History Commons^™

Facing Catholic Antisemitism In Post-War France, The Finaly Affair: 1945-1953, Elizabeth Jane Spaide

Theses and Dissertations

In February 1944, Dr. Fritz and Anni Finaly, Jewish Austrians who had fled the Nazi regime for France in 1939, made a desperate decision. To protect their sons Robert and Gérald from persecution, they placed them in the care of others. The boys were eventually confined to a municipal nursery run by Antoinette Brun in Grenoble, France. After the war, Brun’s refusal to return the children to their relatives led to protracted court proceedings, rendering what came to be called the Finaly Affair, the most highly publicized post-war custody case in France. This thesis will analyze how the press coverage …

Appropriating The Past: Looking At Visual Evidence In The Twenty-First Century Archival Documentary, Zachariah Anderson

Theses and Dissertations

Film and documentary scholars have long debated links between images, history, and truth. The field recently began addressing epistemological questions emergent when visual sources are circulated as evidence in an age of rapid image appropriation, manipulation, and circulation. To contribute to debates about images’ digital-era evidentiary roles, I study twenty-first century archival documentaries. By archival documentary, I mean a film that primarily comprises extant images (from government archives, home movies, surveillance footage, Hollywood films, etc.), rather than footage shot for the documentary. Films scholars and critics have applied many labels to these kinds of films: compilation, found footage, remix, etc. …

Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of trauma is controversial in literature. While one may be able to come up with ways to describe trauma in fiction, representing historical trauma is a hard task for writers. Some argue that trauma can not be described through those who did not experience it, while others claim that, provided some elements are added, one can represent trauma to the reader. This thesis focuses on twentieth-century historical traumas related to a nuclear catastrophe and explores the different literary and testimonial responses to the catastrophic man-made event of Hiroshima (1945). In this thesis, Kathleen Burkinshaw’s historical fiction The Last …

Dulce Sueños De Tierra, Sweet Dreams Of Earth, Jordany Genao

Theses and Dissertations

Jordany's paper congregates their archival research into an art practice that examines the decolonial impulse to excavate the self and produce autonomy. Using ceramics to reference and re-animate Taino ritual objects found in museums, resulting in alternative museology, their work seeks to honor Caribbean ancestors by subverting colonial history.

Black Autonomy As A Form Of Resistance And A Symbol Of Rebellion: A Comparative Study Of Robbins, Illinois, And Milwaukee Bronzeville (1920-1970), Nateya Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

Black towns and segregated Black neighborhoods are two examples of majority Black communities that were formed because of the racial discrimination African Americans faced. Previous research has examined majority Black communities from a deficit model; however, this paper highlights the assets of autonomy and resistance in two majority Black communities in the Midwest: Robbins, Illinois, and Milwaukee Bronzeville. This paper compares Robbins, Illinois, a Black town, and Milwaukee’s Bronzeville neighborhood, a segregated Black community, to answer the questions: How did African Americans in Robbins, Illinois, and Milwaukee Bronzeville use autonomous practices to navigate racial discrimination between 1920 and 1970? What …

Pioneers Of Evacuation, Pioneers Of Resettlement: The Photographic Archive Of The Japanese American Incarceration And The Settler Colonial Imaginary, Christina Hobbs

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reexamines the photographic archive of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II produced by the US government, arguing that these images “restage” the evacuation, incarceration, and resettlement periods through a settler colonial “pioneer” mythology, thereby obscuring the precarity of Japanese Americans' racial positionality between “settler” and “native.”

Off The Press: Exploring Reproducible War Art, Emily Rose Hankins

Theses and Dissertations

Aspects of modernity, such as the news cycle and ever-changing technologies, have played large roles in the construction of the history of wars through the power of reproducible war art imagery as seen in various public spheres and contexts. These include engravings and photographs of the war in news publications, propaganda posters promoting patriotism, protest posters pleading for peace, and prints and books made by artists for display in galleries. The inundation of these images become ubiquitous with the conflict, and the artists who have a hand in creating these images also have the power to construct and reconstruct histories, …

Original Intent: Brown Vs. Board Of Education, White Backlash, & The Enduring Power Of De Facto Segregation, Aaron Brand

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the factors and outcomes surrounding Brown v. Board of Education of 1954. The events that predated it and the resistance that followed determined the chain of consequences from this perceived victory over racial bias. The calculated and persistent backlash against integration obscured Brown’s intent of educational opportunity.

