Social History Commons^™

A Non-Normative Paradigm: Disability And Gender In Nineteenth-Century Gothic Literature, Malena Sol Pendola Biondi

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Within nineteenth century society, normalcy is presented through unfeasible means of appearance and identity, leading to a rejection of the self. By exploring characters in Victorian gothic literature, who are marginalized by society, and invoking the work of Gail Weiss, Kim Hall, and others, this essay investigates the way these norms are immortalized through published representations and how they expose the lingering presence of rejection of disabled, queer, and gender-fluid bodies. Through the analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, I look at the contextualization of marginalized existence compared to able-bodiedness and normalized …

The Cuban Revolution's Emotive Regime: A Decade To Remember, 1968-1978, Maite Morales

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While emotions were central for the victory of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, a decade later, feelings became an obstacle for the consolidation of the revolutionary government. During the second decade, growing disillusionment and dissatisfaction challenged the state's emotive regime. Within the first five years, Cubans engaged in one of the largest mass mobilization projects in the nation’s history and failed to achieve a ten-million-ton sugar harvest. The revolutionary government reacted to the failure in various ways, but all dealt with emotions: from a major carnival revival in 1970 to the establishment of new tactics to satisfy consumer demand.

To …

Shipbuilding, Forest Resource Exploitation, And Environmental Change In Cuba In The Early Eighteenth Century, 1700-1763, Jason M. Daniel

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the construction of Spanish naval warships in Havana, Cuba, between the accession of the Bourbon family to Spain’s throne in 1700 and the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763. The rapid increase in timber consumption after the Royal Havana Company gained the obligation for shipbuilding in 1741 led to significant changes in the social and environmental landscape. This dissertation concludes that Cuba’s maritime industries under royal authorities and the Royal Havana Company were the product of deliberate and centralized Spanish reforms that had demonstrable and measurable consequences on the island.

This period of shipbuilding consumed …

Manufacturing Sin On The Frontier Of Heresy. Bishops, Franciscans And The Inquisition In Cuba During The Long Sixteenth Century, 1511 - 1611., Leonardo Falcon

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the history of the Inquisition in the Diocese of Santiago de Cuba paying special attention to its leadership amid the series of reformations undertaken by the Spanish empire on both sides of the Atlantic. Through the long sixteenth century (1511 – 1611) bishops, Franciscan friars, and other government officials employed or manipulated the Inquisition in Cuba to satisfy the needs of the Spanish Empire or their personal agendas, respectively. Some clergy rightfully used the inquisitorial practices as mandated to uphold the Christian morality of the colonial society. Others, conveniently, fabricated crimes against members of the community to …

The Border-Seas Of A New British Empire: Security And The British Atlantic Islands In The Age Of The American Revolution, Ross M. Nedervelt

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“The Border-seas of a New British Empire” explores the relationship between the rebellious thirteen colonies and the British Atlantic Islands of Bermuda and the Bahamas, and how the “on the ground” impact of the American Revolution explains not only why they did not join the rebellion—despite initial sympathy for the cause—but illustrates also the long-term political, cultural, commercial, and military transformation wrought by the war and its aftermath. To understand the British Atlantic islanders’ allegiances during the American Revolution and the impact of the islands’ loss on the United States, this dissertation employs Atlantic, borderlands and border-seas, and security interpretive …

The Notions Of The "Closet" And The "Secret" In Oscar Wilde's, The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Jessica Maria Oliveira

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will discuss the notions of the “closet” and “secret” within Oscar Wilde’s, The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as offer a clear and precise definition of queer theory to assist in elucidating many of the concepts being discussed. Close reading techniques will be utilized to further uncover the metaphoric, symbolic, and otherwise figurative importance of certain aspects of The Picture of Dorian Gray and supporting texts. Through Judith Butler’s conceptualization of sex and gender, as well as Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of the “secret”, this paper will explicate the intricacies of Wilde’s work and unveil queered aspects …

Engineering Colonialism: Race, Class, And The Social History Of Flood Control In Guyana, Joshua Mullenite

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Overabundance and scarcity of water are global concerns. Across the world’s low-lying coastal plains, flooding brought on by sea level rise acts as an existential threat for a multitude of people and cultures while in desert (and increasingly non-desert) regions intensifying drought cycles do the same. In the decades to come, how people manage these threats will have important implications not only for individual and cultural survival, but also for questions of justice. Recent research on flooding and flood management probes the histories of survival, and adaptation in flood threatened regions for insights into emergent flood-related crises. However, scholars have …

Racial Constructions And Activism Within Graphic Literature. An Analysis Of Hank Mccoy, The Beast, Juan D. Alfonso

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through a post-modern lens, I will primarily focus on comics books published by Marvel Comics to demonstrate the myriad of ways in which graphic literature is used as a subversive tool of sociopolitical discourse. I will demonstrate this by deconstructing and redefining the role of myth as a means of transferring ethical practices through societies and the ways in which graphic literature serves this function within the space of a modern and increasingly atheistic society. The thesis first demonstrates how the American Civil Rights Movement was metaphorically translated and depicted to the pages of Marvel’s X-Men comics to expose its …

