History Commons^™

The Poverty Of Simplicity: Austerity, Alienation, And Tiny Houses, Brian Richard Hennigan

Dissertations - ALL

Tiny houses – stand-alone, fully functional dwellings generally between 100 and 400 square-feet – are increasingly popular in the United States. The degradation of working class life wrought through neoliberal policy and then punctuated by the Great Recession propels this popularity. Next to traditional houses, tiny houses are significantly cheaper. Those among the middle stratum of the working class have sought out tiny houses as a means to ease their financial anxiety. Rather than merely a newer form of cheaper housing, an entire lifestyle movement has emerged around tiny houses. Anti-consumerism is the keystone to this lifestyle movement. For enthusiasts, …

La Esfera Lúdica: Entretenimiento Popular En El Espacio Público Urbano Del Río De La Plata, 1870-1933, Maria Soledad Mocchi Radichi

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I focus on popular ludic and cultural practices that shaped the urban spaces of Uruguay and Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. I argue that by inhabiting the public sphere in close dialogue with modernization and urbanization, popular entertainment became a main protagonist within everyday life. Cultural practices such as carnival, theater, soccer, radio, and cinema, presented intersections between each other. These intersections generated what I term the ludic urban sphere, to underscore not just the overwhelming presence of play and entertainment as central elements in the urban landscape, …

A Workers' Paradise: Re-Integrating Newfoundland Into Colonial American History, Elena Hynes

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

The island of Newfoundland is conspicuous in colonial British and North American histories, most particularly and paradoxically, in its absence, a state of affairs which this study aims to help address. Multiple factors, including a paucity of documentary sources and various historiographic trends, have traditionally contributed to Newfoundland’s marginalization within colonial historical narratives. However, developments in recent years have made Newfoundland’s potential integration into the broader colonial dialogue more feasible including the advent of the Atlantic perspective, the expansion of available sources, and the work of multiple regional historians who have challenged enduring historiographic trends characterizing Newfoundland colonial settlements as …

A Sanctuary World: Understanding The Past, Present, And Future Of Sanctuary Movements, Annaleigh Cummings

Undergraduate Theses

In the late 1970s through the 1980s, sanctuary movements emerged in the United States to support and provide sanctuary for immigrants and asylum seekers without a legal status of U.S. citizenship. This movement has its roots in the ancient church tradition of offering sanctuary to people accused of crimes. Religious leaders offered protection against the government in the name of their beliefs. It is a cycle that has often been repeated throughout history from the medieval European era to abolitionists helping runaway enslaved people in the United States to the contemporary movements existing today. This project explores and analyzes three …

Creating The Experience: Engaging Millennials In Museums With A Focus On Jewish Millennials And Museums, Sarah G. Drozda

Museum Studies Theses

In this research, I explore two main ideas: The relationship that millennials have with museums and what programming excites them into coming back to the museum. To do this, I did a background review of the motivations and passions of the millennial generation, as well as various programming that have engaged millennials in museums. As someone who is a millennial and passionate about Jewish museums and Jewish engagement, I focused my research on how museums can help to bring Jewish millennials closer to their heritage, culture, and Jewish identity. A good segment of Jewish millennials is not drawn to traditional …

Proof Positive: Applications Of Chemical Analysis Techniques In Art Forgery Detection, Joseph Fryc

Museum Studies Theses

In response to the subjective nature of older forgery detection techniques, modern forgery detection methods rely heavily on chemical analysis of the materials utilized in a given piece of work in order to make authenticity determinations. Chemical methods of detection at their core provide an objective determination of facts regarding the composition of materials utilized in contested pieces and provide a relative date of production for those materials. In this way, chemical analysis helps service the field of modern forgery detection as a direct compliment to traditional stylistic analysis, by providing extra data on the piece that can often be …

Museums & Environmental Sustainability: Are They Doing Enough?, Alexandra M. Dwyer

Museum Studies Theses

As the world continues to be affected by the rapid rates of climate change, institutions from every sector are transitioning to become more sustainable by reducing or eliminating their harmful habits on the ecosystem. Whether by their own accord or external pressure from current legislative action to cut carbon emissions, institutions are shifting towards a sustainable future. For museums there are additional unique reasons to adopt sustainability into various aspects with their institution. The most influential reason is that museums have a responsibility as community leaders and change makers. However, looming questions remain: Are museums doing enough? Are these cultural …

Ledgers Of The W.T. Carter And Brother Lumber Company: An Archival Processing Project, Christopher Cameron Cotton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The W.T. Carter and Brother Lumber Company began in 1898 and operated until 1968 when it was sold to the U.S. Plywood Corporation. The Polk County, Texas company harvested longleaf pine during a crucial period of development for the Texas economy. The lumber industry was the state’s first large scale commercial enterprise not dependent on farming and provided a model for future extractive industries in the state. The W.T. Carter and Brother Lumber Company town of Camden, Texas exemplifies rural implementations of the company town system in the Texas lumber industry. This public history thesis provides a brief history of …

