History Commons^™

So Many Roads, So Much At Stake: The Composition Of Faculty Bargaining Units, William A. Herbert, Joseph Van Der Naald

Publications and Research

This book chapter from Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History traces the history of faculty bargaining unit composition in higher education. It examines the evolution in higher education from wall-to-wall bargaining units to professional craft units of tenured, tenure-track, and contingent faculty to separate contingent faculty units. The chapter presents historical examples of bargaining units, starting with early CIO wall-to-wall units in the 1940s, and the facts, preferences, and legal doctrines that has resulted in faculty being placed in combined or separate bargaining under collective bargaining laws. It will also explore the conflicting and congruous …

New York City’S Health Governance And Activism From The 1950s To The 1970s, Andres Valcarcel

Theses and Dissertations

New York City's expansive network of hospitals and preventative health services has an intense history outside of the popular narratives of biomedical and technological advancement. This thesis will discuss the period between the 1950s and 1970s and the various movements and parties that shaped the city's health and hospital system. During this period, New York City's healthcare delivery system became increasingly privatized and commercialized; processes that improved the quality of healthcare yet simultaneously barred the poorest from accessing it. Communities, healthcare workers, and civil rights organizations worked to address perceived faults and extend their agency in health and hospital policy; …

An Uncanny Perspective: Sculptures By Martin Puryear, Jake B. Demartini

Dissertations and Theses

An Uncanny Perspective: Sculptures by Martin Puryear will demonstrate how Puryear (b.1941) both aesthetically and conceptually evokes narratives found in Sigmund Freud’s (1856-1939) theories of the uncanny, specifically signifiers of darkness, unfamiliarity and secrecy. This employment of the uncanny in sculpture aids Puryear’s ability to address a range of aesthetics and provides a striking lens through which he addresses the collective history of violence and servitude within the African American experience. In applying Freud’s theories to several works by Puryear, this thesis will reveal how elements of the uncanny activate a questioning of narratives around terror and fear. Using methods …

Fascismo Al Bivio: The Arditi Del Popolo And Civil War At The Advent Of Fascist Power, Thomas R. Discepola

Dissertations and Theses

Focused on the years immediately following World War I in Italy, the dopoguerra, this thesis revisits the entire period from 1919 to 1922 with special attention given to the largest organized, armed antifascist group, the Arditi del popolo (AdP). It argues that it was the AdP, not the Italian Communist Party (PCI), that preoccupied Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi and led the Socialists (PSI) to work with Benito Mussolini and other members of the Fasci di combattimento (FdC), their erstwhile nemeses, in creating a pacification agreement in the summer of 1921.

Resilience And Resistance: Culture, Conversion, And Survival Among The Stockbridge Mohicans, Mariah N. Ramdeen

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis investigates the history of conversion among the Mohican band in Stockbridge, Massachusetts from the 1730s to the 1740s. Focusing on the praying town under the ministry of Reverend John Sergeant at Stockbridge in 1736, I seek to reconstruct the resistance and survivance at the heart of the Stockbridge Mohicans’ experience. My research will explore why the Mohicans chose to establish the Stockbridge praying town and why they chose to convert to Christianity, the religion of the Puritan colonizers. I will also explore how they used their conversion to promote their own community goals. While praying towns were designed …

An Excavation Of Margaret And Jerry Morgan: How The Architecture Of Black Liminal Spaces Shaped Antebellum Conflict Between Maryland And Pennsylvania, Felicia A. Appenteng

Dissertations and Theses

In the 1830s, Jerry and Margaret Morgan and their six children were living as a free Black family in rural Pennsylvania, one of a growing number of such families in a part of the state that bordered Maryland. Suddenly, their lives were violently disrupted in 1837 when a group of men from Maryland, led by Edward Prigg, entered into Pennsylvania to seize Margaret and the children so that they could be enslaved. Although the most dramatic, this was only the latest twist in the unusual lives of the Morgan family. Jerry Morgan was born into enslavement, gained his freedom, and …

Archiving A Generation: Filipino Artists And Cultural Workers In Queens, Kimberly Izar

Capstones

While census data shows roughly 86,000 Filipinos live in New York City, data on Filipino artists has been sparse. Art is an expression of one’s being and more often than not, broader social resistance — but it’s also work that has left artists criminalized, ostracized, and even killed.