Britain Can Take It: Civil Defense And Chemical Warfare In Great Britain, 1915-1945, Jordan I. Malfoy

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the origins of civil defense are to be found in pre-World War II Britain and that a driving force of this early civil defense scheme was fear of poison gas. Later iterations of civil defense, such as the Cold War system in America, built on already existing regimes that had proven their worth during WWII. This dissertation demonstrates not only that WWII civil defense served as a blueprint for later civil defense schemes, but also that poison gas anxiety served as a particular tool for the implementation and success of civil defense. The dissertation is organized …

Conservative Right-Wing Protest Rhetoric In The Cold War Era Of Segregationist Mobilization, Devon A. Wright

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the early Cold War decades, the Citizens’ Councils of America (CCA) became the flagship conservative right-wing social movement organization (SMO). As part of its organizational activities, it engaged in a highly sophisticated propaganda effort to mobilize pro-segregationist opinion, merging traditional racist arguments with modern Cold War geopolitics to characterize civil rights activism and federal civil rights reforms as an effort to bring about a tyrannical, Soviet-inspired, dictatorship. Through a content discourse analysis, this research aims to contribute to understanding what factors determine how SMO’s deploy propaganda rhetoric. The main hypothesis is that geopolitical factors, defined here as specific geographic …

(Un)Making The Food Desert: Food, Race, And Redevelopment In Miami's Overtown Community, William Hall

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, efforts to transform food environments have played a key role in urban revitalization strategies. On one hand, concerns over urban food deserts have spurred efforts to attract supermarkets to places where access to healthy food is difficult for lower income residents. On the other, the creation of new spaces of consumption, such as trendy restaurants and food retail, has helped cities rebrand low-income communities as cultural destinations of leisure and tourism. In cities around the US, these processes often overlap, converting poorer neighborhoods into places more desirable for the middle-class. My dissertation research examines the social and …

The Sound Of Silence: Ideology Of National Identity And Racial Inequality In Contemporary Curaçao, Angela E. Roe

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation addresses racism in contemporary Curaçao—a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean that remains a component of the Kingdom of The Netherlands. The dissertation theorizes racism as a partially hidden constituent of the island’s ideology of national identity, which throughout its history has emulated hybridity before being influenced, more recently, by multiculturalism. The research’s main objective is to uncover the ways race and racism have been entangled with Curaçao’s hegemonic ideology of national identity, a reality too often omitted and always under-theorized in Dutch and Dutch Caribbean scholarship.

Using historical, ethnographic, statistic, and discourse analysis data, the dissertation reveals …

Firm Foundation: Rebuilding The Early Modern State In Lima, Peru After The Earthquake Of 1687, Judith M. Mansilla

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

One early October morning in 1687, the ground under the large Spanish colonial city of Lima, Peru rumbled. If longstanding historiographical portraits of Spanish government as inefficient and weak were true, the earthquake that was about to shatter Lima should have devastated it beyond repair. The study of the aftermath of this natural disaster reveals that behind the landscape of destruction, the pillars of the colonial state in Lima not only held up but also permitted its rapid recovery after the event. As part of a more recent historiographical trend that reappraises the Spanish decline during the seventeenth century, my …

Policing Slavery: Order And The Development Of Early Nineteenth-Century New Orleans And Salvador, Gregory K. Weimer

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation explores the development of policing and slavery in two early nineteenth-century Atlantic cities. This project engages regionally distinct histories through an examination of legislative and police records in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Salvador, Bahia. Through these sources, my dissertation holds that the development of the theories and practices that guided “public order” emerged in similar ways in these Atlantic slaveholding cities. Enslaved people and their actions played an integral role in the evolution of “good order” and its policing. Legislators created laws and institutions to police enslaved people and promote order. In these instances, local government policed slavery …

Harlemites, Haitians And The Black International: 1915-1934, Felix Jean-Louis Iii

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

On July 28, 1915 the United States began a nineteen year military occupation of Haiti. The occupation connected Haiti and the United States and created an avenue of migration in the country. As a consequence of extreme racism in the South and segregation in the Northern states, the majority of the immigrants moved to Harlem. The movement of people reinvigorated the relationship between African Americans and Haitians. The connection constituted an avenue of the interwar Black International. Using newspapers articles, letters, and press releases from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Yale Beinecke Rare Books and …

"To Hold The World In Contempt": The British Empire, War, And The Irish And Indian Nationalist Press, 1899-1914, Susan A. Rosenkranz

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The era between the close of the nineteenth century and the onset of the First World War witnessed a marked increase in radical agitation among Indian and Irish nationalists. The most outspoken political leaders of the day founded a series of widely circulated newspapers in India and Ireland, placing these editors in the enviable position of both reporting and creating the news. Nationalist journalists were in the vanguard of those pressing vocally for an independent India and Ireland, and together constituted an increasingly problematic contingent for the British Empire. The advanced-nationalist press in Ireland and the nationalist press in India …