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Backboards And Backlash: The Experiences Of Women's Intercollegiate Basketball Players Under Title Ix, 1975-1992, Meredyth Dwyer Aug 2023

Backboards And Backlash: The Experiences Of Women's Intercollegiate Basketball Players Under Title Ix, 1975-1992, Meredyth Dwyer

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Enacted as a provision of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, Title IX dramatically reshaped intercollegiate athletics opportunities for young women at American institutions of higher education. Yet, discrimination in intercollegiate athletics continued in the decades after the law went into effect. Using the oral history testimony of ten narrators, each a woman who played intercollegiate basketball between 1975 and 1992, this thesis explores the experiences of women’s basketball players in the first two decades after the passage of Title IX. Approaching the Title IX era through the lens of social history, this thesis asks two major questions: whether female …


“The Dignity Of Being Called Americans”: American Identity And Portrayals Of Canadians In The American Press, 1754-1812, Jonathan Bayer Jul 2023

“The Dignity Of Being Called Americans”: American Identity And Portrayals Of Canadians In The American Press, 1754-1812, Jonathan Bayer

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores the ways that Canadians were portrayed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century American press and considers how those portrayals intersected with and reinforced the development of early American identity. Building on the concepts of “othering” as identified by Edward Said and “imagined communities” as identified by Benedict Anderson, I argue that American newspapers othered Canadians as a means of reinforcing cohesion within the early American imagined community. Many historians have explored the ways that early Americans othered their French, British, Indigenous, and Black neighbours in constructing their own unified American identity, but these studies have …


Unsung Equine Heroes: An Analysis Of Equine Care And Management During The Great War, Emma E. Kuiack Aug 2022

Unsung Equine Heroes: An Analysis Of Equine Care And Management During The Great War, Emma E. Kuiack

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis explores the use of equines by the British Expeditionary Forces throughout the First World War, particularly examining various aspects of war equine care and management. It addresses the significance behind the use of these animals in the war before delving into the reality of how equines were cared for in terms of farrier work, skin care and management, feeding and watering, as well as psychological understandings of horses, donkeys, and mules. Through the implementation of various primary and secondary source materials, this thesis considers care mistakes that were made and the corrections that were enforced to alleviate injury …


You Go To My Head: Women's Prescription Pill Use In Postwar America, Erin K. Brown Jul 2022

You Go To My Head: Women's Prescription Pill Use In Postwar America, Erin K. Brown

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

During the postwar era, US pharmaceutical companies grew their production and distribution of prescription pills, which included barbiturates, minor tranquilizers, and amphetamines for mass consumption. Middle- and upper-class women were the majority users of these pills, finding assistance with the aid of prescribed drugs that helped correct difficulty with sleeping, eased anxiety, provided energy, and reduced the users’ size. This dissertation works to bring drug history and women’s history together to integrate the impact prescription pills had on women’s lives, positive and negative, and how and why consumers sought these drugs and the effects they promised. This project uncovers interactions …


In The Shadow Of The Atomic Cloud: Masculinity, Modernity, And The ‘Bomb’ In The Electoral Politics Of Canada And The United States, 1949-1963, Allen G. Priest Oct 2021

In The Shadow Of The Atomic Cloud: Masculinity, Modernity, And The ‘Bomb’ In The Electoral Politics Of Canada And The United States, 1949-1963, Allen G. Priest

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores the impact of hegemonic masculinity, in the early Cold War era, on the electoral politics of Canada and the United States. It situates itself in the years between 1949 and 1963, arguably the height of nuclear fear, at a time when masculine ideals were adjusting to an uncertain postwar reality. Previous scholarship has established that the Cold War brought with it a retreat into domesticity, followed by an emergent “crisis” of masculinity. This monograph contributes to the historiography by demonstrating that the masculine architypes of the early Cold War are frequently reflected in electoral discourse. It also …


The 1980 Moscow Olympic Boycott As A Tool Of American Foreign Policy, Andrew Rice Aug 2021

The 1980 Moscow Olympic Boycott As A Tool Of American Foreign Policy, Andrew Rice

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis explores the United States’ boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics as a tool of American foreign policy. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 which prompted US President Jimmy Carter to impose sanctions on the Soviets, including a boycott of the Moscow Games. The purpose of the paper is to explore why the boycott failed to achieve Carter’s objectives and evaluate what the President may have considered to substantially increase its success. Carter’s dealings with essential groups within the Olympic movement, such as the United States Olympic Committee (USOC), International Olympic Committee (IOC), and the Olympic athletes, as …


