History Commons^™

Sisters Of Social Justice: The Social Justice Activism Of The Grand Rapids Dominican Sisters, Elizabeth Kay Chamberlain

Wayne State University Dissertations

“Sisters of Social Justice: The Social Justice Activism of the Grand Rapids Dominican Sisters,” examines the late-twentieth-century social justice activism of the Grand Rapids Dominican Sisters at the local, national, and international levels. It addresses the opposition to their social justice activism by the Vatican and other institutions at the local and national levels and the dangers they faced when ministering abroad. It argues that within the opposition and dangers they faced, and their responses to these challenges, we can see the agency of the Grand Rapids Dominican Sisters. This dissertation, “Sisters of Social Justice: The Social Justice Activism of …

A Program Of Race Betterment: The Emergence And Evolution Of Eugenic Ideas In Michigan, Branden Mceuen

Wayne State University Dissertations

Contemporary concerns with technologies like CRISPR and the proliferation of state laws restricting abortion have led people to wonder if we are witnessing a return of eugenics. I analyze the development and evolution of eugenic ideas and policies throughout the 20th century, using the state of Michigan as a frame of reference. In examining the eugenic theories and policies psychiatrists and physicians endorsed, I demonstrate that eugenics was a key component of preventive public medicine in the first two decades of the 20th century. I show how they educated the public on eugenics based on both environmentalist and hereditarian ideas …

Singing Solidarity: Class Consciousness, Emotional Pedagogy, And The Songs Of The Industrial Workers Of The World, Tara Forbes

Wayne State University Dissertations

Singing Solidarity looks at songs and song culture in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) from its inception to its decline near the start of WWI and examines how IWW songs engaged with, transformed, and directed workers’ feelings to “spur [them] to action” (Gould 47). Songs in the IWW repertoire created a sense of group identity and cohesion, supporting the IWW’s project of class consciousness and working-class solidarity. This solidarity, I argue, was felt rather than theorized. The felt solidarity of the IWW collective was intensified through the act of singing as a group, which was simultaneously an instantiation …

Recovering Heraclitus: Neglected Religious, Ethical And Political Themes In The Work Of A Pre-Socratic Thinker, Thomas Joseph Wood

Wayne State University Dissertations

The early Greek philosopher Heraclitus writes in a puzzling, cryptic way which makes his ideas difficult to work out. Many commentators are content to make some broad statements about his place in the development of philosophy as a natural philosopher or metaphysician; statements for which there is ample support.

In this essay, I argue that we can use Heraclitus’ biography and his historical context to recover his ideas about religion, ethics, and politics. I believe that this method reveals a Heraclitus who was grasping for an early sort of political theory and ethics in response to the turbulent period in …

“I’Ve Always Had A Voice, Now I Want To Use It”: The Working Women’S Movement And Clerical Unionism In Higher Education, Amanda Lauren Walter

Wayne State University Dissertations

“I’ve Always Had a Voice, Now I Want to Use It”: The Working Women’s Movement and Clerical Unionism in Higher Education, examines the intersection of the labor movement and the women’s movement through the working lives and organizing of clerical workers in higher education in the United States beginning in the 1970s. Through an examination of UAW, SEIU, AFSCME, District 65, and AFT clerical organizing campaigns in higher education, I contend that women found their lack of collective bargaining power in the higher education workplace limited their effectiveness. Working women’s organizations and clericals in higher education, dealing with university budgetary …

Constitutive Memories Of City Space: Rhetorics Of Civil Rights Memory In Detroit’S Urban Landscape, Scott Mitchell

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines public memories of civil rights injustice and resistance as constitutive rhetorics of urban culture and spatiality for the city of Detroit. By studying the city of Detroit as it navigates an ongoing period of dramatic change and redevelopment, this study demonstrates how material manifestations of memory become the constitutive forces that define what many describe as “Detroit’s heart and soul.” This project illustrates the embedded cultural logics produced from sites of public memory, thereby arguing city spaces as locations bound to their legacies and beholden to material and symbolic consequences of their past. This dissertation proceeds through …

A Quest For Human Rights And Civil Rights: Archbishop Iakovos And The Greek Orthodox Church, Michael Varlamos

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation consists of a biography of Archbishop Iakovos, Primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America from 1959 to 1996, and the role he played in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, his continuing advocacy for human rights, and his vision for a humanistically Greek, theologically Orthodox Christian, and socially just society. The fundamental research question that I sought to answer was why Archbishop Iakovos went to Selma in March of 1965 and participated in a memorial service/civil rights demonstration. What were the influences and circumstances that prompted him, a religious leader of an almost …

Envisioning The City Of The Future: Responses To Deindustrialization, Segregation, And The Urban Crisis In Postwar Detroit, 1950-1970, Andrew Hnatow