Collige Et Impera: The United States Reengagement In Libya, Marco Schinella

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

President Biden's "America is back" pledge holds the potential to be put to the test with the ongoing crisis in Libya. The internationalization of the post-Ghaddafi Libyan breakdown, strained by great-power competition (GPC) dynamics, poses nonnegligible threats to the United States (US) national security that extends beyond Libya per se. Reframing the conflict from yet another Middle East and North Africa (MENA) conflict to an urgent multilateral Mediterranean security challenge will help elevate the country's profile on the global stage. This thesis outlines a qualitative, within-case study analysis of the ongoing Libyan crisis from the perspective of US national security …

Improving Veteran Access; Status Of Operations Of The United States Department Of Veteran Affairs Work-Study Program, Kirk Allen

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The usage status of The U.S. Department Veterans Affairs Work-Study Program is examined. Beneficiary numbers from the Global, Unites States, State, and Local/County perspective are reviewed. While of essential value, the program suffers from a lack of scholarly research and government oversight, and is further hindered by restrictive administrative rules lived first-hand. Research suggests that the program is operating outside of accountability to the taxpayer, presents as unnecessarily/overly-restrictive in accessibility, and is underutilized. The program appears to not be serving all veterans to full potential.

The Work-Study Program is codified in Veterans Benefits', Title 38 United States Code, Part III, …

All Roads Lead To Darrington: Building A Bluegrass Community In Western Washington, James W. Edgar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through the mid-twentieth century, a significant pattern of migration occurred between Appalachia and the Pacific Northwest, with Washington’s thriving timber industry offering compelling economic opportunities. Many workers and families from western North Carolina settled in the small mountain town of Darrington, Washington, frequently accompanied by their banjos and guitars. As a group of young bluegrass enthusiasts from Seattle established relationships with Darrington’s “Tar Heel” musicians, a collaborative music community formed, laying the foundation for the region’s contemporary bluegrass scene.

Drawn from a series of ethnographic interviews, this project illuminates the development of a bluegrass community in western Washington, while identifying …

Tightening Your Grip : The Unintended Consequences Of Export Control Policies, Keon C. Weigold

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation examines the effects that policies instituted to restrict the diffusion of technology between countries have on the development of technology and international relations. Diffusion restrictions such as export controls or strategic trade controls are often instituted for the purpose of increasing the national security of the implementing country. However, this project theorizes that these types of restrictions can have unforeseen effects on the level of technological development in the implementing country and other countries around the world. The implementing country will see a decrease in their relative level of technological development while other countries around the world will …

The Impacts Of Social Media On Social Movements, Gabriela Aguilar

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

As time passes by there is more representation of social movements due to their high exposure on social media. Technology has become a major part of our everyday lives and on average we spend many hours on social platforms. We are exposed to the injustices that occur every minute of every day through social media. Before, when technology was not accessible for everyone the news people received were from television, newspapers, or even magazines. Now, we have platforms such as Twitter and TikTok among others that provide us with news on any malpractice that occurs in our communities and society. …

An Intergenerational Photo Exploration Of Self Care Actions In Self-Identifying Strong Black Women, Vanessa Patrice Goodar

Dissertations

The current study sought to expand upon the Giscombé Superwoman Schema (2010) specifically exploring the role of vulnerability resistance and help obligation as potential barriers to changing comprehensive self-care health commitments in self-identifying Strong Black Women (SBW). The Superwoman Schema characteristics of vulnerability resistance and help obligation along with socio-economic factors of income, religious affiliation and marital status were assessed in the project using a visual-ethnography approach to Photo Voice methods and five intergenerational focus groups of SBW's born between 1946 and 2002. The collective self-care knowledge of these eighteen participants was analyzed using a participatory action research discussion framework …

How “Interested” Criticism Fueled The Formulation Of Nineteen Eighty-Four’S Cultural Afterlife, John Cameron Bosch

All Theses

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four carries a “cultural afterlife” as a result of “interested” criticism, which has a set political/practical barometer or motive. While everyone agrees that the novel presents a frightening dystopia, many also consider it a prophetic piece that illuminates the possible corruption of executive power of a nation thanks to this cultural afterlife; the modern and popular term “Orwellian” resulted from these sorts of analyses and have only escalated in the years since its inception. As a result, within the past decade, multiple scholars, analysts, and journalists have referenced Orwell’s novel as a factual representation of this executive …

