History Commons^™

Past And Progress: Producing History At Chicago's 1933-34 World's Fair, Cate Liabraaten

Dissertations

During the country’s worst economic crisis, the Great Depression, Chicago hosted an event that presented a vision for the future. The 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition was Chicago’s second world’s fair, important for revitalizing the local economy as well as encouraging optimism for a better future. While the fair’s theme officially focused on scientific and technological progress and was intended to be forward-looking, several exhibits dwelt on the past.

Study of these historic-themed exhibits reveals that by featuring Abraham Lincoln, Fort Dearborn, Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable, and a replica colonial village, Americans looked to their shared past to make …

“The Saloon Is Their Palace”: Race, Immigration, And Politics In The Woman’S Christian Temperance Union, 1874–1933, Ella Wagner

Dissertations

immigration, prohibition, race, suffrage, temperance, women's history

Reclaiming The Patria: Sinarquismo In The United States, 1936-1966, Nathan Ellstrand

Dissertations

This dissertation examines the rise and fall of the Catholic, nationalist, and anti-communist Mexican Unión Nacional Sinarquista (UNS or National Synarchist Union) in the U.S. between 1936 and the 1960s. Whereas most scholars study the UNS as a Mexico-specific movement, I examine the organization as a transnational one. This project not only adds to the literature on the UNS, but in Mexican American, Western, and postrevolutionary Mexican history. The individuals that became sinarquistas found refuge from the Mexican church-state conflict in the U.S. in places such as Texas, California, and Chicagoland. The organization’s leadership therefore envisioned an expanded Mexico wherever …

Detrimental Influences: Chicago And The Home Owners' Loan Corporation, 1933-1940, Matthew Amyx

Dissertations

This dissertation chronicles and analyzes the record of the Chicago chapter of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation in Chicago during the New Deal.

Reams, Radicals And Revolutionaries: The 'Illinois Staats-Zeitung' And The German-American Milieu In Chicago, 1847-1877, Sebastian Peter Wuepper

Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes how a large, German-language newspaper, the Illinois Staats-Zeitung served the German-American immigrant community in Chicago in the second half of the nineteenth century. The German diaspora in the United States was not a secluded, separated, and isolated entity, but a node in a transnational network of cultural exchange that crossed national and natural boundaries. Newspapers contributed significantly to the creation and maintenance of this cultural sphere. The editors of the Staats-Zeitung were refugees of the failed 1848 democratic revolutions in Germany. In Germany they had been academics, intellectuals, lawyers and journalists. They brought their political convictions with …

Peace Bodies: Women, Encampments, And The Struggle Against Nuclear Weapons During The Cold War, 1979-1992, Janette Clay

Dissertations

"Peace Bodies: Women, Encampments, and the Struggle against Nuclear Weapons during the Cold War, 1972-1992" examines the global 1980s women's peace camping movement. This study aims to explore and comprehend peace in new ways. It is specifically targeted to define peace campers' fundamental peace principles and to discover how they embodied them. This research interrogates the ways in which the peace camping movement influenced the political and cultural developments that led to nuclear de-escalation in the final years of the Cold War. The sources for this research include women's peace camp archival records, film footage and photographs, interviews, and oral …

"An Environmental Sleight Of Hand:" Trash, Activism, And Urban Finance In Detroit, 1970-1990, Chelsea Denault

Dissertations

This dissertation explores the political, economic, and environmental choices that led city officials in Detroit to build the world's largest waste incinerator. in the 1970s, Detroit officials €“ led by Mayor Coleman Young €“ confronted the difficult financial realities of the urban crisis alongside the rise of a new environmental issue €“ the garbage crisis. a single solution to these dual crises seemed to present itself in €œresource recovery,€ the burning of municipal waste in an incinerator to produce steam and electricity. in the context of the energy crises of the 1970s, the logic of resource recovery was compelling to …

Useful For Life: Women, Girls, And Vocational School Reform In Chicago, 1880-1930, Ruby Oram

Dissertations

This dissertation explores how the competing efforts of women to prepare girls for wage-earning and homemaking shaped the development of vocation programs for female students in Chicago schools between 1880 and 1930. Histories of vocational education have neglected the role of women as school reformers and suggested that boys rather than girls were the primary focus of new work-oriented classes in urban public schools. Using Chicago as a case study, this dissertation uncovers how groups of women social reformers, educators, and trade unionists promoted vocational programs to protect school-aged girls from dangerous working conditions, steer girls into "wholesome" occupations, and …