Wayne State University Dissertations

Following Second World War, cities in the United States appeared to be in trouble. The urban crisis revolved around poverty, unemployment, segregation and discrimination, suburbanization, and deindustrialization. Using metropolitan Detroit as a case-study, this dissertation examines responses by local residents, urban planners, and federal policy-makers to these changes. Local community and union members centered around the Ford River Rouge complex in Dearborn rallied against industrial decentralization in the early 1950s. Community members in Grosse Pointe practiced systematic housing segregation, while other members of the community organized a Human Relations Council to support integration and interracial understanding. Constantinos Doxiadis led a …

‘The Luxurious Fancies Of Vice’: Sexuality, Luxury, And Space In The Eighteenth-Century British Social Sphere, Joelle Del Rose Del Rose

Wayne State University Dissertations

This project examines the refinement of sexuality over the course of the long eighteenth century in Britain in relation to a changing social and material world. The class connotations associated with seduction and sexual violence were used to elevate and denigrate men who aligned on one side of the divide between restraint and force, and the sexual nature of men was often indicated by the positional goods they were associated with. In person and in print, objects became freighted with meanings connecting sexuality and status in ways that could not be separated. By analyzing the decorative objects and luxury furnishings …

Servant Voices And Tales In The British Gothic Novel, 1764-1847, Reema Barlaskar

Wayne State University Dissertations

Servant Voices and Tales in the British Gothic Novel, 1764-1847 explores the intersectionality of class, race, and gender positions in the Gothic novel’s portrayal of lower-class identity, constructing an argument framed on the following questions: how do servant voices manifest in the marginal spaces surrounding the dominant narrative of rational discourse; in what ways do servants’ discourse resist and negotiate the narrative of individual experience; how do servants subvert dominant narratives; and what ideological implications do such subversions and resistance entail? The argument emphasizes servants’ discourse within the context of domestic ideology, and as a result, analyzes class, gender, and …

Accumulating Risk: Environmental Justice And The History Of Capitalism In Detroit, 1880-2015, Josiah John Rector

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is an environmental history of Detroit, Michigan from the 19th century to the present. Recent scholarship on the history of capitalism has largely ignored the problem of environmental inequality, and the negative externalities of economic growth. In contrast, studies of the environmental justice movement have richly documented race, class, and gender inequalities in environmental risk exposure. However, they have neglected the relationship between the development of the environmental justice movement and the restructuring of American capitalism since the 1970s, including deindustrialization and the shift to neoliberalism. Bringing these fields together, this dissertation connects Detroit’s long-term economic transformation to …

Economic Revolution From Within: Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt And The Emergence Of The National Industrial Recovery Act Of 1933, Angella Lanette Smith

Wayne State University Dissertations

ECONOMIC REVOLUTION FROM WITHIN: HERBERT HOOVER, FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL RECOVERY ACT OF 1933

By

Angella LaNette Smith

August of 2015

Advisor: Dr. Elizabeth Faue

Major: History

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation seeks to place the National Recovery Administration (NRA), a central agency of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, in historical context. It explores the NRA’s origins in the political agendas and ideological arguments of presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as they reshaped the federal government’s role in bringing about an end to the Great Depression of the 1930s. The dissertation …

London Calling: The London Corresponding Society And The Ascension Of Popular Politics, Frank L. Petersmark

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

LONDON CALLING: THE LONDON CORRESPONDING SOCIETY AND THE ASCENSION OF POPULAR POLITICS

by

FRANK L. PETERSMARK III

May 2015

Advisor: Dr. Eric H. Ash

Major: History

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

This proposed dissertation will focus on the short but historically important life of the London Corresponding Society (LCS) in Britain in the last decade of the eighteenth century, from 1792-1799. The intent of such a focus should serve as a way to better understand the spread of political participation in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century and the key role that the London Corresponding Society played in …

Transforming Motherhood: Single Parents' Liberation In The 1970s, Elizabeth Ryan

Wayne State University Dissertations

Transforming Motherhood examines the experiences of single mothers from the early 1970s until the mid-1980s. Because most accounts of single motherhood in these decades focused on single motherhood as the cause of social problems, most of the discourse about single motherhood is framed on the premise that single mothers are bad. The result of this assumption is to negate the single mother experience and uphold policies which try to limit single motherhood altogether. Transforming Motherhood seeks to redefine the problem of single motherhood by focusing on the issues from the perspective of single mothers. When single motherhood is examined through …

Princess On The Margins: Toward A New Portrait Of Madame Élisabeth De France, Maria Spencer Wendeln

Wayne State University Dissertations

Princess on the Margins: Toward a New Biography of Madame Élisabeth de France, moves past the perpetuation of prior biographies on Louis XVI’s sister which make the princess out to be a “virgin martyr” and instead focuses on the princess’s political agency and place with the political culture of the French Revolution.