Beirut/The Other Side Of The City: The Impact Of Visual Texture Production Of The Lebanese Postmemory Generation, 1989 - Present, Mohamed Moustafa Gameel Ebada

Theses and Dissertations

In 1989, after the Ta'if agreement, the war in Lebanon started to fade, which ended years of one of the most destructive civil conflicts in the region with no decisive winner or loser. The year also marked the birth of a new Lebanese generation who did not experience the war in person. It is a generation of postmemory, a term Maria Hirsch coined to describe the reminisces of those who did not have a personal encounter with past traumatic events. However, it was not before February 2005, when Rafic Al-Hariri's violent assassination occurred, when the postmemory generation started to question …

People From Everywhere: Metis Identity, Kinship And Mobility 1600s-1800s, Mark Edward Langenfeld

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

PEOPLE FROM EVERYWHERE: METIS IDENTITY, KINSHIP AND MOBILITY, 1600s-1800s

by

Mark Langenfeld

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2021Under the Supervision of Professor Margaret Noodin

People from Everywhere: Metis Identity, Kinship and Mobility, 1600s-1800s, is a discussion of how the Metis people of the American southern Great Lakes region in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin made individual and familial choices about ethnic identification from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries that enabled them to survive colonization in their homeland. I argue that Metis people maintained, through kinship networks, a private identity as a collective, distinct group of …

Yolkkh: The Story Of My People, Amna Zelimkha Yandarbin

Theses and Dissertations

The name of my project is: Yolkkh, The Story of My People. With this project I present a series of scarves each one bearing an illustrated scene in order to tell a story – my story and the story of the Noxci people. Noxci are the people who are referred to as “Chechens” by Russians and are generally known by that title. As a Muslim, I have witnessed the way Western media tend to dehumanize my community. In order to contrast this dehumanizing process, I thought that telling the story of my family would help reverse Islamophobic tendencies and raise …

"Accountable To No One": Confronting Police Power In Black Milwaukee, William I. Tchakirides

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation uncovers the roots of discriminatory police power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and traces Black-led efforts to make the city’s police bureaucracy more accountable to all citizens. It analyzes the politics of police reform in the century spanning the passage of two state laws that reconfigured Milwaukee’s law enforcement arrangements. The first (1885) removed City Hall’s managerial control over the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD). Corporate elites and social reformers fearful of rising working-class power and moral degeneration in the immigrant-industrial city lobbied for the statute’s enactment. The second (1984) reversed course, re-empowering non-police officials after decades of Black-led campaigns for …

Partisans And Soldiers: Themes Of Gender And The Commemoration Of Jewish Resistance In The Soviet Union During World War Ii, Taylor Marie Dews

Theses and Dissertations

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, thousands of Red Army soldiers, peasants, and Jewish men, women, and children escaped imprisonment and certain death by fleeing into the vast forests of Belorussia. Using oral histories, archival websites, and survivor testimony, this thesis explores the Soviet partisan units and the Jewish partisan units and family camps that were organized in the forests and raises questions including: How do the experiences of Jewish women in the partisans compare with Jewish women who fought in the Red Army? How are the Jewish partisans remembered around the world today? What postwar …

Breakdown Of Relations: American Expansionism, The Great Plains, And The Arikara People, 1823-1957, Stephen R. Aoun

Theses and Dissertations

Arikara people had been adapting their tribal structures to European influences since Europeans first arrived on the northern Plains in the early seventeenth century. Their sedentary lifestyle, focused on agriculture and hunting, increasingly included trade with French, British, and American trappers by the seventeenth century. The goods procured from European traders, such as firearms and other metallurgical works, began to upset the balance of geopolitical power on the Plains, setting the stage for the violence and political realignments at the center of this thesis. As my research reveals, by the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition, tensions between the …

