Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Stasi Brainwashing In The Gdr 1957 - 1990, Jacob H. Solbrig, Jacob Hagen Solbrig

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the methods used by the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), more commonly known as the Stasi, or East German secret police, for extraction of information from citizens of the German Democratic Republic for the purpose of espionage and covert operations inside East Germany, as it pertains to the deliberate brainwashing of East German citizens. As one of the most efficient intelligence agencies to ever exist, the Stasi’s main purpose was to monitor the population, gather intelligence, and collect or turn informants. They used brainwashing techniques to control the people of the GDR, keeping the populace paralyzed with fear …

Is ‘Military Necessity’ Enough? Lincoln’S Conception Of Executive Power In Suspending Habeas Corpus In 1861, Evan Mclaughlin

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

In May 1861, President Abraham Lincoln's decision to suspend habeas corpus in Baltimore following an attack on Federal troops as they marched through Baltimore on April 19th to answer Lincoln’s call to defend the Capitol. To complicate matters further, Congress was still in recess, so they could not legislate a solution to the growing insurgency. In order to check these actions, Abraham Lincoln authorized General Scott to suspend Habeas Corpus between Baltimore and Philadelphia. When John Merryman was arrested, detained, and denied habeas corpus, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney issued an in-chambers decision, Ex Parte Merryman, to voice his …

A Portrayal Of An Ottoman City And Its Inhabitants: Administration, Society, And Economy In Ottoman Antakya (Antioch), 1750-1840, Ali Capar

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the main features of the social and economic life of the district of Antakya between 1750 and 1840 to essentially understand the characteristics of the daily life of society, administration, political developments, and economic activities in this particular city. While elucidating the city administration, demography, neighborhood life, trade, marketplace, guilds, religious minorities, women, children, and the politics of notables in the district of Antakya between 1750 and 1840; my observations revealed the main aspects of social, economic, and politic life of the city of Antakya- one of the most important religious, political, and commercial centers in the …

The Legacy Of British Rule On Lgbt Rights In Jamaica And The Cayman Islands, Zachary Stewart

Master's Theses

This thesis explores the relationship between British colonial influence and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) rights in the Caribbean. Comparing the Cayman Islands, a British Overseas Territory, and Jamaica, an independent former colony of the United Kingdom, the situation for LGBT people is evaluated. While Jamaica has serious abuses and a concerning situation for the human rights of LGBT people, the Cayman Islands’ LGBT community’s position is far less concerning. Owing to its continued connection to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Cayman Islands’ LGBT rights situation is much less dire. Through British influence via …

Eisenhower Internationalism And Nasser Nationalism: The Suez Crisis Defining International Policy In Post-Colonial Egypt, Dominic Supple

Senior Theses

The nationalization of the Suez Canal by the Egyptians in 1956 was an international controversy. As history, the topic has been just as controversial among scholars; however events such as: the planning of the Aswan Dam, the Protocol of Sèvres, the Bandung Conference, and the Baghdad Pact have helped crystalize the perspective and significance of the Suez Crisis. The United States dealings in Egypt during the Suez Crisis, and subsequent relations with Abdel Nasser, cemented United States Cold War foreign policy, culminating in the passing of the Eisenhower Doctrine. While these events were the enactment of containment policy, they also …

A Legion Of Legacy: Tyrolean Militarism, Catholicism, And The Heimwehr Movement, Jason Engle

Dissertations

This study of the origins of the Heimwehr (Home Guard) movement offers insight into the conditions under which such groups gained their following. As such, its story is a valuable one that shows a society groping with the problem of a complex, multi-faceted identity that was, at the same time, wracked with substantial economic privation and politically polarized. The paramilitary Heimwehr movement that began in 1920 was the creation of Austria’s conservative provincial governments. It was intended to preserve the existing social and political order—that of the hegemonic social groups of the Habsburg Monarchy—against the growing threat of Marxist revolution, …

Think Of The Children: Child Labor Through The Progressive Era In Early Twentieth-Century America, Thomas Clark

History Undergraduate Theses

Child labor in America was a pivotal component of the Progressive reform movement throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning my research, I looked into the role of child labor in the creation of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The FLSA was the first federal law to abolish child labor successfully. Throughout my research, I noticed a trend of law passage and Supreme Court denial.