“A Lonely Wandering Refugee”: Displaced Whites In The Trans-Mississippi West During The American Civil War, 1861-1868, David Paul Hopkins, Jr.

Wayne State University Dissertations

Historians have written a great deal about the American Civil War and, until recently, much of that scholarly activity has focused on military battles and the effectiveness of the Union and Confederate armies on the war’s outcome. During the past few decades, social historians have tried to dig beneath that narrative to situate the war in the eyes of American citizens and how that war affected their lives. With this, there has been a focus on the Northern and Southern homefronts, African Americans, and soldiers’ motivations to fight – all rooted in the wartime experience. In this discussion, however, there …

Grafting Onto `The Jew': The Importance Of Being Jew-Ish To Early Modern English Christian Identity, Joan Blackwell Wedes

Wayne State University Dissertations

The dissertation examines how Jewish figures in early modern plays, prose, and poetry moved beyond the uncomplicated medieval image of murderous villain and towards a more reasoned consideration of the Jew's position in Christianity as well as in English life. While there has been significant scholarship on early modern representations of Jews, particularly in drama, these studies have not examined how Paul's Letter to the Romans, in forming much of Reformation doctrine, was also crucial in forming attitudes towards and representations of literary and living Jews. My project uniquely combines history, biblical studies, and literary analysis to reveal how early …

Deliver Me From The Days Of Old: Rock And Roll, Youth Culture, And The Civil Rights Movement, Beth Nicole Fowler

Wayne State University Dissertations

The U.S. civil rights movement is almost always presented as an undisputed success in mainstream culture and educational curricula, but scholars continue to question whether the widespread protests against racial segregation and inequality that swept the nation in the 1950s and 1960s led to meaningful economic, or social change. These criticisms extend to shifts in popular culture and the emergence of rock and roll music, which, as many contemporary critics noted, were areas where racial integration had already occurred. Since rock and roll emerged from both African-American and European-American cultural traditions, it introduced both black

and white listeners to sounds …

Assumptions Of Authority: Social Washington's Evolution From Republican Court To Self-Rule, 1801-1831, Merry Ellen Scofield

Wayne State University Dissertations

Washington City's political society was born in late November 1800, when the early republic moved its seat of government from Philadelphia to the banks of the Potomac. Washington's political elite, many of them accustomed to the urban pleasures of the nation's largest city, found themselves forming a proper society among boardinghouses, muddy roads, and half-built public buildings. A simple social hierarchy developed based on political position. Despite Jefferson's protests that the Court of the United States had died with the Federalist era, a republican court formed around him. His issuance of a set of social tenets, written after the Merry …

Absentee Soldier Voting In Civil War Law And Politics, David A. Collins

Wayne State University Dissertations

During the Civil War, twenty northern states changed their laws to permit absent soldiers to vote. Before enactment of these statutes, state laws had tethered balloting to the voter's community and required in-person participation by voters. Under the new laws, eligible voters - as long as they were soldiers - could cast ballots in distant military encampments, far from their neighbors and community leaders. This dissertation examines the legal conflicts that arose from this phenomenon and the political causes underlying it.

Legally, the laws represented an abrupt change, contrary to earlier scholarship viewing them as culminating a gradual process of …

Drawn Out In Love: Religious Experience, The Public Sphere, And Evangelical Lay Women's Writing In Eighteenth Century England, Andrew O. Winckles

Wayne State University Dissertations

"Drawn Out in Love: Religious Experience, the Public Sphere, and Evangelical Lay Women's Writing in Eighteenth Century England" explores the writing of eighteenth century evangelical lay women in print, poetry, and educational material. Through careful attention to both the content and materiality of their texts I reveal how the women of the evangelical revival used subjective spiritual experience as an impetus for entry into the public discourses of print, and in turn, how their religious narratives were shaped by these discourses. Chapters on women's conversion narratives, moral literature for children, and religious poetry demonstrate the ways that personal spiritual experience …

The Power To Protect Themselves: Gender, Protective Labor Legislation, And Public Policy In Michigan, 1883-1913, Amy Marie-Holtman French

Wayne State University Dissertations

This study provides a narrative of laborers' fight for legal protection through the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Since American law was one of the most important forces in shaping and limiting workplace reform, both labor unionists and reformers used the law to try to solve labor problems. Reformers employed the law to force state control over women and children, while labor unionists attempted to craft legislation to allow working men control over industrial relations.

