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Full-Text Articles in History

The Making Of Ras Beirut: A Landscape Of Memory For Narratives Of Exceptionalism, Maria B. Abunnasr Sep 2013

The Making Of Ras Beirut: A Landscape Of Memory For Narratives Of Exceptionalism, Maria B. Abunnasr

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examines the memory of Ras Beirut and the various claims to its exceptionalism. I frame its history as a landscape of memory born of the convergence of narratives of exceptionalism. On the one hand, Ras Beirut's landscape inspired Anglo-American missionary future providence such that they chose it as the site of their college on a hill, the Syrian Protestant College (SPC, later renamed the American University of Beirut [AUB]). On the other hand, the memory of Ras Beirut's "golden age" before the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 inspired longings for a vanished past to Ras …


Approaches To Black Power: African American Grassroots Political Struggle In Cleveland, Ohio, 1960-1966, David M. Swiderski Sep 2013

Approaches To Black Power: African American Grassroots Political Struggle In Cleveland, Ohio, 1960-1966, David M. Swiderski

Open Access Dissertations

Black communities located in cities across the country became sites of explosive political unrest during the mid-1960s. These uprisings coincided with a period of intensified political activity among African Americans nationally, and played a decisive role in expanding national concern with black political struggle from a singular focus on the Civil Rights movement led by black southerners to consider the "race problem" clearly present in the cities of the North and West. Moreover, unrest within urban black communities emerged at a time when alternate political analyses of the relationship between black people and the American state that challenged the goal …


Composing The African Atlantic: Sun Ra, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, And The Poetics Of African Diasporic Composition, James Gregory Carroll May 2013

Composing The African Atlantic: Sun Ra, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, And The Poetics Of African Diasporic Composition, James Gregory Carroll

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation undertakes a comparative analysis of the musical, written, and spoken production of Sun Ra and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti with respect to the larger African Atlantic intellectual environment, situating the two artists as both shapers of an Atlantic intellectual culture as well as artists who were, in turn, shaped by that culture. Through a reading of their creative work, the dissertation argues that, even given the obvious cultural, temporal, and temperamental differences between Sun Ra and Fela, both artists' orientations toward musical composition and performance share similar preoccupations with the recitation of cultural memory and the dialogic creation of historical …


Sweating Femininity: Women Athletes, Masculine Culture, And American Inequality From 1930 To The Present, Michella Mary Marino May 2013

Sweating Femininity: Women Athletes, Masculine Culture, And American Inequality From 1930 To The Present, Michella Mary Marino

Open Access Dissertations

Despite a long history of participation in sports, women have yet to gain equal access to this male-dominated realm. The national sports culture continues to regard them as marginal, if not invisible. For more than a century, women athletes have struggled against a subordinate status based on rigid definitions of female sexuality, an emphasis on white middle-class standards of beauty, and restrictive cultural expectations of motherhood. This dissertation, however, reveals a vital story of feminist women who have consistently stretched the boundaries of gender and have actively carved out their own identities as women, athletes, and mothers while playing an …


Woodrow Wilson's Conversion Experience: The President And The Federal Woman Suffrage Amendment, Beth Behn Feb 2012

Woodrow Wilson's Conversion Experience: The President And The Federal Woman Suffrage Amendment, Beth Behn

Open Access Dissertations

Over the course of his first six years in office, President Woodrow Wilson evolved from an opponent of woman suffrage to an advocate for a federal woman suffrage amendment. This study explores what transpired to bring about such a dramatic change in Wilson's position. It seeks to understand the array of forces that pressured Wilson and the extent to which he was, in turn, able to influence Congress and voters.


Fighting For The Nation: Military Service, Popular Political Mobilization And The Creation Of Modern Puerto Rican National Identities: 1868-1952, Harry Franqui May 2010

Fighting For The Nation: Military Service, Popular Political Mobilization And The Creation Of Modern Puerto Rican National Identities: 1868-1952, Harry Franqui

Open Access Dissertations

This project explores the military and political mobilization of rural and urban working sectors of Puerto Rican society as the Island transitioned from Spanish to U.S. imperial rule. In particular, my research is interested in examining how this shift occurs via patterns of inclusion-exclusion within the military and the various forms of citizenship that are subsequently transformed into socio-economic and political enfranchisement. Analyzing the armed forces as a culture-homogenizing agent helps to explain the formation and evolution of Puerto Rican national identities from 1868 to 1952, and how these evolving identities affected the political choices of the Island. This phenomenon, …


Seeking Shakers: Two Centuries Of Visitors To Shaker Villages, Brian L. Bixby Feb 2010

Seeking Shakers: Two Centuries Of Visitors To Shaker Villages, Brian L. Bixby

Open Access Dissertations

The dissertation analyzes the history of tourism at Shaker communities from their foundation to the present. Tourism is presented as an interaction between the host Shakers and the visitors. The culture, expectations, and activities of both parties affect their relationship to each other. Historically, tourists and other visitors have gradually dominated the relationship, shifting from hostility based on religion to acceptance based on a romantic view of the Shakers. This relationship has spilled over into related cultural phenomena, notably fiction and antique collecting. Overall, the analysis extends contemporary tourism theory and integrates Shaker history with the broader course of American …


A Stitch In Time: The Needlework Of Aging Women In Antebellum America, Aimee E. Newell Feb 2010

A Stitch In Time: The Needlework Of Aging Women In Antebellum America, Aimee E. Newell

Open Access Dissertations

In October 1852, Amy Fiske (1785-1859) of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, stitched a sampler. But she was not a schoolgirl making a sampler to learn her letters. Instead, as she explained: “The above is what I have taken from my sampler that I wrought when I was nine years old. It was w[rough]t on fine cloth it tattered to pieces. My age at this time is 66 years.” Drawing from 167 examples of decorative needlework – primarily samplers and quilts from 114 collections across the United States – made by individual women aged forty years and over between 1820 and 1860, this …


Cold Spring, Hot Foundry: An Archaeological Exploration Of The West Point Foundry’S Paternal Influence Upon The Village Of Cold Spring And Its Residents, Elizabeth M. Norris Sep 2009

Cold Spring, Hot Foundry: An Archaeological Exploration Of The West Point Foundry’S Paternal Influence Upon The Village Of Cold Spring And Its Residents, Elizabeth M. Norris

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation explores the nineteenth century paternal relationship between industrialists and their predominantly skilled workers in a small northern community. As an archaeological analysis, artifacts such as houses and ceramics demonstrate the economic and consumption patterns observable throughout the United States during its industrialization. Discussion centers around the West Point Foundry, which operated in the Village of Cold Spring from 1818 to 1911 and originally owned half of the village’s property and employed half of its workers. Privately owned, it manufactured a variety of iron products including heavy ordnance for both the country’s Navy and Army. Methodological analysis paired documentary …


Before The Second Wave: College Women, Cultural Literacy, Sexuality And Identity, 1940--1965, Babette Faehmel May 2009

Before The Second Wave: College Women, Cultural Literacy, Sexuality And Identity, 1940--1965, Babette Faehmel

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation follows career-oriented college women over the course of their education in liberal arts programs and seeks to explain why so many of them, in departure from original plans of combining work and marriage, married and became full-time mothers. Using diaries, personal correspondences, and student publications, in conjunction with works from the social sciences, philosophy, and literature, I argue that these women's experiences need to be understood in the context of cultural conflicts over the definition of class, status, and national identity. Mid twentieth-century college women, I propose, began their education at a moment when the convergence of long-contested …