Lux Occidentale: The Eastern Mission Of The Pontifical Commission For Russia, Origins To 1933, Michael Anthony Guzik

Theses and Dissertations

Although it was first a sub-commission within the Congregation for the Eastern Churches (CEO), the Pontifical Commission for Russia (PCpR) emerged as an independent commission under the presidency of the noted Vatican Russian expert, Michel d’Herbigny, S.J. in 1925, and remained so until 1933 when it was re-integrated into CEO. The PCpR was given authority over the spiritual and material mission to Soviet Russia, including refugees who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution. While most studies concerning the Catholic Church and Russia are religious or political histories which focus, respectively, on martyrdom or the contest between the so-called free world and …

Stitched Together: The Singer Manufacturing Company And Its Employees In Revolutionary Russia, 1914-1930, Jenna Elizabeth Himsl

Theses and Dissertations

In 1914, the Russian Empire was the largest foreign market of the Singer Manufacturing Company. Following the Russian Revolution, Singer’s Russian subsidiary, Kompaniya Singer, was nationalized in a piecemeal fashion. Singer’s employees were forced to adapt to the new order or attempt to leave Soviet Russia. This thesis addresses the ways in which Kompaniya Singer and its employees built, used, fostered, and hampered national and institutional identities during the chaotic period from 1914 to 1930 in their quests to respond to the shifting political foundations of Russian society. As it became impossible for Kompaniya Singer and its cosmopolitan, managerial employees …

Gender Politics, Presence And Erasure: Tattoo In In Pursuit Of Venus [Infected] And Les Sauvages De La Mer Pacifique, Emily Cornish

Theses and Dissertations

This paper utilizes tattoo as a means for exploring the dialogue between contemporary Maori artist Lisa Reihana’s In Pursuit of Venus [infected] and Joseph Dufour’s nineteenth-century decorative wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique. I argue that the tattooed body constitutes a re-insertion or re-infection within the pictorial program of In Pursuit of Venus [infected]. As such, tattoo becomes one focal point which allows us to work through four themes investigated by these two artworks: gender identity and ambiguity vis a vis practices that concern bodily adornment, the mutability of looking practices from one culture to another, encounters between different …

Grassroots And Community Activism Within Milwaukee's Black Community: A Response To Central City Renewal And Revitalization Efforts In The Walnut Street Area, 1960s To 1980s, Madeline Mary Riordan

Theses and Dissertations

Many researchers and scholars have explored the Black urban experience and have often chosen to focus on the systemic and institutionalized forms of racism that affect different aspects of Black lives. Descriptions of central city lives as told by Black central city residents are starkly similar to the descriptions of Black residents of industrialized cities throughout the United States. Fragments of the Black urban experience are contained in discussions of the effects of urban renewal efforts, including “redevelopment” and “revitalization,” beginning most heavily in the 1940s. Looking back at urban renewal designs and strategies from the 1940s through the 1980s …

Jamaican Revolts In British Press And Politics, 1760-1865, Thomas R. Day

Theses and Dissertations

This research examines the changes over time in British Newspaper reports covering the Jamaican rebellions of 1760, 1832 and 1865. The uprisings: Tacky’s Rebellion, the Baptist War and the Morant Bay Rebellion respectively, represented three key moments in the history of race, slavery and the British Empire. Though all three rebellions have been studied, this work compares the three events as moments of crisis challenging the British public discourse on slavery, race and subjecthood as it related to the changing Atlantic Empire. British newspapers provided the most direct way in which popular readers and the growing literate public examined and …

Ruffians And Revolutionaries: The Development Of The Young Lords Organization In Chicago, Michael Robert Gonzales

Theses and Dissertations

The Young Lords began as a street "gang" in the early 1960s in the western Puerto Rican section of Chicago's Lincoln Park community area. In late 1968, some of the group's leaders began to embrace radical politics and the Young Lords changed from a social group into a political organization. By examining the various factors that led to the politicization of the group's leaders and informed their organizing, this thesis works to provide a better understanding of the Young Lords movement. More specifically, this study looks at how local social pressures, traditions of radical organizing, and efforts to forge collective …