The most referenced events involving child labor as an evil to society came in the early part of the twentieth-century. The two most famous events were Mary “Mother Jones” Harris and …

Our History Is The Future: Mni Wiconi And The Struggle For Native Liberation, Nick Estes

American Studies ETDs

From April 2016 to February 2017, Indigenous women and youth led a historic struggle to halt the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline from crossing Mni Sose, the Missouri River, and threatening the drinking water of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and millions downstream. Rallied under the banner Mni Wiconi, a Lakota assertion meaning “water is life,” centuries of history converged during the protests. It was about more than an oil pipeline. It was struggle over the meaning of history, the defense of land and water, and the rights of Indigenous peoples to determine their own future. When land and …

A Necessary Evil?, Jessica Wetzel

Honors Theses

In this essay, I set out to prove that some of the medical experiments undertaken by Nazi doctors during World War II have scientific relevance in today’s scientific community. In the first section, the experiments connected with Dr. Karl Brandt will be examined in some detail allowing the reader to develop a basic knowledge of the experiments that will be discussed. This will also set the foundation for the discussion on scientific validity due to the nature in which they are described. In the second section, the results relevant to today’s scientific community will be discussed, proving that these horrific …

Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky

Theses and Dissertations

This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …

From Protest Song To Social Song: Music And Politics In Colombia, 1966-2016, Joshua Katz-Rosene

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on archival and ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of Bogotá and Medellín, this dissertation documents the development of canción protesta (protest song) in Colombia in the 1960s, and tracks its evolution in subsequent decades. At the turn of the 1970s, songwriters affiliated with a grassroots canción protesta movement in Bogotá used music as a vehicle for disseminating leftist political ideology and extolling the revolutionary guerrilla groups that had formed in the Colombian countryside in the preceding years. However, canción protesta was an urban phenomenon that emerged in tandem with other countercultural currents, and their confluence in the late 1960s …

The Politics Of Shorter Hours And Corporate-Centered Society: A History Of Work-Time Regulation In The United States And Japan, Keisuke Jinno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shorter working hours drew much attention as a means of fighting unemployment and crisis in capitalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Nowadays, shorter work-time is rarely considered a policy option to fix economic or social issues in the United States and Japan. This dissertation presents a history of work-time regulation in the United States and Japan to examine how and why its developments and stalemate took place.

In the big picture, developments of work-time regulation during the first half of the twentieth century were a part of concessional modifications of class relations, a common phenomenon in many …

El Español De Canarias Y La Canariedad En La España Autonómica: Un Estudio Glotopolítico, Pablo Guerra

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I intend to analyze the abundance of discourses about the Spanish from the Canary Islands from the 1980’s to present day. I have identified two key processes that are part of the consolidation of an autonomous field of reflection on language in the Canary Islands: the development of descriptive studies of the Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands carried out in the Department of Spanish Language at the Universidad de La Laguna (Tenerife) during the first twenty five years of democracy in Spain, as well as the creation of the Canarian Academy of Language in the year …

Spectacular Politics And Everyday Performance: Tracing Music From Ceauşescu’S Romania To Multicultural America, Benjamin Dumbauld

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing from fieldwork conducted throughout the United States and Canada, this dissertation examines the continued performance of socialist-era music within the Romanian-American community. It addresses why a community largely made up of people who sought to leave the country during the authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu continue to perform music tied to that period by tracing the historical performance and reception of multiple genres, ranging from traditional peasant music to folk rock. The dissertation begins by examining the nationalization of Romania’s music industry under the early socialist regime (1944-1965), and locates the difficulties Communist Party members confronted in delineating a …

Designing Simplicity To Achieve Technological Improvement: The General Electric J79 Turbojet Engine; Innovations, Achievements And Effects, Matt C. Brimer

Theses

With the beginning of powered, manned flight, the piston engine drove a propeller or multiple propellers to provide the thrust for lift required to overcome the forces of drag and gravity for flight. As aircraft speeds gradually increased over time, the power needed to overcome the aerodynamic inefficiencies of the propeller to greater speeds and altitudes were quickly realized as a hindrance to the potential of aircraft. With the turbojet engine, this new mechanism and subsequent aerodynamic changes revolutionized aircraft to increased speeds and altitude never before achievable with a piston engine. The United States, after acquiring further and more …

The Catholic Church And The Formation Of Human Rights Doctrine In El Salvador, Edward Mikus Iii

Theses and Dissertations

The Catholic Church’s focus on human rights in the years following the Second Vatican Council led to increased political activity amongst the clergy in socially stratified El Salvador. This development, in turn, led to a breakdown in relations between the Church and the Salvadoran State

Dynamics Of War: Culture, Society, Environment, And Pedagogy, Breanne Jacobsen

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

War is an ever-present feature of human civilization. Nearly all cultures and societies show accounts of human conflict. This portfolio seeks to provide both a multidimensional analysis of war and a means of instructing students to appreciate its significance as a driving force of history using three different components.

