Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Merchant Seamen, Sailortowns, And The Shaping Of U.S. Citizenship, 1843-1945, Johnathan Thayer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that merchant seamen, because of their inherent transience, diversity, and the unique nature of their work, occupied a marginal position in U.S. society, and that that marginalization produced a series of confrontations with shoreside people, communities, institutions, and the state, most specifically over the nature and definition of citizenship. This argument is developed through examination of a series of encounters and negotiations that merchant seamen provoked from the piers, back alleys, and boardinghouses of the nation’s “sailortowns” from the 1830s through World War II, including: 1) nineteenth century maritime ministry projects in the Port of New York …

Buying Time: Consuming Urban Pasts In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Dory Agazarian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about how historical narratives developed in the context of a modern marketplace in nineteenth-century Britain. In particular, it explores British historicism through urban space with a focus on Rome and London. Both cities were invested with complex political, religious and cultural meanings central to the British imagination. These were favorite tourist destinations and the subjects of popular and professional history writing. Both cities operated as palimpsests, offering a variety of histories to be “tried on” across the span of time. In Rome, British consumers struggled when traditional histories were problematized by emerging scholarship and archaeology. In London, …

The Color Of Desire: Contradictions Of Race, Sex, And Gay Rights In The Federal Republic Of Germany, Christopher B. Ewing

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that the current artificial dichotomy between European and Islamic sexual mores is rooted in competing impulses in German homosexual rights movements to seek solidarity with communities of color while simultaneously exoticizing their members. Interdisciplinary scholars of contemporary Europe have examined the many ways in which white Europeans have imagined Islam as inherently homophobic and misogynistic, rendering it incompatible with Western Europe's purported commitment to LGBT rights. My research historicizes this work by showing how, in the struggle against legal persecution and discrimination, homosexual West Germans turned to anti-racism as a political tool while simultaneously seeking out "exotic" …

Black Business As Activism: Ebony Magazine And The Civil Rights Movement, Seon Britton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the fight for justice, equality, and true liberation, African American organizations and institutions have often acted as a voice for the African American community at large focusing on common issues and concerns. With the civil rights movement being broadcast across the world, there was no better time for African American community and civil rights organizations to take a role within the movement in combatting the oppression, racism, and discrimination of white supremacy. Often left out of this history of the civil rights movement is an analysis of black-owned private businesses, also giving shape to the African American community. Black …

“A Christian World Order:” Protestants, Democracy And Christian Aid To Germany, 1945-1961, Ky N. Woltering

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the relationship between the German and American Protestantism from 1945-1961. I argue that in response to the threat of Nazism and communism, mainline ecumenical American Protestants aimed to create a universalist “Christian World Order” based on liberal democracy and Christian ethics. Only this new order, they argued, could supersede nationalist and materialist agendas and restore world peace. By rhetorically depicting Nazi and Communist "totalitarianism" as anti-Christian, a construction I refer to as the Christian-Totalitarian Dichotomy, these Protestants drove German conservatives away from Nazism and toward Western liberal democracy through association with Christianity. They accomplished this through two …

Race, Sexuality, And Masculinity On The Down Low, Stephen Kochenash

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a so-called post-racial America, a new gay identity has flourished and come into the limelight. However, in recent years, researchers have concluded that not all men who have sex with other men (MSM) self-identify as gay, most noticeably a large population of Black men. It is possible that a tainted history of Black enslavement in this country that is inextricably linked with ideas of space, surveillance, subversion, and survival inform a Black male’s self-identification as being “on the down low” (DL). This begs the question: What does mainstream society view as gay-ness and how is the DL constructed …

A Colony’S State Of Sovereignty: Decolonization Has Yet To Take Place In Rwanda, Mahalia Mehu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Martin Shipway, renowned author of Decolonization and Its Impact and professor of twentieth-century French Studies stated that:

"[...]it took only about twenty years for most of the formal structures and institutions of colonialism [...]to be swept away.[The] often violent and intermittently intense period of crisis[...] [explains] an international phenomenon as complex as decolonization[...] ."

Yet this quote by Shipway does not speak to the fact that independence from former colonial powers has not been fully achieved and neither has decolonization. According to the documentation of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, the former German/Belgian colony of Rwanda did not achieve the …

The Bronx Was Brewing: A Digital Resource Of A Lost Industry, Michelle Zimmer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Bronx: a bucolic oasis laden with history, a suburb within city-limits, an urban warzone, and thanks to the recent renaissance, a phoenix of progress rising from the proverbial ashes of the fires that burned through the borough in the 1970’s. But many people are unaware that the Bronx also brewed.
Uncovering the brewing industry of the Bronx tells not only the story of the lost industry, but it also communicates the narrative of the development of the Bronx. The brewers were German immigrants who developed a thriving industry by introducing lager beer to the United States by taking advantage …