History Commons^™

Review: 'Atlantic Automobilism: Emergence And Persistence Of The Car, 1895-1940', John Alfred Heitmann

History Faculty Publications

Gijs Mom particularly wants to answer the question of Why? Why the car (and not, say, the bicycle) Why in the North-Atlantic realm, and not elsewhere initially? During the course of seven intense and lengthy chapters that are further divided into two parts (1895-1918 and 1918-1940) Mom goes deep into motives as to why the internal combustion engine car has come to dominate our lives. These include masculinity and adventure; tourism; male violence and aggression; pleasure and consumption; encapsulation in closed vehicles and the cyborg relationship between driver and the machine; thrills and risks; gender and family structures; tinkering and …

Review: 'Ethnic Historians And The Mainstream: Shaping America's Immigration Story', Caroline Waldron Merithew

History Faculty Publications

Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream links two different strands of academic writing that have become a part of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century discourse: the memoir as a genre of seeking historical ‘‘truths’’ and, in turn, the historiographical essay that traces legacies and the transformation of scholarly production. The latter is, of course, less new than the former. The methodological framework for this volume revolves around the question: ‘‘How do historians come by their calling as scholars and decide on the projects that eventuate in the books by which they become known?’’ (p. 3). In the published work of their …

Review: 'Death And Changing Rituals: Function And Meaning In Ancient Funerary Practices', Dorian Borbonus

History Faculty Publications

The fourteen conference papers in this collection explore chronological changes in funerary rituals and advance theoretical approaches that help explain such changes. The case studies range from the Mesolithic to the Early Modern periods and concentrate on European contexts. They are arranged chronologically, with four contributions on prehistory, one Etruscan, three Roman imperial, two late antique, three medieval and one early modern. The opening chapter briefly sets out five themes that characterize, to varying degrees, all subsequent contributions: change versus continuity, the relationship between practice and belief, the treatment and deposition of bodies, burial location and grave goods, and ritual …

Maybe Irish Voters Actually Were Swayed By Their Church, Una M. Cadegan

History Faculty Publications

It’s almost always more incorrect than correct to say “Church” when you mean “hierarchy.” It’s especially misleading in the case of same-sex marriage, and Catholic support thereof.

The vocal public insistence of much of the hierarchy (Vatican, Irish, US) on the impossibility and the danger of same-sex marriage represents a dead end in Catholic moral theology. This is not to undercut the entirety of the moral theology — far from it. The notion that humans are created for relationships, that the power of procreation is deeply and sacredly connected to the love between men and women, that stable, loving families …

What American Students Can Learn From Immersing Themselves In Africa, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

More than one million people travelled from around the world to study at American universities in the 2013-2014 academic year. By contrast, just under 300,000 Americans enrolled to study abroad.

In this era of globalisation, it’s no surprise that so many young people are keen to study abroad. But as the Institute of International Education’s research reveals, the majority of US students are sticking close to home - not geographically, but culturally.

Africa remains on the margins when it comes to American universities' curricula and initiatives like study-abroad programmes. American university students also display profoundly ill-informed views about Africa.

Black White And In-Between: Race And Ethnicity In The Criminal Justice System 1885-1915, Elizabeth M. Wilhelm

Honors Theses

Events in the past year have brought racial and ethnic discrimination in the criminal justice system to the forefront of American consciousness. In reality, race has been used to create stereotypes for centuries, often supported by “scientific” and “statistical” evidence to support the idea that certain races are more likely to commit crimes than others. In my research, I trace the development of these ideas as well as the evidence used to support these racial notions primarily by drawing upon conference transcripts from two professional organizations: The National Prison Association and the National Conference of Charities and Corrections covering the …

Practical Cosmopolitans: The Diversity Of A Changing Indian Ocean, 1500-1750, Jordan Seitz

Honors Theses

The Indian Ocean has served as a catalyst for trade throughout history, connecting multiple cultural and geographical spheres. My goal was to dissect the ways in which social and cultural norms were impacted by the large amount of diversity found within Indian Ocean port cities between 1500 and 1800. Specifically, I chose to investigate the possibility of the creation of a virtue of diversity, similar to the concept of Cosmopolitanism. In this case, this would mean a variety of people who differ in cultural, ethnicity, and religion sharing mutual respect within a particular space. Among the factors which shaped these …

The Second Punic War: The Turning Point Of An Empire, Timothy Edward Schaefer

Honors Theses

Though the foundation of the Roman Empire is considered by some to be in 27 BC with Octavian’s acceptance of the name Augustus, its origins were in fact in the late 3rd Century BC with Rome’s involvement in the Second Punic War. The nearly 20 year war pitched Rome against Carthage in what became a turning point in Roman history. Rome would undergo economic changes that led to the establishment of the practice of Roman aristocrats paying extra costs of the war in an exemption of military service. During the war, Rome’s armies were active farther abroad for greater lengths …

Archivum Plena: The Quest For A Fulfilling Past, Madeline Mcdermott

Honors Theses

Lyons Township High School, founded in 1888 in a suburb of Chicago, celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2014. For seven years, a project researching and preserving the history of the school has been maintained. Over the summer of 2014, an archive was established for the school so that they could continue to keep safe all the historical items that had been kept, found, or donated. In addition to recounting the history of the high school and its relationship with the local area, this thesis also follows the process of creating the school’s archive and compares the experience there to related …

Mostly True: An Exploration Of My Family History, Jessica Urban

Honors Theses

Family histories are tricky things, especially when the people in the stories don't necessarily want to talk about their pasts. My family immigrated to the US in the early 1800's, many to escape the anti-Semitism that was rampant in their countries. Through a series of personal interviews, family stories passed down from generation to generation, and my own imagination to fill in the gaps, I have compiled a series of short stories about my family and their lives in America from their arrival here in the 1800's to the present day. Although each family has a different story to tell, …