Illusory Inclusion: The Underlying Racial Barriers In Civil Defense 1950 - 1965, Hayley R. Dick Jul 2021

Illusory Inclusion: The Underlying Racial Barriers In Civil Defense 1950 - 1965, Hayley R. Dick

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Between the years of 1950 and 1965, evacuations and sheltering were used to ensure the protection of American civilians from a nuclear threat. However, not all Americans were able to employ these safety measures to prominent racial hierarchy within civil defense policy. This thesis explores the distribution, attainability, and utilization of civil defense to and by Black Americans. It examines the demographic, societal, and financial discrepancies between white and Black Americans employing census information, federal documents, and newspaper distribution. Owing to deep-rooted disparities in income between white and Black Americans, demographics, and racial ideals, this thesis argues that Black Americans …


"Second Sight": Acknowledging W.E.B. Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" As A Step Towards Dissolution, Alexandra M. Hudecki Oct 2020

"Second Sight": Acknowledging W.E.B. Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" As A Step Towards Dissolution, Alexandra M. Hudecki

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project examines American scholar W.E.B.’s DuBois’ idea of “double consciousness”, from his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The idea of “double consciousness” has and continues to be utilized by Black scholars and artists in literary, theoretical, and psychological contexts, some of which I hope my paper will adequately survey. I begin by examining “double consciousness” from the perspective of particulars by understanding Du Bois’s original idea and the specificities of the American context he himself was a part, considering the legacy of slavery. Then, by focusing primarily on writers such as Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright and Paul …


The Vine That Ate The North? Northern Reactions To Kudzu, 1876-2009, Kenneth Reilly Jul 2020

The Vine That Ate The North? Northern Reactions To Kudzu, 1876-2009, Kenneth Reilly

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Kudzu, Pueraria montana, is a perennial climbing vine native to Japan that was introduced in North America in 1876. With little awareness of where the plant could thrive, people across the United States grew the vine wherever they could. As a result, kudzu was not considered northern or southern. New Deal era policies centered around soil conservation encouraged the widespread usage of kudzu vine and discovered that kudzu grew best in southeastern states. This led to an increased association of the vine with the South. During the Great Migration and with the vine’s growing reputation as an invasive species, …


The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash Aug 2018

The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to …


Welcoming Strangers: Race, Religion, And Ethnicity In German Lutheran Ontario And Missouri, 1939-1970, Elliot Worsfold Aug 2018

Welcoming Strangers: Race, Religion, And Ethnicity In German Lutheran Ontario And Missouri, 1939-1970, Elliot Worsfold

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines how German-American and German-Canadian Lutherans in St. Louis, Missouri, and Waterloo County, Ontario, constructed their ethnic identities from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 to 1970. Did German Lutherans understand their ethnicity as an identity to overcome, or as an identity worth preserving? What role did religion and race play in how they constructed their ethnic identities? It argues that German Lutherans in the Missouri and Canada Synods constructed a hybrid identity that sought to balance their competing ethnic, religious, racial, and national identities. It charts their experiences negotiating discrimination during the Second World …


Tanks And Tinsel: The American Celebration Of Christmas During World War Ii, Samantha Desroches Jul 2018

Tanks And Tinsel: The American Celebration Of Christmas During World War Ii, Samantha Desroches

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

“Tanks and Tinsel: The American Celebration of Christmas during World War II” is an examination of the American celebration of Christmas during World War II. As the first comprehensive investigation into the most well-known holiday in Western culture and its role in shaping Americans’ experience and understanding of the war, it contributes to historical scholarship in three ways. First, it continues the trend of blending analyses of society into military-focused narratives of the war, and it expands the scope of this by fusing the literature of War and Society with that of Holiday History. Second, it challenges traditional views of …


The Foundations Of Empire Building: Spain’S Legacy And The American Imperial Identity, 1776-1921, Gregg M. French Jun 2017

The Foundations Of Empire Building: Spain’S Legacy And The American Imperial Identity, 1776-1921, Gregg M. French

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores both the admiration and dependency that influential Americans developed towards Spain and its imperial legacy as they attempted to construct the United States’ national and imperial identities throughout the long nineteenth century. The project also challenges beliefs associated with American exceptionalism, isolationism, and the Black Legend narrative. Developed in the metropole during the century prior to the United States’ emergence onto the world stage as an overseas imperial power in 1898, an informal group of elite Americans, made up of politicians, diplomats, Hispanist scholars, magazine editors, and exposition organizers, appropriated Spain’s imperial past as the foundation of …


