Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

No Relief: The Politics Of Welfare Retrenchment, 1873-1898 And 1973-2002, Stephen Pimpare

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No Relief compares the national repeal of AFDC in 1996 with the widespread campaigns against municipal poor relief that occurred throughout the United States some one hundred years earlier. In both eras businesses and the governments that depended upon them, threatened by growing labor power, civil unrest and the rising costs of poor relief, launched an attack against poor people and the limited benefits available to them. They did not do so directly but under cover of the Charity Organization Societies of the Gilded Age and conservative think tanks of the late twentieth century—"neutral" reform organizations that obscured the class-based …

The City Encomium In Medieval And Humanist Spain, Jeffrey Stephen Ruth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation narrates the history of city encomia in Spain from the genre's roots in the eighth-century De laude Spanie of Isidore through the humanist laudes urbium of ca. 1455 to 1506. Preliminary context for the Spanish tradition is provided in a survey of classical and medieval theoretical writings for the praise of place. The major European city encomia from those periods are also presented.

Ancient authors tended to write about Iberia as a unit—Hispania—rather than to focus on its regions or cities. Hence the establishment of the early laus Hispaniae tradition in passages of Pliny, Solinus, Claudian, and Pacatus. …

Urban Youth Reimagine Trauma: Making Meaning Of Experiences With Chronic Community Violence Through The Arts, Stephanie Urso Spina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The impact of participation in the "Creating Original Opera" (COO) program was investigated among two consecutive (1999 and 2000) cohorts of eighth grade inner-city students living in a context of chronic community violence. Four research questions were posed: (1) What are these students' experiences of violence? (2) What strategies, if any, do they employ to cope with violent events? (3) What, if any, of the above change over the duration of the project? (4) How might those changes relate (or not) to participation in the opera program?

Data collection included a series of three semi-structured interviews with randomly chosen students …

Vigilance Or Tolerance?: Ambivalence And Attitude Accessibility In Response To Terrorist Threats, Julie Tison

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research explored the cognitive processes underlying the Response Amplification Effect (RAE), which is ambivalent people's tendency to judge the object of their ambivalence (typically, a stigmatized other) more extremely than a comparable control target. Being in a state of ambivalence is known to be uncomfortable. This discomfort may be dealt with by implementing changes in the accessibility level of attitudinal elements. It is suggested that cognitions compatible with the side of the ambivalence made salient by the current situation will be super-activated and that incompatible elements will be sub-activated, thus leading to amplified reactions congruent with the current context. …