Over the last year, journalist Kimberly Izar collaborated with Filipino artists and cultural workers across Queens. Queens boasts the largest population of Filipinos compared to any other borough, but this enclave has gradually declined in numbers due to waves of gentrification and migration. Through in-depth coverage and a mix of engagement tools …

Mapping The Theaters Of Brooklyn's Past (1825-1925): A Gis Project, Elena Shefsky

Publications and Research

Despite its rich performance culture, Brooklyn remains underrepresented in theater history, eclipsed in fame by the well-known theaters of Manhattan. One of the most populous areas in America, Brooklyn has been an artistic home to actors, playwrights, directors, and impresarios for centuries. That said, there is a dearth of accessible information and scholarship on Brooklyn theaters. My objective was to update an ongoing mapping project, The City Performs, to include information and images of theater buildings from Brooklyn. The project is an interactive, open-source digital map that uses ArcGIS software to georeference data about NYC theaters. I collected data …

Hall Of Fame For Great Americans Collection, 1894-2008, Allen Thomas, Cynthia Tobar

Finding Aids

Finding aid for the Hall of Fame for Great Americans collection prepared by Bronx Community College Archives.

Review Of The Book Denial Of Genocides In The Twenty-First Century, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book Denial of Genocides in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Bedross Der Matossian.

Excerpts From An Anti-Standardized “수능”: A Design-Fictional Approach To Korea, Seo-Young J. Chu, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

"Excerpts from an Anti-Standardized '수능'” experiments with design fiction to disrupt overly rehearsed ways of thinking about Korea’s past(s), present(s), and future(s).

Colonial Investments: The Global Coordinates Of The English Political Imaginary, 1628–1668, Nathan D. Nikolic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The main question my dissertation attempts to address is: what role did the expansion of English colonial trades play in the transformation of English society and government between the Petition of Right and the early years of the Restoration (1628-1668)? My thesis is that during this period, colonial expansion rose to the level of a general national interest and that many early seventeenth-century texts index the complexities and tensions of this development. As a small but very organized group of merchants, peers, and MPs mobilized the military and financial technologies of colonization to support Parliament’s war against Charles I, their …

Take Back The Power: The Fall And Rise And Fall Of New York City's Transport Workers Union Local 100, 1975–2009, Marc Kagan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Take Back the Power: The Fall and Rise and Fall of Transport Workers Union Local 100, 1975-2009 tracks the history of this strategically significant union from the onset of New York City’s fiscal crisis in 1975 to the end, in 2009, of a second attempt to free transit workers from the grip of neoliberal economic austerity.

The first effort began in 1978 and culminated with the eleven-day 1980 transit strike, initiated by union dissidents over the opposition of the union president, but abruptly ended by him before a decisive victory could be won. That president, and his successors, reconciled themselves …

Publishing The Pan-Jewish: The First Hebrew Newspaper And Its Modernities, Philip E. Keisman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Publishing the Pan-Jewish emerges from a question about sites of synthesis between claims of sacred continuity and novel forms of communication. It centers on the first ten years of Hamagid (1856-1866), acknowledged within the historiography as history’s first Hebrew-language newspaper. Eliezer Lipman Silberman, an Orthodox butcher founded Hamagid in East Prussia as a bulwark of his vision of traditional Judaism. The first chapter of this dissertation examines the formal elements of the newspaper as a medium, demonstrating the myriad ways in which it presented novel experiences for its reading public. Chapter two narrates an untold history of the newspaper’s early …

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, And Disgust In The Work Of Virginia Woolf And Zinaida Gippius, Yelizaveta Shapiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, and Disgust in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Zinaida Gippius examines how the discourses of degeneration, eugenics, and sexology shaped representations of women’s bodies in British and Russian modernist literature. Focusing on the writing of Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), I challenge the longstanding argument that both authors attempted to escape the material body by resorting to androgynous tropes. I argue that the material female body takes center stage in both Gippius’s and Woolf’s work and functions as a powerfully paradoxical entity: one that generates disgust and enables oppression while housing …

Extraction, Property, And Rights In Southeastern Arabian Seascapes C.1820–Present, Scott Erich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a historical and ethnographic examination of fish, pearl, sponge, and oil extraction in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. These waters, which were fished and labored upon in much of the same way for millennia, have, in the last two centuries, undergone a sea change. Regimes of property and rights have transformed the ocean from a wild and undifferentiated space into a place which is enclosed, privatized, industrially fished, drilled, and otherwise despoiled. This dissertation, building on recent works in environmental history, Indian Ocean studies, and legal and economic anthropology, probes the many cultural, religious, social, …