The Passion Of Ken Williams: The Double Life Of A Mayor, The Newspaper That Brought Him Down, And The Story Of Journalism In America, Michael Adkison

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In November 2007, a team of reporters from the Benton County Daily Record published an expose revealing that Ken Williams, the mayor of Centerton, Arkansas, had been living a double life. In his former life as Don LaRose, he was a preacher in the Northeast, who one day vanished without a trace. His wild saga includes Satanists, truth serums, and a supposed murder. The Benton County Daily Record confronted the former reverend several times before he finally confessed to his double life. The next morning, he resigned as mayor, saying that the decisions he made were for the protection of …

[Dis]Assembling Race: The Fepc In Oklahoma, 1941-1946, Arley Ward

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

On the World War II home front in Oklahoma the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) succeeded in securing defense jobs for African Americans. The efforts of the committee, The Oklahoma Eagle, the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch, and the State Conference of Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) advanced civil rights in Oklahoma throughout World War II and beyond. The efforts of the FEPC in Oklahoma connect civil rights efforts in the 1940s directly to Brown v Board of Education, (1954) and the classic civil rights movement.

A Song Of The Bluff: The Phoenix Of Pine Bluff Arkansas - Documentary, Neba Evans

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Pine Bluff, Arkansas has long grappled with a reputation as a town riddled with crime and violence. Once a thriving agricultural center of the state, Arkansas residents tend to score the town’s successes as relics of the past. Economic decline, negative migration systems like white flight and brain drain, and racial disparities ties to the city’s roots has continued to take its toll on the city. Nonetheless, the community of Pine Bluff knows excellence has and continues to prosper there. A Song of the Bluff is a 15-minute documentary that seeks to flip the negative narrative by confronting these stereotypes …

Interpreting Summer In The Parks In The National Capital Area Of The National Park Service, Brendan J. Kane

Human Movement Studies & Special Education Theses & Dissertations

Washington D.C. has witnessed many watershed events throughout the history of the United States of America. One of these events was the Summer in the Parks (SITP) program organized by the National Park Service (NPS) from 1968-1976. Summer in the Parks was a community-based series of events including concerts, park visits, and exhibitions designed to quell racial tensions and promote park usage. Researchers have begun chronicling SITP, but have yet to explore how the story of SITP is conveyed by park interpreters to visitors and subsequently what themes are shared to inform public understanding of the historic relationship between NPS …

“From The House Come Everything”: Macler Shepard And Jeffvanderlou, Inc’S Effort To Rebuild A North St. Louis City Neighborhood, 1966-1978, Mark Loehrer

Theses

This thesis charts the course of the JeffVanderLou (JVL) organization between the pivotal years of 1966 to 1976, using the life of a man named Macler Shepard as the primary lens of exploration. Born in Marvell Arkansas, Macler Shepard followed in the footsteps of tens of thousands of other Southern migrants to cities like St. Louis, hoping to find a new life in the industrial North. However, no sooner had he settled in, he was displaced by the construction of Pruitt-Igoe, one of St. Louis’ first large-scale urban renewal programs. In response, Shepard became involved in neighborhood organizing, focusing on …

The Predictive Influence Of Challenging Behavior On Parent Stress In Young Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Paige Weir

LSU Master's Theses

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in social communication, restricted interest, and repetitive patterns of behavior. Individuals with ASD also exhibit challenging behaviors that affect parent and caregiver stress directly. However, researchers have not yet examined the predictive influence of specific challenging behaviors on parent stress, particularly in young children (i.e., infants and toddlers) with ASD. Therefore, the current study expands existing literature by a) investigating the influence that challenging behaviors of young children with ASD have on parent stress and b) examining the unique contribution that each behavior (i.e., aggressive/disruptive behavior, stereotypy, and self-injurious …

“Living Under Different Skies”: Misrepresenting Egyptian Education During The British Occupation In The North American Press, Shaymaa Zantout

Major Papers

During the British occupation from 1882 to 1922, Egypt saw the rise of colonial educational reforms, American missionary projects, and foreign-subsidized schools. Consequently, newspapers in North America reported extensively on these colonial educational excursions. In the view of correspondents, the so-called “enlightenment” of Egyptians was dependent on their adoption of Western moral ideals and instructional models. The main criticisms levelled at Egyptian education centred on what was viewed as the “incompetence” of native instructors and schools, namely Muslim ones, as well as the need for the modern education of young women. Moreover, Christian or Western schooling was posited as the …

Accessibility For All: Digitization In Museums, Shayna Diamond

Museum Studies Theses

The role museums have in society is an ever-changing one. As institutions of knowledge, culture, and humanity, they are subject to the same evolutions as the people they represent, educate, and serve. Thus, as digitization movements have swept the world, efforts to bring museums into the digital age have increased. This paper discusses digitization in the museum context, addresses the digitization of collections and exhibitions, and examines how digitization tools open those resources for public access – in particular for people with disabilities. The aim of this topic is to demonstrate how said digitization can best be utilized for the …