Mobilizing The Past: Local History And Community Action In Modern Metropolitan Chicago, Hope Shannon

Dissertations

The vast majority of local historical societies in operation today opened in the decades following World War II. These organizations are common fixtures in cities, towns, and neighborhoods across the United States, and their members continue to support the mandate to protect and share the local past set by their society founders forty, fifty, and sixty years ago. Despite the ubiquity of the local historical society, however, few scholars have considered the ways historical society founders and members used these organizations to do anything beyond explore an interest in local history. €œMobilizing the Past€ investigates how and why residents formed …

Exhibiting Sovereignty: Tribal Museums In The Great Lakes Region, 1969-2010, Meagan Mcchesney

Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the foundation and development of tribal museums in the Great Lakes region is a form of activism -- a deliberate action performed for the purpose of inciting positive political, social, cultural, and/or economic change -- and that the functions of tribal museums enable Native activism to continue and evolve to reflect and address new historical understandings and contemporary circumstances. I argue that in the Great Lakes region, Native activism continued beyond the highly publicized movement of the 1960s and 70s, and manifested in ways suited to address regionally and tribally-based needs. Control over interpretations of the …

Love And Loyal Actions': Ritual Affect And Royal Authority, 1688-1760, Amy Oberlin

Dissertations

This project examines the changing emotional relationship between the English royal court and the public during the reigns of the last Stuarts (1688 - 1714) and the early Hanoverians (1714-1760), when the court was forced to abandon traditional representations of divine right. During this period, the rise of print, the growth of representative institutions and changing cultural attitudes to emotion created a new style of monarchy, one more emotionally accessible to its subjects. These changes signaled the death of rule by divine right and the birth of a modern monarchy. In essence, the monarch moved from heaven to earth, becoming …

Survival Under Oppression: The Puerto Rican And Allied Struggle For Representation In Chicago, 1950-1983, Marisol Violanda Rivera

Dissertations

This dissertation explores the how various Latino organizations spanning from 1950 to 1983, helped Latinos gain representation within Chicago. Social clubs, which brought opportunity to European ethnics, no longer functioned as a conduit to direct power as white ethnics solidified their positions in the city. Progressive Latino organizations under government oppression suffered destruction or evolved in effort to obtain better opportunities for Latinos. Oral histories show how members of the organizations develop their own narratives and reveal the creation of discourses regarding events that occurred as well as the impact they had within their lives and on the community.

Transport For Early Modern London: London's Transportation Environment And The Experience Of Movement, 1500-1800, Noah Paul Phelps

Dissertations

This dissertation investigates two closely related topics regarding London's transportation environment. The first was to determine the shape of early modern London's transportation infrastructure and determine who was responsible for its design, construction and maintenance. The second goal was to investigate the experiences of those moving about the city. In some cases, it was possible to find substantive information on London's transport milieu; for example, the number of gates and the size of the wall surrounding the city from Stow's 1598 Survey of London or the rules regarding street cleaning in London's Letter Books. In most cases, however, it was …

Forgetting How To Hate: The Evolution Of White Responses To Integration In Chicago, 1946-1987, Chris Ramsey

Dissertations

After the Supreme Court made restrictive covenants illegal in 1948, violence became the default response for numerous white communities across the South Side of Chicago when African Americans moved into €“ or just passed through €“ their neighborhoods. The civil rights movement's high-profile successes in the first half of the 1960s and the media attention Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s open housing marches on the Southwest Side of Chicago brought to segregation in the urban North made brute force unacceptable to the public at-large. White ethnic residents on Chicago's Southwest Side realized they could no longer resort to violent means …

"Let's Get Together And Chew The Fat": Women, Size And Community In Modern America, Amelia Earhart Serafine

Dissertations

"Let's Get Together and Chew the FAT: Women, Size, and Community in Modern America" argues that between 1948 and the 1980s, women in America formed communities around issues of size in order to claim agency over their bodies. Primarily concerned with losing weight, many women in these groups nonetheless created new tools and abilities with which to resist oppression based on body size. Some women went as far as to form explicitly positive fat identities and reject compulsory slenderness. This dissertation investigates four cases studies: TOPS (Take off Pounds Sensibly), Overeaters Anonymous, Weight Watchers, and the Fat Liberation movement of …

Seekers And Observers: Life Histories Of Three Female Antebellum Historians, Annmarie Valdes