Civilizational Imperatives: American Colonial Culture In The Islamic Philippines, 1899-1942, Oliver Charbonneau Feb 2016

Civilizational Imperatives: American Colonial Culture In The Islamic Philippines, 1899-1942, Oliver Charbonneau

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the colonial experience in the Islamic Philippines between 1899 and 1942. Occupying Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago in 1899, U.S. Army officials assumed sovereignty over a series of Muslim populations collectively referred to as ‘Moros.’ Beholden to pre-existing notions of Moro ungovernability, for two decades military and civilian administrators ruled the Southern Philippines separately from the Christian regions of the North. In the 1920s, Islamic areas of Mindanao and Sulu were ‘normalized’ and haphazardly assimilated into the emergent Philippine nation-state. Never fully integrated, the Muslim South persisted as an exotic frontier zone in the American and Filipino …


Creating Difference: The Legal Production Of Race In American Slavery, Shaun N. Ramdin Apr 2015

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

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

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 Apr 2015

Green Berets And Gay Deceivers: The New Left, The Vietnam Draft And American Masculinity, Anna L. Zuschlag

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

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 …


Before The World Was Quiet: Ronald Reagan, Cold War Foreign Policy, And The 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Summer Games, Brad Congelio Jun 2014

Before The World Was Quiet: Ronald Reagan, Cold War Foreign Policy, And The 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Summer Games, Brad Congelio

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Upon becoming President of the United States in 1981, Ronald Reagan faced a rapidly deteriorating relationship with the Soviet Union in the midst of the ongoing Cold War, exacerbated by the events of the 1980s, including the 1980 Olympic boycott and President Jimmy Carter’s administration. President Reagan’s bellicose statements and staunch anti-communism stance further aggravated the situation, reasserting and deepening Cold War anxieties in the Soviet Union. Compared to his predecessors, Reagan was a war hawk determined to bring an absolute end to the Soviet Union and the socialist world. This was no more apparent than in his foreign policy …


Boxing In The Union Blue: A Social History Of American Boxing In The Union States During The Late Antebellum And Civil War Years, Greggory M. Ross Apr 2014

Boxing In The Union Blue: A Social History Of American Boxing In The Union States During The Late Antebellum And Civil War Years, Greggory M. Ross

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study explores the social history of boxing in the Civil War era Union States in both the martial and civilian contexts, focusing on issues of masculinity, ethnicity, race, and class. This dissertation is divided into four sections, each emphasizing a different boxing scene. First, boxing in is explained in the context of the Union Army, drawing upon accounts of military life from diaries, letters, official army correspondence, and newspapers to examine how soldiers used: gloved sparring for physical and mental exercise and camaraderie; bare-knuckle prizefighting for dispute resolution, entertainment, and gambling; and both forms of boxing to exhibit masculine …


Day Of The Woman?: Feminism & Rape-Revenge Films, Kayley A. Viteo Dec 2012

Day Of The Woman?: Feminism & Rape-Revenge Films, Kayley A. Viteo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the horror film sub-genre of ‘rape revenge’ for the ways it reflects and helps to constitute broader public debates about women and feminism. In order to do so, it examines two well-known representatives of the sub-genre, Last House on the Left and I Spit On Your Grave. Both of these films were initially made in 1972 and 1978 respectively and were recently remade in 2009 and 2010. This thesis examines both the originals and the remakes of these films within and against their socio-historical context, with a specific focus on dominant discussions about feminism and women taking …


The Vatican, American Catholics And The Struggle For Palestine, 1917-1958: A Study Of Cold War Roman Catholic Transnationalism, Adriano E. Ciani Dec 2011

The Vatican, American Catholics And The Struggle For Palestine, 1917-1958: A Study Of Cold War Roman Catholic Transnationalism, Adriano E. Ciani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The modern relationship between the Vatican and the state of Israel is rooted in a much deeper history of relations between Judaism and Christianity. In the main, this relationship was fraught with tensions and animosity, as early Christian writers chastised and demonized Judaism, ensconcing a hostility that endured for centuries. The advent of political Zionism in the nineteenth century renewed Roman Catholic fears of a Jewish-dominated Palestine, where religious sites sacred to Catholics would fall under the political jurisdiction of a Zionist state. In 1904, Pope Pius X granted an audience to the prominent Zionist Theodor Herzl, in which he …