The syllabus project provides a long-term view of how the various wars and conflicts came to be and progressed in Western Civilization in the modern era.

The chapter-length paper shows the ravaging effects that war and conflict can have on a physical landscape and the environment in which the conflict takes …

When We Were Monsters: Ethnogenesis In Medieval Ireland 800-1366, Dawn Adelaide Seymour Klos

Master's Theses

Ethnogenesis, or the process of identity construction occurred in medieval Ireland as a reaction to laws passed by the first centralized government on the island. This thesis tracks ethnogenesis through documents relating to change in language, custom, and law. This argument provides insight into how a new political identity was rendered necessary by the Anglo-Irish. Victor Turner’s model of Communitas structures the argument as each stage of liminality represents a turning point in the process of ethnogenesis.

1169 marked a watershed moment as it began the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. English nobles brought with them ideas of centralized power. In …

Arkansas's Divided Democracy: The Making Of The Constitution Of 1874, Rodney Waymon Harris

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the making of Arkansas’s constitution of 1874, which drew the curtain on Reconstruction in the state and remains in force in the twenty-first century. It contributes to the scholarship of Arkansas history, Southern history, and U.S. political and constitutional history by showing that Arkansas’s Redeemers were not unified or homogeneous, but rather a fractured group who fought about how restrictive the state’s new constitution would be. In the end, it was more generous in some sections than some Democrats wished. This dissertation, thus, challenges a traditional narrative of a likeminded convention and relentlessly restrictive constitution-making. However, it …

The Anti-Black Hero: Black Masculinity Media Representation As Seen In Netflix Series Luke Cage And Fox Series Empire, Meya Joyell Hemphill

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

The reoccurrence of the Black Brute, the Thug, and the modern day Coon stereotypical images on current television narrowly defines Black masculinity as a monolithic experience. Young Black boys, are often unable to see themselves as those who are portrayed on television. The images they see on screen are sometimes not realistic. Unfortunately, for some young Black boys, these stereotypical images may heavily influence their own behavior. Society often criminalizes and demonizes young Black men as angry, violent, and dangerous. They pose as a supposed threat to society and are thought to be even more problematic as they age. Currently, …

Bloody Bay: Grassroots Policeways, Community Control, And Power In San Francisco And Its Hinterlands, 1846-1915, Darren A. Raspa

History ETDs

“Bloody Bay: Grassroots Policeways, Community Control, and Power in San Francisco and its Hinterlands, 1846–1915” follows the history of San Francisco’s spectrum of formal and informal policing from the American takeover of California in 1846 during the U.S.–Mexico War to Police Commissioner Jesse B. Cook’s nationwide law enforcement advisory team tour in 1912 and San Francisco’s debut as the Jewel of a new American Pacific world during the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915. These six decades functioned as a unique period wherein a culture of popular justice and grassroots community peacekeeping were fostered. This policing environment was forged in …

"Not Your Mother's Pta": Women's Political Activism In Twentieth-Century America, Jennifer Lynn Mcpherson

History ETDs

Not Your Mother’s PTA: Women’s Political Activism in Twentieth-Century America provides the first in-depth study of women’s political activism in the National PTA and its local PTA units. It closely examines how women integrated themselves and their ideas on women’s and children’s welfare reform into government from the 1890s through the 1970s. This project explores the resources, strategies, and methods used by PTA women working for women and children’s interests at the local and national level, primarily in public schools and government agencies. Not Your Mother’s PTA challenges the subtext of the PTA mother/housewife and shows how women used the …

The Needed Man: The Evolution, Abandonment, And Resurrection Of The Roman Dictatorship, Mark B. Wilson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite being an integral institution of the Roman state, employed frequently and routinely from the Republic’s earliest crises to the last days of the climactic fight with Hannibal, the Roman dictatorship is profoundly misunderstood. Perplexed by the idea of the Roman Republic—a state born out of the rejection of the preeminence of any one man—nonetheless investing the power of the state in a single unelected individual, and reacting to the anomalous first-century BCE dictatorships of Sulla and Caesar, both late-Republic historians and modern scholars have consistently described the office in ominous and fundamentally mythological terms that are largely contradicted by …