Unmade And Unmanned Men: Reading Traumatized Masculinity In Late Nineteenth-Century British Adventure Fiction Through The Lens Of The Indian “Mutiny” Of 1857, Madison A. Bettle

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Unmade and Unmanned Men: Reading Traumatized Masculinity in Late Nineteenth-Century British Adventure Fiction through the Lens of the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857 examines the selected adventure fiction of George Alfred Henty, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad through the historico-political context of India’s First War of Independence, known in Victorian Britain as the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857. Examining masculine trauma in adventure fiction reveals how British men, who were themselves colonized by the Empire’s expectations of them, sought not only to recover from the scars inflicted by imperialism, but also to expose the Empire for inflicting the psychologically damaging expectations that …

Nopal En La Frente: Racial Passing And The Hidden Indigeneity Of The Los Altos Region Of Jalisco, 1720-1950, Brandon Manuel Márquez

History

When people look at Los Altos de Jalisco, they typically think of this area as representing a pocket of European ancestry in a mestizaje state. Yet this ignores one huge aspect of this region: its indigenous history. Throughout the last three hundred years, the Los Altos region of Jalisco has allowed for the racial passing of many different families. This is all the more significant because many of its citizens have what many believe to be European features- mainly being light hair, light skin, and colored eyes. Because of these perceived European features, many of the Alteños believe that they …

Instrumentalizing The Past: The Politics Of Holocaust Memory In Contemporary Poland, Jonathan Zisook

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates Poland’s politics of Holocaust memory from the contentious Jedwabne debate in the early 2000s through the present and shows how the history of the Holocaust has been both distorted and exploited in contemporary Polish politics and culture. It pays special attention to the most recent period of Law and Justice Party rule (2015-2020) and considers the varying ways that the government has constructed its approach to the past by asserting a “policy on history” (polityka historyczna) in state-sponsored research, the educational system, legislation, museum narratives, and more. In so doing, this work argues that the …

Desde El Fuego Que En Mí Arde: Performance, Literatura Y Cine Afro-Latinoamericano Producidos Por Mujeres Afrodescendientes En Perú, Cuba Y Brasil (1960–2000), Elena Ekatherina Chavez Goycochea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines different films, literary, and performance art pieces created by contemporary afro-descendant women from Peru, Cuba, and Brazil after the sixties with emphasis on the most relevant works of Conceição Evaristo, Sara Gómez, Victoria Santa Cruz, and Lucía Charún-Illescas. I focus my research on the crucial role these artists played in the cultural identity formation of Latin America when inserting ‘race’ as a category of socio-political analysis and cultural production. How did their films, performances, and texts challenge national narratives and imaginaries after 1960? Although in the sixties, women improved their civil rights in different countries, the ‘mujer …

The Federalist Papers' Account Of Human Nature, Jeffrey P. Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper is an analysis of the account of human nature found in The Federalist Papers. This interpretation assumes The Federalist is a work of political rhetoric and advocacy, but also one of genuine significance as political science and philosophy. As a book, The Federalist is a coherent whole, which offers a coherent account of human nature, despite the collective nature of its authorship, the time pressures of its publication, and the piecemeal nature of its workmanship. This understanding of human nature is the thread which runs through all its analysis and numbers. Its arguments asserting the inadequacies of …

Afterlives Of Discovery: Speculative Geographies In The Colombian Political Landscape, Heidi A. Rhodes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers how the temporal remains of the Age of Discovery and its doctrine persist in a racial-geographical ranking of human and non-human, terrestrial and planetary life and worth. Across this work, I interpret a series of historical moments and their objects of speculative geographic cultural production: a state mapping program, a painting, a biomedical project, a de-monumenting protest action. As repositories of codified belief and repertoires of Discovery’s political and affective modes of racialized domination, I read these materials from the Colombian archives of coloniality and liberalism to illuminate their implications for Colombia’s national becoming as a liberal …

Orban's Hungary: Lack Of Freedoms Becoming The Motivation For Hungarian Emigration, Fanni Sampson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the past 10 years Hungary has gone through some major systematic changes since the Orban administration took office. The implementations of the Orban government serve the benefits and power of his party and aim to limit the freedom of Hungarian citizens. Orban, throughout these changes, emphasizes the importance of preserving the Hungarian national identity, which he defines as far-right conservative christian values and takes control over everything that does not fit under this definition. This thesis argues that the Hungarian government is becoming increasingly dictatorial under the Orban administration which not only challenges the life of Hungarian citizens but …