Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 10 of 10

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Material Consumption Of An 18th-Century Middling Urban Craftsman In Boston, Massachusetts, Lauryn E. Sharp Aug 2023

Material Consumption Of An 18th-Century Middling Urban Craftsman In Boston, Massachusetts, Lauryn E. Sharp

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis studies how Caleb Parker, a blacksmith and craftsman who lived in the early- to mid-18th century, viewed and utilized refinement and genteel behaviors using the glass and ceramic artifacts recovered from a privy at his home at 23 Unity Street in Boston’s North End. Background research explores the concept of “partible refinement,” which speaks to the notion that the “middling sorts'' at this time, including craftspeople like Caleb Parker, had the agency to selectively use different components of refined gentility according to their personal consumer choice and tastes. This resulted in middling sorts incorporating both traditional and modern …


Black Family Engagement Through Communication Technology: A Phenomenological Study From The Perspective Of Urban Public High Schools Parents In The Greater Boston Area, Mariette Bien-Aime Ayala Dec 2019

Black Family Engagement Through Communication Technology: A Phenomenological Study From The Perspective Of Urban Public High Schools Parents In The Greater Boston Area, Mariette Bien-Aime Ayala

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Black family engagement is the key to improving the life outcomes of young Black students (Clark, 2015; Mestry & Grobler, 2007). Recently, as a response to a need for better family engagement in K-12 education, new technologies have emerged. As educators, it is important to study the effectiveness of these new communication technologies, as well as how Black families are experiencing opportunities for engagement through them. Guided by critical race theory and capital theory, I ask: How do Black families experience opportunities for engagement with their children’s high schools through the use of communication technologies? To find this answer, in …


“The True Spirit Of Service": Ceramics And Toys As Tools Of Ideology At The Dorchester Industrial School For Girls, Sarah N. Johnson Aug 2018

“The True Spirit Of Service": Ceramics And Toys As Tools Of Ideology At The Dorchester Industrial School For Girls, Sarah N. Johnson

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis examines the ceramics, both full-scale and toy, and dolls recovered from the Industrial School for Girls (1859-1941) in Dorchester, MA, in order to assess the ways in which the Managers who ran the School used material culture to enculturate the girls, as well as how the girls used material culture to shape their own identities. This site provides a unique opportunity to study the archaeology of a single-gender, and predominately single-class and single-age. The Industrial School for Girls, as an institution whose aim was to better the lives of poor girls and give them economic opportunities, as well …


Lgbt Student Experiences In Boston Public Schools: A Case Study, David Geyer May 2017

Lgbt Student Experiences In Boston Public Schools: A Case Study, David Geyer

Honors College Theses

While the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community has overcome great obstacles in its fight for equality, the newest challenge has become the poor mental health of the LGBT youth. In this study, the experiences of a recently graduated LGBT Boston Public Schools student were investigated through qualitative research methods. Interviews with the student were analyzed to determine what factors contributed to his overall positive experiences and mental health as a bisexual student attending Boston Public Schools. The showing of support from his mother and peers, along with the presence of a Gay-Straight Alliance club at his school positively affected …


Ceramic Consumption In A Boston Immigrant Tenement, Andrew J. Webster Aug 2016

Ceramic Consumption In A Boston Immigrant Tenement, Andrew J. Webster

Graduate Masters Theses

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Boston’s North End became home to thousands of European immigrants, mostly from Ireland and Italy. The majority of these immigrant families lived in crowded tenement apartments and earned their wages from low-paying jobs such as manual laborers or store clerks. The Ebenezer Clough House at 21 Unity Street was originally built as a single-family colonial home in the early eighteenth century but was later repurposed as a tenement in the nineteenth century. In 2013, the City of Boston Archaeology Program excavated the rear lot of the Clough House, recovering 36,465 artifacts, including …


From Horse To Electric Power At The Metropolitan Railroad Company Site: Archaeology And The Narrative Of Technological Change, Miles Shugar Aug 2014