"The World Of Our Children": Jews, Puerto Ricans, And The Politics Of Place And Race On The Lower East Side, 1963-1993, Barry Goldberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how Jewish political leaders on the Lower East Side responded to neighborhood change, particularly the influx of Puerto Rican migrants, from the 1960s through the 1990s. Utilizing untapped archival material, including congressional records, municipal papers, legal files, articles from the ethnic press, and quantitative voting data, I demonstrate that the Lower East Side remained home to an influential network of Jewish political leaders, institutions, and voters long after the early twentieth-century. Residing on Grand Street, largely Orthodox, and often descended from Lower East Side Jewish immigrants, this political base created, shaped, and implemented antipoverty, education, housing, and …

Region, Nation And Gastronomy: Regionalism In Gastronomic Texts Of The Early 20th Century (1900-1939), Lauren Reches

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

France is far from being a uniform culture and yet the food of French provinces is often subsumed into one universally known “French cuisine.” While 19^th-century haute cuisine ignored regional differences, gastronomes of the early 20^th-century, such as Curnonsky, Marcel Rouff, Austin de Croze, and Pampille, defined a new French culinary identity based on appropriating and incorporating the diversity of the regional cuisines. Regional cuisine at the time was, however, quite diverse. Some of the regions of France were newly added to the country, such as Savoie and Nice, while others had been in contention for …

The Willfulness Of A Missing Frame: Ahmed Zaki And The Politics Of Visual Resistance, Miriam M. Gabriel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ahmed Zaki (1949-2005) is one of Egyptian cinema’s most prominent leading actors, with work spanning three decades of critical films that informed a generation’s visual register of masculinity. However, the beginnings of his career were marked by public skepticism around his place as a leading actor due to him being “too dark” and “too poor”; as his career continued to flourish, those very markings of racing and classing Zaki because a foundation for increasingly stamping his public image with the “authenticity” of an Egyptian citizen. At a particularly neoliberal moment in the Egyptian economy, that of the early 80s, new …

Spectral Bodies: Women's Resistance Across Time In North America, Whitney C. Evanson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project contrasts the lived experiences of feminists within the EZLN in Mexico with the historical persecution of community outsiders during the Salem witch trials. I want to explore the differences between a radical political and social movement (the EZLN), and the radical shift in history in which women were accused of witchcraft based on hysteria and rumors. There are parallels between the witch trials and the causes of the Zapatista movement in the ways that women's bodies were treated--their political usefulness to create fear and obedience from citizens by murdering them for their defiance, burying them in shallow graves. …

Cold War And The Olympics: An Athlete's Perspective, Mike Vecchione

Honors Theses

When President Jimmy Carter decided to boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, it was the largest act of political interference in the history of the Olympics. It began in December of 1979 when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. Carter was having a difficult time getting the hostages back so in response to the invasion of Afghanistan, Carter gave the Soviets one month to withdraw their troops or the United States would boycott their Olympics. Since the Soviets did not respect the demands of the President, Carter stuck to his threat and the United States did not participate in the 1980 …

Stronger For Scotland: The Rise Of The Modern Scottish Nationalist Movement, Thomas Wilson

Honors Theses

This research analyzes the growth of the Scottish Nationalist Party, currently Scotland’s main party in Scottish Parliament. The growth of the nationalist movement began in the 1920s and took a long period of formative years before the movement grew into the Scottish Nationalist party seen today. The nationalist movement was most successful in the latter years of the 20th century, but the most important stages of the nationalist movement were its formative years in from the 1920s through the 1940s. This thesis analyzes the nationalist’s developmental process of determining the goal of the nationalist movement and the methods the movement …

Dictatorship Across Borders: How Brazil Influenced The Chilean Coup D’État Of 1973, Mila Burns Nascimento

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on the testimony of Brazilian exiles who lived in Chile during the coup d’état of 1973, on documents recently declassified by the Brazilian Truth Commission and the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Relations, and on broad archival research in United States and South American collections, this dissertation investigates the political, economic, and diplomatic relations between Brazil and Chile from Salvador Allende’s candidacy to presidency and the first days of the Chilean military dictatorship. Despite the the widely held notion that the United States was the one and only supporter of the Chilean September 11 coup, this theis shows that …