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Full-Text Articles in History

Diagnosing The Will To Suffer: Lovesickness In The Medical And Literary Traditions, Jane Shmidt Sep 2018

Diagnosing The Will To Suffer: Lovesickness In The Medical And Literary Traditions, Jane Shmidt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout Western medical history, unconsummated, unreturned, or otherwise failed love was believed to generate a disorder of the mind and body that manifested in physiological and psychological symptoms. This study traces the medical and literary history of lovesickness from antiquity through the 19th century, emphasizing significant moments in the development of the medical discourse on love. The project is part of the recent academic focus on the intersection between the humanities and the medical sciences, and it situates literary texts in concurrent medical and philosophical debates on afflictions of the psyche. By contextualizing the fictional works within the scientific …


Darwin's Failures: Childless Women In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rose P. O'Malley May 2018

Darwin's Failures: Childless Women In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rose P. O'Malley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation uses feminist neo-materialist and evolutionary theory to examine non-maternal relations among childless female characters in nineteenth-century British novels. In both the nineteenth century and the present day there is a tendency to use the authority of evolutionary biology to define women as essentially reproductive beings; their entire physical and intellectual organization is seen as geared toward childbearing and childrearing. Reading childless female characters with this tradition in mind, as well as the more open-minded counter-narrative of feminist engagements with evolution, opens up new questions about their meaning: Are they truly biological failures, or not? What avenues of physical …


"Betwixt The World Destroyed And World Restored": Subjectivity And Paradisal Recovery In John Milton's Late Poems, Chihping Ma Feb 2018

"Betwixt The World Destroyed And World Restored": Subjectivity And Paradisal Recovery In John Milton's Late Poems, Chihping Ma

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study focuses on the discovery of subjectivity through the recovery of lost paradise in Milton’s late poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. This theme revolves around the tension between the affective and the empirical, which also configure the spheres of the sacred and the profane. I explore how the irresistibly emancipatory impulse of recovering lost paradise compels Miltonic subjects to seek ways to return to their originary state or the divine ensemble. During this process, the subject is engaged with his own incapacity or privation while reaching into the sphere of unknown potentiality. In …


Powerhouse Chihuahua: Electricity, Water, And The State In The Long Mexican Revolution, Jonathan Hill Jr Feb 2018

Powerhouse Chihuahua: Electricity, Water, And The State In The Long Mexican Revolution, Jonathan Hill Jr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

State formation has for decades been a major analytical focus for historians of Mexico, especially during the armed Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and the “long” political and social revolution which continued for decades thereafter. Since the 1980s, the cultural turn in the humanities has produced groundbreaking works in the field and introduced a model of state formation framed around hegemony, subaltern agency, and the nation. While these reflect prevailing approaches, this dissertation joins more recent interdisciplinary work on Mexico in conversation with a ‘material turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. Focusing on the policy debates and infrastructural networks which attended …


The Bronx Was Brewing: A Digital Resource Of A Lost Industry, Michelle Zimmer Feb 2018

The Bronx Was Brewing: A Digital Resource Of A Lost Industry, Michelle Zimmer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Bronx: a bucolic oasis laden with history, a suburb within city-limits, an urban warzone, and thanks to the recent renaissance, a phoenix of progress rising from the proverbial ashes of the fires that burned through the borough in the 1970’s. But many people are unaware that the Bronx also brewed.
Uncovering the brewing industry of the Bronx tells not only the story of the lost industry, but it also communicates the narrative of the development of the Bronx. The brewers were German immigrants who developed a thriving industry by introducing lager beer to the United States by taking advantage …