From Horse To Electric Power At The Metropolitan Railroad Company Site: Archaeology And The Narrative Of Technological Change, Miles Shugar

Graduate Masters Theses

The Metropolitan Railroad Company Site in Roxbury (Boston), Massachusetts, was first excavated in the late 1970s by staff of the Museum of Afro American History. Researchers recovered nearly 20,000 artifacts related to the site's life as a horsecar street railway station and carriage manufacturer from 1860 to 1891, its subsequent conversion into an electric street railway until around 1920, and finally its modern use as an automobile garage. Using the framework of behavioral archaeology, this project uses GIS-based spatial methods and newly collected documentary evidence to reexamine the site's assemblage of horse accoutrements and carriage manufacturing byproducts. Artifact distribution maps …


Germs, Pigs And Silver: King Philip's War And The Deconstruction Of The Middle Ground In New England, Benjamin M. Roine Dec 2013

Germs, Pigs And Silver: King Philip's War And The Deconstruction Of The Middle Ground In New England, Benjamin M. Roine

Graduate Masters Theses

Early in the seventeenth century Algonquians peoples of southern New England and English colonists built a middle ground which benefitted both groups. Trade, the existence of competition from Dutch and French colonies and powerful Algonquian tribes maintained this middle ground. However, as trade items, such as beaver pelts and wampum became rare or lost value and continued English immigration to New England weakened Dutch claims to the area, the middle ground began to crumble. As English-style farms and livestock changed the ecology of New England and the colonists sought to assert their will, Algonquians lost the ability to live as …


The Application Of Geographic Information Technology And Ground-Penetrating Radar In The Study Of The Evolution Of The Charles River Basin, Lars E. Anderas Aug 2013

The Application Of Geographic Information Technology And Ground-Penetrating Radar In The Study Of The Evolution Of The Charles River Basin, Lars E. Anderas

Graduate Masters Theses

A two-part study was conducted on the evolution of the shoreline of the Charles River basin on a city-wide scale as well as in finer detail in Magazine Beach Park, along the Cambridge shore of the river. Both parts of the study utilized geographic information technology (GIT) to integrate and analyze data from modern and historical sources, including maps, digital elevation models (DEMs), and orthographic and oblique photography. The city-scale portion of the study produced estimates of the total area of new land made within the study area since Boston's founding in 1630, 14.3 km2, of which 6.5 …


Bones In The Landfill: A Zooarchaeological Study From Faneuil Hall, Linda M. Santoro Aug 2012

Bones In The Landfill: A Zooarchaeological Study From Faneuil Hall, Linda M. Santoro

Graduate Masters Theses

Using data from recent archaeological excavations at Faneuil Hall in Boston, this thesis examines how an 18th-century urban landfill context can be used towards understanding the broader foodways of a city community. Much of today's urban landscape has been artificially created over time, often through the efforts of communities to fill land and dispose of their garbage, and it is important for archaeologists to utilize these contexts in meaningful ways. The Town Dock was gradually filled in with the daily trash of the merchants, shop-keepers, and other residents of the nearby community, and the faunal assemblage gives us a glimpse …


Urban Consumption In Late 19th-Century Dorchester, Jennifer Poulsen Aug 2011

Urban Consumption In Late 19th-Century Dorchester, Jennifer Poulsen

Anthropology, Historical Archaeology Masters Theses Collection

This thesis examines the bottles recovered from an 1895 fill deposit at the Blake House site in Dorchester, MA, to determine what inconspicuous consumption reveals about the anonymous consumers of Dorchester in the late 19th century. The assemblage is composed of 1,892 pieces of bottle glass, representing food, alcohol, medicine, and household products, 73 with original paper labels. The analysis presented here demonstrates the consumers were from several households and included men, women and children from immigrant populations. Despite evidence for intensive recycling of bottles, indicating that these individuals were under economic stress, they had some amount of discretionary money …