History Commons^™

Printing Devotion: Sufi Books And Their Transregional Networks In An Age Of Print, Mariam Elashmawy

Theses and Dissertations

The production of printed books in the Muslim world is a story that encompasses an array of actors, spanning centuries, and taking place in remote, yet connected locales. This thesis provides an intellectual history of Ṣūfī print production of Islamicate mystical works in the nineteenth-twentieth centuries by examining three overlapping genres: poetry, Ṣūfī histories (hagiography), and litanies (aḥzāb). Texts such as the Dīwān of devotional poetry by Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 632/1234), the litany of Abū al-Ḥasan al-Shādhilī (d. 656/1258), Ḥizb al-baḥr, and Rashaḥāt ʿayn al-ḥayāt, a history of the Naqshbandiyya order by Fakhr …

Fast Glass: Modernity, Technology, And The Cinematic Lens, Allain Daigle

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation tells a cultural history of how lenses became cinema lenses. While lenses are essential for film production, we know very little about the early history of cinema lenses. Rather than just focusing on which lenses were used on certain movies, I historicize how lens production became an industry. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, lens production shifted from an artisanal craft to a commercial industry. By looking at how companies created lenses for film production and projection, I expand early film history to account for the creative work of opticians, engineers, advertisers, and distributors. In more specifically focusing …

Culture And Code: The Evolution Of Digital Architecture And The Formation Of Networked Publics, Geoffrey Gimse

Theses and Dissertations

Culture and Code traces the construction of the modern idea of the Internet and offers a potential glimpse of how that idea may change in the near future. Developed through a theoretical framework that links Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim’s theory of the sociotechnical imaginary to broader theories on publics and counterpublics, Culture and Code offers a way to reframe the evolution of Internet technology and its culture as an enmeshed part of larger socio-political shifts within society. In traveling the history of the modern Internet as detailed in its technical documentation, legal documents, user created content, and popular media …

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

"To Conceive With Child Is The Earnest Desire If Not Of All, Yet Of Most Women": The Advancement Of Prenatal Care And Childbirth In Early Modern England: 1500-1770, Victoria E.C. Glover

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes medical manuals published in England between 1500 and 1770 to trace developing medical understandings and prescriptive approaches to conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. While there have been plenty of books written regarding social and religious changes in the reproductive process during the early modern era, there is a dearth of scholarly work focusing on the medical changes which took place in obstetrics over this period. Early modern England was a time of great change in the field of obstetrics as physicians incorporated newly-discovered knowledge about the male and female body, new fields and tools, and new or revived …

"Fanciful But Not Forgotten: A Historical Examination Of The Study Of The Flea, 1840-1930", Andrea Jean Buhler

Theses and Dissertations

Although the Victorian and Progressive periods saw a rise in entomological research, fleas were not a priority for scientific investigation. The discovery of fleas as disease vectors in the late nineteenth century marked a turning-point in interest in fleas. Expanding this standard history of fleas, the thesis probes flea research conducted outside the confines of disease during 1840-1930. It documents and analyzes the contributions of Louis Bertolotto, William Heckler, Charles Rothschild, Karl Jordan, and L. O. Howard. Whereas those working in the new profession of entomology saw fleas as disease vectors, these men had different relationships with fleas: Bertolotto and …

Distant Electric Vision: Cultural Representations Of Television From “Edison’S Telephonoscope” To The Electronic Screen, Ivy Roberts

Theses and Dissertations

Do inventions that exist only on paper have less credibility than functional technologies? How has the meaning and significance of audiovisual media and technology changed over time? This dissertation examines historiography and methodology for media history, arguing for an interdisciplinary approach. It addresses methodological issues in media history—media in transition, media archaeology, and film history—through an examination of television’s speculative era. It tackles moving-image history through an historical investigation of Victorian and Machine age “television”.

Because the concept and terminology of “television” changed dramatically during this period, I use the phrases “distant electric vision” and “seeing by electricity,” to define …

Rationality, Parapsychology, And Artificial Intelligence In Military And Intelligence Research By The United States Government In The Cold War, Guy M. Lomeo

Theses and Dissertations

A study analyzing the roles of rationality, parapsychology, and artificial intelligence in military and intelligence research by the United States Government in the Cold War. An examination of the methodology behind the decisions to pursue research in two fields that were initially considered irrational.

The Unsung Evolutionist: Charles Rau's Swiss Lake Dwelling Collection At The Smithsonian Institution, Liam C. Murphy

Theses and Dissertations

During the second half of the nineteenth century, museums and collectors around the world engaged in a collecting frenzy focused on objects from the Swiss Alpine sites known as Pfahlbauten. Romantic reconstructions of these sites captured the antiquarian imagination and resulted in an artifact diaspora. Charles (Carl) Rau, a German-American archaeologist who became the first Curator of Antiquities at the Smithsonian Institution (SI), collected several hundred Neolithic and Bronze Age artifacts from the lake dwelling sites of Robenhausen and Auvernier, donating this material as well as his library to the SI upon his death in 1886. This thesis investigates the …

Utilizing Illinois State University's Environmental Legacy And Historical Collections To Sustain A Global Future, Melissa Nergard

Theses and Dissertations

The scholarly capital of materials at Illinois State University includes numerous natural history collections from the mid-nineteenth century that hold significant research and historical value. Changes in pedagogical methods and academic leadership, however, created confusion and territorial competition in who would preserve and manage the collections. Consequently some specimens from those early collections have been both lost and forgotten. This thesis used a systems approach to track the material losses incurred when institutional support shifted in the 1870s, and the original collectors and curators left Central Illinois for national interests in Washington, D.C. Yet, historical environmental collections have become increasingly …

Race And Mental Illness At A Virginia Hospital: A Case Study Of Central Lunatic Asylum For The Colored Insane, 1869-1885, Caitlin Doucette Foltz

Theses and Dissertations

In 1869 the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia passed legislation that established the first asylum in the United States to care exclusively for African-American patients. Then known as Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane and located in Richmond, Virginia, the asylum began to admit patients in 1870. This thesis explores three aspects of Central State Hospital's history during the nineteenth century: attitudes physicians held toward their patients, the involuntary commitment of patients, and life inside the asylum. Chapter One explores the nineteenth-century belief held by southern white physicians, including those at Central State Hospital, that freed people …

Interdisciplinary Connections Between Science & Theatre, Jessica N. Dotson

Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

INTERDISCIPLINARY CONNECTIONS BETWEEN SCIENCE & THEATRE

Jessica Nicole Dotson

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Virginia Commonwealth University, 2015.

Major Director: Dr. Noreen C. Barnes, Director of Graduate Studies, Associate Professor of Theatre

In the 1990s, astronomer Peter Usher was searching for new ways to teach his introductory astronomy class at Pennsylvania State University. He began to engage his students by searching for astronomical connections from other disciplines. His focus was turned to the arts, especially the works of William Shakespeare. Usher found, while …