Dissertations

This dissertation provides a history and analysis of the educational experiences and scholarly texts of three female historians. The study employs the combined frameworks of Haraway's €˜situated knowledges' and Life History for examining three female historians who were involved in three integrated aspects of knowledge production: scholar, educator and author. The three case studies examine the lives of Elizabeth Peabody (1804-1894), Caroline Dall (1822-1912), and Mary L. Booth (1831-1889), with an analytical focus on their Antebellum Era, mid-nineteenth-century historical publications. A core contention is that knowledge production by women and, in particular, historical texts produced for schools and public consumption …

She Shot Him Dead: The Criminalization Of Women And The Struggle Over Social Order In Chicago, 1871-1919, Rachel A. Boyle

Dissertations

From 1871 to 1919, Chicago emerged as an epicenter of a struggle over social order as municipal officials and self-proclaimed reformers fought for the power to decide which people and what behavior should be designated as criminal. Studying the criminalization of women in Chicago reveals how contested categories of crime and gender changed over time and provides insight into broader battles over moral, political, and economic power in the United States. In the late nineteenth century, an intimate economy of public women fighting, drinking, and having sex for money profoundly shaped daily life in the streets, saloons, and brothels of …

Remains To Be Seen: Execution And Embodiment In The Early English Atlantic World, Erin M. Feichtinger

Dissertations

This dissertation explores the development of capitalism in the early English Atlantic World (1580 - 1752) and the manipulation of the legal system to criminalize the laboring body in order to more fully exploit the productive output of labor.

The Best Poor Man's Country?: William Penn, Quakers, And Unfree Labor In Atlantic Pennsylvania, Peter B. Kotowski

Dissertations

William Penn’s writings famously emphasized notions of egalitarianism, just governance, and moderation in economic pursuits. Twentieth-century scholars took Penn’s rhetoric at his word and interpreted colonial Pennsylvania as nothing less than “the best poor man’s country,” as reflected in the title of one of the most popular histories of the colony. They also imagined a world where all men had access to economic opportunity and lived free from the barbarity endemic to Atlantic world colonies. Despite this halcyon vision of the Peaceable Kingdom, the reality was the opposite: a colony where religious convictions justified what we today (and radicals then) …

Olympic Bids, Professional Sports, And Urban Politics: Four Decades Of Stadium Planning In Detroit, 1936-1975, Jeffrey R. Wing

Dissertations

Between 1936 and 1975, political and business leaders in Detroit tried to gain support for the financing and construction of a municipal stadium. The stadium plan originated as part of an attempt to bring the Summer Olympics to the city. The municipal stadium was to serve as the main Olympic stadium and be used for a variety of events after the Olympics were finished. Later, after Detroit leaders gave up on the Olympics after several failed bids, the stadium plan evolved into a domed facility on the downtown riverfront for the Detroit Tigers and Detroit Lions, the city’s professional baseball …

Unius Regulae Ac Unius Patriae: A Standardizing Process In Anglo-Saxon England, Daniel Matteuzzi O'Gorman

Dissertations

My dissertation investigates the value of `standards' and `standardization' as tools for historians to interpret social and political dynamics in the Middle Ages. To date, medieval scholarship has utilized these concepts in a relatively unsophisticated manner; standardization has been taken to simply mean the imposition of uniformity. My dissertation uses the work of contemporary engineers and sociologists to problematize this understanding of standardization. I argue that the term, properly employed, signifies a process of consensus, of horizontal rather than hierarchical relationships and of ongoing revision. Further, I contend that standardization is a means and not an end, and that those …

Censorship And Intolerance In Medieval England, Richard Obenauf

Dissertations

Censorship is difficult to prove conclusively in the Middle Ages because manuscript culture is susceptible to the destruction of evidence, namely by burning works deemed unacceptable. Moreover, medieval authors were subject to many forms of intolerance which shaped their literary decisions. This dissertation proposes that the roots of formal print censorship in England are to be found in earlier forms of intolerance which sought to enforce conformity and that censorship is not distinct from intolerance, but rather is another form of intolerance. I draw on political writings by Peter Abelard, John of Salisbury, and William of Ockham to establish a …

Growing Diversity: Urban Renewal, Community Activism, And The Politics Of Cultural Diversity In Uptown Chicago, 1940-1970, Devin Hunter

