History Commons^™

Lords From The Desert, Caroline Mercado

Capstones

Lords from the Desert

This work explores a reality that is little talked about: how the most prestigious pre-Columbian art exhibits in the United States hide a murky origin. From looting of temples to illicit art trafficking, to smuggling and collectors’ affairs, the pieces gain value in proportion to the social prestige of their owner. Along the way, the most important is lost: research that provides context and allows us to know history. The First World wins a seductive, but simplistic story. The Third World, from which all these cultures emerge, loses patrimony and possibilities of understanding themselves. A pair …

Layered Histories, Interpretive Desires, Rachelle Dang

Theses and Dissertations

I aim to excavate source material from the past and reinterpret its significance in the present through art. I merge history with the contemporary through acts of appropriation and material exploration, creating conditions for the viewer to grapple with colonial legacies in an affective space of visual experience.

“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales

Theses and Dissertations

After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.

The Romance Novel Cover, Jessica D. Spears

Theses and Dissertations

Romance novel covers dating from the 1980s and 1990s reflect complex and contradictory ideas about gender, power, and sexuality. The covers overflow with stereotypes of what women are attracted to such as enormous pink roses, lush folds of silk, and hair long enough for Rapunzel. To this socially acceptable women’s imagery, the covers add two less reputable aspects: sexual imagery and, occasionally, suggestions of female submission. Since the association of romance and conventional femininity is so strong, the covers make a visual argument that submission and sexuality are things that a conventional woman wants. Readers have to deal with what …

Shadows Of Empire: The Mughal And British Colonial Heritage Of Lahore, Naeem U. Din

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Pakistani city of Lahore is the capital of the Punjab province. The city itself has existed for over a thousand years. In 1947 the British rule in the Indian subcontinent ended, resulting in the partition of British India into the modern states of India and Pakistan. At the time the Punjab province was also partitioned, with the western half (including Lahore) going to Pakistan and the eastern half being awarded to India. Prior to partition, Lahore served as an important administrative and commercial center under the Mughal Empire (1526–1799), the Sikh Empire (1799–1849), the British East India Company (1849–1858), …

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, …

Lauretta Vinciarelli In Context: Transatlantic Dialogues In Architecture, Art, Pedagogy, And Theory, 1968-2007, Rebecca Siefert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation centers on the interdisciplinary work of Italian-born artist, architect, teacher, and theorist Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943-2011), a key yet relatively unknown figure who occupies a historic place in the 1970s revival of architectural drawings, Columbia University’s housing studio, Peter Eisenman’s influential Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York, and architectonic trends in contemporary painting. She was the first woman to have drawings acquired by the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, in 1974), she was among the first women to teach architecture studio courses at Columbia University (hired in 1978), …

Transformations: Suburban Cordoba During The Umayyad Caliphate, 929-1009, Carmen M. Tagle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

It has been noted how long it took for the Muslim presence in Iberia, starting in 711 BCE, to materialize into significant works of architecture. The continuous military campaigns, necessary to consolidate control of the Peninsula, were undertaken by a relatively small group of incoming Arab and Berber troops. This naturally limited the potential scope of construction to repairs of the Hispano-Roman infrastructure found in the conquered areas, mainly in the middle and the South of the Iberian Peninsula. The old walled city of Cordoba, locale of Roman and Visigoth rulers, served as the capital of the new emirate, …

Women’S Suffrage In American Art: Recovering Forgotten Contexts, 1900-1920, Elsie Y. Heung

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1920, women in the United States finally won the right to vote. The campaign for suffrage, which began in the 1848, with the first women’s rights convention held at Seneca Falls, NY, involved the efforts and enthusiasm of countless women who believed that they both deserved and needed the right to vote. This dissertation investigates the ways in which women artists both responded to and contributed to this divisive movement through painting and sculpture during the final decades of the campaign, when visual culture and propaganda played a crucial role in advancing the suffrage and anti-suffrage agendas. The literature …

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 …

Cuneiform And The Rise Of Early Alphabets In The Greater Arabian Peninsula: A Visual Investigation, Saad D. Abulhab

Publications and Research

Scholars trace the roots of most historical and modern alphabets in the Near East and Europe, including Arabic and Latin, to a single obscure script, namely the Proto-Sinaitic or Proto-Canaanite script. This presumed script was attested by Western scholars in the early 20^th Century following the discovery in 1905-06 of a few, very short graffiti inscriptions at “Serabit el-Khadim” in the Sinai Peninsula and the subsequent discovery in 1999 of a few similar ones at “Wadi el-Hol” in the middle of Egypt. According to these scholars, Proto-Sinaitic was derived from the Egyptian Hieroglyphs writing system between 18^th-15 …

Introduction To The Arts Of Africa, Joshua Cohen

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.