Biology Textbooks And The Decentering Of The Scopes Trial, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

I was reminded of this while reading Adam Shapiro’s fine book, Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools. Central to Trying Biology is the argument that the Scopes Trial was not the inevitable result of an eternal conflict between science and religion, but instead grew out of "debates over American education that had little to do with either science or religion" (12). As Shapiro nicely articulates, the school antievolution movement that emerged in the early 1920s was a backlash against schools teaching evolution "in a politically charged way" and "to a new population of …

Stealing Freedom: Auto Theft And Autonomous Individualism In American Film, James Todd Uhlman, John Alfred Heitmann

History Faculty Publications

In the real world today auto theft is usually about gangs, drugs, and money (Heitmann and Morales 5). However, since 1945, the cinematic representation of auto theft has had more to do with the symbolic meaning cars and driving hold in American culture. In the early twentieth century, the automobile and driving became associated with many of the classic qualities of American identity (March and Collette 107). The roots of that expectation stretch back even further to the role that movement played in the colonization of the continent. The unrestrained capacity to move became equated early in the American cultural …

Review: 'Common Threads: A Cultural History Of Clothing In American Catholicism', Una M. Cadegan

History Faculty Publications

Sally Dwyer-McNulty's Common Threads is a readable, useful study. The work's scope is narrower than the title suggests, but it is evocative nonetheless. The book focuses primarily on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (more on the latter), the clothing of priests and female religious (sisters or nuns), and the uniforms of Catholic schoolgirls.

In The 'Lógos' Of Love: Promise And Predicament In Catholic Intellectual Life, Una M. Cadegan, James Heft

History Faculty Publications

In the 'Lógos' of Love: Promise and Predicament in Catholic Intellectual Life, the title of the September 2013 conference cosponsored by the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California and by the University of Dayton, was inspired by a somewhat unlikely pair: Walker Percy and Pope Benedict XVI. The lógos of love, according to Benedict in his 2009 encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, is where “[t]ruth opens and unites our minds ... the Christian proclamation and testimony of caritas”—that Latin word inadequately translated into English as “charity” but which refers to the fullness of love made possible …

Review : 'Rural Unrest During The First Russian Revolution: Kursk Province', David W. Darrow

History Faculty Publications

The provincial, particularly the rural and agrarian, aspects of Russian history have received renewed attention of late. In many ways, the book under review fits well with two other recent publications by Catherine Evtuhov and Tracy Dennison (Tracy Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom [Cambridge, 2011]; Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Province: Economy, Society and Civilization in Nizhnii Novgorod [Pittsburgh, 2011]), contributing greatly to our understanding of provincial life and peasant economy in imperial Russia. Miller’s thorough study puts Kursk province under a microscope in search of an explanation of the socio-economic causal factors that contributed to violent peasant …

Review: 'States Of Obligation: Taxes And Citizenship In The Russian Empire And Early Soviet Republic', David W. Darrow

History Faculty Publications

Many have portrayed death and taxes as life’s only certainties. Yanni Kotsonis’ book masterfully disrupts many of our certainties about Russian history by examining taxation as a nexus of key categories (state, economy, and people), and the role taxation played in the mutually constitutive processes whereby the modern state, the modern economy, and the modern population came into existence. In Russia, perhaps even more than in other states, ‘new kinds of taxes helped define [create] these categories, introduced a fundamental duality to each of them, and put each in tension with the others’ (8). The modern imperial state thrived on …

Partition, Haimanti Roy

History Faculty Publications

The Partition of India in 1947 is one of the most significant events in South Asian history. It refers to the political division of the Indian subcontinent that marked the end of British colonial rule in the region. There were three partitions in 1947—of British India and of the provinces of Bengal and Punjab—that created the new nation-states of India and a spatially fragmented West and East Pakistan. While the end of the Second World War, political outcomes of the provincial elections in 1946 and contingency were factors, long-term organizing efforts of communal organizations, both Hindu and Muslim, were also …

Review: 'The Material Life Of Roman Slaves', Dorian Borbonus

History Faculty Publications

The Material Life of Roman Slaves complements and enriches a growing body of scholarship on the physical conditions and material remains of Roman slavery, but it also represents a logical continuation of the research agenda of both authors. It is clearly informed by Joshel’s book about occupational titles in funerary inscriptions (Work, Identity, and Legal Status at Rome: A Study of the Occupational Inscriptions [1992]) and Petersen’s study on the visual culture of freedmen and its perception (The Freedman in Roman Art and Art History [2006]).

Their collaboration on the present book represents a model of scholarly teamwork that …

How The Goodman Read His Bible, Bobbi Sutherland

History Faculty Publications

Though best known for its “cookbook” portion, the Menagier de Paris contains a wide miscellany of information. Written by a man for his fifteen-year-old wife, it teaches her to be a good wife in every sense of the word. It includes a treatise on the seven deadly sins and stories of good and bad women, many of which are drawn from the Bible. Recent scholarship has shown that contrary to long-standing assumptions, the Bible was widely known and read by the laity of the Middle Ages, especially in France and the Low Countries. The Menagier provides further support for these …

African Immersion: American College Students In Cameroon, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Based on previously unused primary sources including extensive interviews in Cameroon, personal journals, diaries, responses to questionnaires, and a variety of secondary sources, this study is a critical analysis of US study abroad programs in Africa. Using the University of Dayton Cameroon Immersion program as a case study, the work examines different aspects of experiential learning including selection, orientation, activities of US college students in Cameroon, post-immersion meetings, and impact of program. The nation of Cameroon and University of Dayton are uniquely ideal for the study as Cameroon is considered “Africa in miniature” and serves as a window to understanding …