Dissertations

“Growing Diversity: Urban Renewal, Community Activism, and the Politics of Cultural Diversity in Uptown Chicago, 1940-1971” examines the development of one of the nation’s most culturally and economically diverse neighborhoods. This character resulted from a historical process centered on the shifting politics of cultural diversity itself. Boosters, urban renewal and redevelopment advocates, community activists, and low-income residents defined diversity on their own—often competing—terms. These dynamics manifested in urban planning and architecture, working-class and middle-class leisure, radical community organizing, and film. Beyond the demographic development of social and economic heterogeneity, “Growing Diversity” traces the ways that historical processes influenced the ways …

Herbert Spencer And His American Audience, Joel F. Yoder

Dissertations

The philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) is little remembered today, but in the late nineteenth century he was a world-renowned figure and widely read. Spencer was popular in his native England, but even more highly regarded in America. Modern scholars generally understand this popularity as stemming from Spencer’s social Darwinism—that is, his belief that natural selection does and should operate on humans to improve mankind. On the other hand, many of those who have studied Spencer’s work claim that he was not a social Darwinist at all. It is my contention that Spencer was a social Darwinist, but that other aspects …

The Fashionable Life: Fashion Imagery And The Construction Of Masculinity In America, 1960-2000, Kelly Ann O'Connor

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

'We're Not Little Babies Anymore': A Cultural History Of Small Girls In America, 1920-1945, Stella A. Ress

Dissertations

The appearance of high-profile girl characters in popular culture media of all types soared between the years from 1924, when Little Orphan Annie first appeared in the comic section of newspapers, to 1945, when teenage girls replaced their younger sisters in the spotlight. As such, girl culture of the 1920s through the 1940s experienced a boon in popularity never before witnessed. And yet, despite substantial evidence that point to the impact preadolescent girls had on society during this time, surprisingly scholars have left the experiences of these girls and their depictions in popular entertainment unexplored. For historians, this raises a …

Brandy Nan And Farmer George: Public Perceptions Of Royal Health And The Demystification Of English Monarchy During The Long Eighteenth Century, Steven Catania

Dissertations

This dissertation investigates how public comments related to the body natural and the body politic of the English monarchs, particularly in newspapers and other forms of print culture, changed between 1688 and 1789. It argues that by examining the depth and type of reportage on royal health and the sovereign's body, coupled with Parliament's increasing involvement in such activities, it is possible to see the irregular trajectory of how the English monarchy was demystified during the long eighteenth century. Additionally, this work shows how the topic of monarchical health went from being an illicit subject, to one associated with a …

Producing A Past: Cyrus Mccormick's Reaper From Heritage To History, Daniel Peter Ott

Dissertations

"Producing a Past" explores how the false "fact" of Cyrus McCormick's 1831 invention of the reaper came to be incorporated into the American historical cannon. From 1884 to 1932, the McCormick Harvester family and their various affiliated businesses created a useable past about their departed patriarch, Cyrus McCormick, and his role in producing civilization through advertising and the emerging historical profession. The McCormick narrative of the past which was peddled in advertising and supported in scholarship justified the family's elite position in American society and its monopolistic control of the harvester industry in the face of political and popular antagonism. …

Funk My Soul: The Assassination Of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And The Birth Of Funk Culture, Domenico Rocco Ferri

Dissertations

Few can deny that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s untimely death had a profound impact on American life. In this dissertation, I argue that the assassination inspired musicians, producers, artists, and consumers across the nation to reconstruct soul music and, in its place, construct the cultural idiom known as funk. Narrating the process by which black artists' embraced and popularized funk modes of expression, this dissertation traces how the genre extended directly from post-assassination trauma and attempted to provide a purposeful announcement of black solidarity and an uncensored narrative of the black American experience. In telling the story of funk, …

Feeling Like A Holy Warrior: Western Authors' Attributions Of Emotion As Proof Of Motives For Violence Among Christian Actors In Military Conflicts, Tenth Through Early Twelfth Centuries, Jilana Ordman

Dissertations

This dissertation explores two areas of human experience that have been criticized as potentially dangerous and uncontrollable almost consistently since Late Antiquity: violence and those who engage in it, and emotions. However, it will be seen that in the Western Mediterranean and Southern and Central Western Europe, from Late Antiquity through the early-Twelfth Century, these areas were carefully controlled and directed by complex philosophical and religious systems.

Polytheist Roman, and later patristic Christian, authors who wrote within classical and late antique philosophical and religious systems created the accepted norms for the undertaking of organized violence - that which was fought …