in 1993, has a very tenuous history. Three influencing factors, sport-related violence, the sportization process, and subculture, have interacted directly with events and individuals through the sport’s history, resulting in these three multi-directional sources of influences having the greatest effect on the direction and development of the sport. MMA, initially promoted as a violent spectacle, became the target of political attacks. Such unprecedented levels and presentation of sporting violence had never before been seen. In reaction, the sportization process of MMA began and the subculture of the sport started to develop as …

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

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

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 …

Elusive Peace, Security, And Justice In Post-Conflict Guatemala: An Exploration Of Transitional Justice And The International Commission Against Impunity In Guatemala (Cicig), Daniel W. Schloss

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Guatemala has, until today, struggled to achieve security and justice following the end of nearly half a century of civil war in 1996. One specific institution, the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), has been implemented to rectify many of the Guatemalan state’s difficulties in establishing and maintaining the rule of law. In this thesis, I look to better explain CICIG’s role in Guatemala relative to security and justice in a post-conflict setting: I define CICIG as an institution potentially capable of building societal trust, and I explain how the inclusion of procedural justice within transitional justice can help …

Creating Difference: The Legal Production Of Race In American Slavery, Shaun N. Ramdin

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This dissertation examines the legal construction and development of racial difference as considered in literature written or set during the final years of American slavery. While there had consistently been a conceptual correspondence between black skin and enslavement, race or racial difference did not become the unqualified explanation of enslavement until fairly late in the institution’s history. Specifically, as slavery’s stability became increasingly threatened through the nineteenth century by abolitionism and racial slippage, race became the singular and explicit rationale for its existence and perpetuation. I argue that the primary discourse of this justificatory rationale was legal: through law race …

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 …

“Contemporary Reactions To War And The Holocaust With A Focus On The Role Of The Polish- Language Press In North America From 1926-1945.”, Magdalena E. Kubow

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Yad Vashem Magazine argued that more work needed to be done with regard to “how media reports on the Holocaust influenced people’s positions vis-à-vis the Jews during the war.” My research examines the attitude toward Jews prior to and during the Holocaust, and how information on such attitudes was disseminated, thus helping to reveal who knew what? When? Furthermore, in examining the evolution of the Holocaust, the question of who was interpreted as a target for genocide is explored.

When considering an event as ‘unprecedented’ as the Holocaust, historians should be asking when information was created, made available, and just …

Dishonoured Americans: Loyalist Manhood And Political Death In Revolutionary America, Timothy J. Compeau

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This dissertation offers a new reading of the loyalist experience by drawing on the insights and methodologies of cultural history and the anthropological study of honour, as well as the history of masculinity, to contextualize the class and gender-based concerns embedded in patriot and loyalist written records. American revolutionaries attacked loyalist men using deeply gendered language and symbols, and succeeded in dishonouring loyalism in general, while also driving individual loyalists from their communities. Male loyalists relied on the same culture of honour to rationalize their experiences, justify their continued allegiance to the Crown, and transform injuries intended as marks of …

Scintillating Scotoma: Migraine, Aura, And Perception In European Literature, 1860-1900, Janice Y. Zehentbauer

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This dissertation focuses upon the ways in which nineteenth-century physicians in the emergent field of neurology conceptualized and catalogued the neurological condition, migraine, and the ways in which European literary texts reimagined and interrogated such medical classifications. A recognized condition for hundreds of years, migraine in the nineteenth century became pathological; migraineurs became a “nervous” modern figure that haunted medicine and literary fiction. Anxieties regarding the construction of fragmented vision, bodies, gender, and consciousness render the migraine figure a relevant symbol for the modern era. The nineteenth-century medical treatises by Jean-Martin Charcot, Edward Liveing, and Hubert Airy reveal that a …

La Dialectique Du Bourreau : Étude Du Bourreau Nazi Dans La Littérature Contemporaine Française, Désirée Lamoureux

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La parole du bourreau nazi est absente de la majorité des documents historiques. Pour contrer cette carence, certains auteurs ont choisi de donner une place narrative à ce personage sybillin à l’intérieur de leur diégèse. Cette étude a pour but d’analyser la manière dont trois auteurs, soit Robert Merle, Jonathan Littell et Laurent Binet, octroient une place narrative au bourreau nazi. Nous cherchons aussi à élucider les raisons pour lesquelles il existe un intérêt dans la perspective du bourreau au début de ce nouveau millénaire.