Although society and the law treated men as independent agents, working men were not truly free. Common law designated workers as servants. Employers denied laboring …

Reading The Tea Leaves: The Media And Sino-American Rapprochement, 1963-1972, Guolin Yi

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation aims to find out what role(s) the media in the United States and China played in their historic rapprochement from 1963 to 1972. In order to examine how they covered the major events that affected Sino-American relations, I select seven elite U.S. media and two Chinese official newspapers to study. These media include: the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, CBS, ABC, NBC, People's Daily, and Reference News,

The study is based on the assumption that media, instead of reporting the information "objectively," have the ability to affect the content they deliver and set the agenda for …

Interests And Ideas: Industrialization And The Making Of Early American Trade Policy, 1789 - 1860, John Austin Moore

Wayne State University Dissertations

Trade policy was a prominent economic and political issue in the United States between 1789 and 1860, culminating in the Civil War. Many historians have characterized this period as pitting mutually exclusive economic systems, an industrializing, free-labor North and a slave-based agricultural South, against one another. The traditional interpretation is that the North eagerly supported tariffs and economic protection that they provided, while the South stood in opposition. The Nullification Crisis of 1832-1833 is frequently cited as evidence that the tariff was a sectional issue and some historians go so far as to describe the tariff as a significant cause …

Prudence And Decorum And The Invention Of American Democracy: An Examination Of The Ratification Debates For The Federal Constitution In 1787-88, Robert Bryan Brito

Wayne State University Dissertations

Abstract

This dissertation examines the ratification debates for the federal constitution in 1787-88. The goal of this project has been to examine the use of the rhetorical strategies of prudence and decorum as they are employed within the debates in Massachusetts, Virginia and New York.

In Massachusetts, classical notions of representation are challenged by the use of binding instructions given to delegates sent to the ratification debates. In addition, Massachusetts federalists had to overcome objections to the proposed constitution based on the system of representation, as well as the absence of a Bill of Rights. Federalists Challenged these views, and …

Detroit Blues Women, Michael Duggan Murphy

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

DETROIT BLUES WOMEN

by

Michael Duggan Murphy

August 2011

Advisor: Dr. John J. Bukowczyk

Major: History

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

"Detroit Blues Women" explores how African American "women's blues" survived the twentieth century relatively unscripted by the image-makers of the male-dominated music industry. In the 1920s, African American blues queens laid out a foundation for assertive and rebellious women's blues that the many musical heirs who succeeded them in the twentieth century and into the first decade of the twenty first century sustained, preserved and built upon. The dissertation argues that women's blues, which encouraged women to liberate themselves …

Higher Than Those Of Their Race Of Less Fortunate Advantages:Race, Ethnicity, And West Indian Political Leadership In Detroit's African American Community, 1885-1940, Kathryn Lorraine Beard

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation explores West Indian immigrants in the city of Detroit and their leadership of key institutions in the African American community from 1885 to 1940. This work is divided into two parts, with the Great Migration as the line of demarcation. The research method consists largely of collective biographies and a survey of periodicals, census records, and records generated by the institutions that had West Indian leaders. The dissertation concludes that West Indian immigrants perceived middle-class status and ethnicity as a means of distinguishing themselves from their African American counterparts, but race became a more significant factor as more …

The Cultural Memory Of German Victimhood In Post-1990 Popular German Literature And Television, Pauline Ebert

Wayne State University Dissertations

My dissertation analyzes the representation of Germans as victims of the Third Reich and the Second World War in post-1990 German memory. After unification, there no longer were two states that could each blame the other as the heir of National Socialism and this past had to be renegotiated. The claim that many Germans had been victims became central as evidenced by the vast number of popular literature, commercial cinema and television programs of this subject. I argue with Wulf Kansteiner (2006) that to understand collective memory, we should explore mass media representations. As the majority of highbrow artifacts do …

Fighting For Survival: Coal Miners And The Struggle Over Health And Safety In The United States, 1968-1988, Richard Fry

Wayne State University Dissertations

My dissertation focuses on coal mining and occupational health and safety in the United States from 1968 to 1985. In the late 1960s, coal miners faced the constant risk of injury, occupational disease, and death. The dangerous conditions in the coal industry resulted in a massive explosion at the Farmington mine in West Virginia in 1968, which killed 78 miners. The Farmington disaster spurred miners to campaign for the reform of state and federal coal mine health and safety laws in the United States. They rejected the national leadership of their union, the United Mine Workers (UMW), which they perceived …

The Rise Of Public Sector Unionism In Detroit, 1947-1967, Louis Eugene Jones

Wayne State University Dissertations

In 1947, the Michigan Legislature passed into law the Hutchinson Act banning strikes of state and local workers. The law provided for the termination of striking public sector workers but did not require state and local agencies to bargain with public employees or their representatives. It even allowed for fines and prison sentences for non public sector workers who influenced public sector workers to strike. The law forced public sector unions into an untenable state of "collective begging." Indeed, it was often referred to as punitive and draconian. 18 years later, the Michigan Legislature passed and the governor signed into …