We Are Aquin: The Creation Of Community And Personal Identity In The Freeport Catholic Schools, Sherry Ann Cluver

Theses and Dissertations

Aquin Central Catholic High School, a tiny institution in the rural, Midwestern town of Freeport, Illinois, is a case study unlike the schools from Chicago, Boston, and other large cities highlighted in previous scholarship. Freeport's patterns of schooling in the 1970s and 1980s were largely unaffected by race or "white flight," and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockford afforded to its schools a greater than usual degree of local control. Yet, Aquin (founded in 1923) followed the trends of Catholic schools with regard to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), assimilation of previously immigrant Catholic families into middle class American social …

Urban Renewal And The Development Of Milwaukee's African American Community: 1960-1980, Niles William Niemuth

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the impact of urban renewal on the development of Milwaukee's African American community, with a particular focus on the 1960s and 1970s. While urban renewal programs of various stripes were promoted as a means of stoking economic development, these programs had a particularly negative impact on African American communities throughout the United States in the post-World War II era. Urban renewal resulted in the wholesale destruction of black neighborhoods, wiping away important areas of residential, economic and cultural development.

This case study of developments regarding urban renewal and its relation to the African American community in Milwaukee …

3 Up, 3 Down: The Complex Relationship Of Professional Sports And Community Identity In Brooklyn, Milwaukee, And Washington, D.C., Peter Lund

Theses and Dissertations

This paper seeks to understand the role that professional sports teams play in influencing community identity. Specifically, it hypothesizes that community identity is one of the main factors in cities choosing to provide public funds as subsidies for the construction of sports stadiums and arenas. This influence is important, as economists generally accept that stadiums do not provide the economic contributions that popular rhetoric presents as justification for their construction. By looking at three cases where considerations of a publicly funded stadium resulted in a city losing its professional team, the larger discourse of public subsidies is augmented in complexity. …

Perceptions Of Educational Administration Pre-Service Training By Former Illinois Superintendents Currently Serving As University Professors, Douglas Raymond Kaufman

Theses and Dissertations

PERCEPTIONS OF EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION PRE-SERVICE TRAINING BY FORMER ILLINOIS SUPERINTENDENTS

CURRENTLY SERVING AS UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS

Douglas R. Kaufman

179 pages December 2009

The 1983 publication of A Nation at Riskwas the start of the latest chapter in the long history and development of the public school superintendent. A Nation at Riskbrought new pressure and awareness on university programs that train school administrators coupled with suggestions on how to improve their effectiveness. This study describes many of these suggested reforms and investigates their effectiveness and rate of implementation.

This qualitative study describes the experiences and perceptions of pre-service learning …

The War To End All Germans: Wisconsin Synod Lutherans And The First World War, Stephen Scott Gurgel

Theses and Dissertations

The First World War came to the United States to the consternation of many of its citizens, especially its German Americans. On the home front, government officials required complete adherence to the war effort. This also included religious adherence. The Wisconsin Synod Lutherans, a German-speaking religious group, met tremendous difficulties during the war years. In addition to the crusade against all things German, the synod faced religious persecution because it doctrinally abstained from religiously sanctioning the war aims and programs of the United States. The repression of the synod came from both patriotic citizens and government agents who typically misunderstood …

From No Choice To Forced Choice To School Choice: A History Of Educational Options In Milwaukee Public Schools, James Kenneth Nelsen

Theses and Dissertations

Americans cherish freedom and value local control of education. The issue of "school choice," a movement that supports publicly funded tuition vouchers for students who attend private schools, appeared on the public agenda in the 1980s and has remained a controversial topic into the twenty-first century. Milwaukee had one of the first and most expansive school choice programs in the United States. If one is to understand school choice, one must understand its origin in Milwaukee. Milwaukee moved through three eras of choice--the eras of "no choice," "forced choice," and "school choice." The Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) followed a "comprehensive" …