Marriage Stories: Legal Reform And The Novel In France And Britain, 1780–1860, Tatiana Nunez-Bright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Marriage Stories” analyzes connections between novelistic form, marriage law reform, and portrayals of virtue in texts by, among others, Stéphanie de Genlis, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sophie Cottin, Claire de Duras, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Sophie Doin, George Sand, Anne Brontë, and Gustave Flaubert. I argue that the novel was less concerned with abolishing or even critiquing marriage than it was with delineating “good” from “bad” unions, which in turn reflects contemporary discussions about marriage’s role in response to burgeoning social movements. My first chapter considers the epistolary novel in relation to the idea of spouses existing as “one body” culturally …

Reflections On The Digital Memory Of Trans-Atlantic Slavery, Vinh T. Pham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Within the scope of digital humanities scholarship, this thesis interrogates ‘memory’ as a conceptual frame for remembering Black life, both past and present, in the face of missing historical data and in the afterlife of trans-Atlantic slavery. Such a concept—increasingly taken up as method in the humanities, along with related allusions to the ephemeral, spectral, or haunted—is sought to refuse historiographical and techno-scientific claims to empirical certainty or transparency, and instead affirm its gaps and absences as themselves productive sites for self-reflexive speculation on the complexities of lived experience. Applied to the digital study of trans-Atlantic chattel slavery, memory comes …

Justice, Pandemics, And Museums In Cyberspace: Archaeology Museums’ Decolonization Projects During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Samuel Besse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper explores three Archeology Museums (Historic St. Mary’s City, James Madison’s Montpelier, and the American Museum of Natural History), their attempts at addressing the colonial narratives that museums are built on, and how the Covid-19 pandemic and protests over George Floyd’s death affected these projects. I place a special effort on the online presence of these museums, as this is the main way visitors interacted with the museums during the pandemic. After discussing the origins of museum’s decolonization efforts and their efforts to make an online presence, I talk about the Covid-19 pandemic and the events around George Floyd’s …

The Archival Impulse: English Family Record Keeping And Archives, Ca. 1450–1700, Maura Kenny

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

England in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries witnessed a proliferation of documents arising from a growth in literacy and an expansion of state administrative offices. Scholarship on the archival history of this period has grown recently but it has focused mainly on institutional and state archives. Very little has been written about family or personal archives and the uses made of them. Based on modern archival theory and extensive archival research, this dissertation seeks to fill this gap by addressing the creation of family records and archives as a whole, exploring early modern English families as a “community of records.” …

Staging Nature: Performing Environmental Crises In War, Housing, And Labor, 1935–1990, Erik Barrett Wallenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Staging Nature” examines how theater was used as a means for expressing environmental concerns in moments of environmental crisis in the United States. I begin with The Federal Theatre Project’s national tour of a performance addressing the metabolic rift in the divide between the city and country with a focus on the devastation of farmland in the Dust Bowl in the late 1930s. At the heart of the dissertation are three theater groups that start in the 1960s during the rise of the modern environmental movement. Chapters on Bread and Puppet Theater show that they make a name for themselves …

The State Of The Unions 2023: A Profile Of Organized Labor In New York City, New York State, And The United States, Ruth Milkman, Joseph Van Der Naald

Publications and Research

This report released by the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, State of the Unions 2023: A Profile of Organized Labor in New York City, New York State, and the United States, is a part of an annual publication series, documents recent trends in unionization patterns. The overall level of unionization in both the City and State has been roughly double the national rate over the past two decades. But recently, union density has fallen more in New York City and New York State than in the United States as a whole. In the mid-2010s, both the City and …

Hist 104: America Since 1865, Douglas Manson

Open Educational Resources

This history course utilizes materials that are open sourced

Haunted Homelands: Mary Hunter Austin's Search For Belonging In California's Central Valley, Aimee M. Maddalena

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From childhood, Mary Hunter Austin resisted the social conformity expected of a young girl in 1850’s Carlinville, Illinois. Instead, causing her mother to “shed tears of vexation,” she was outspoken, opinionated, and read the “wrong” books, which, according to her mother, “was what made you queer so that people didn’t like you.” Young Mary had a rich inner life and was drawn in a spiritual, mystical way to the minutiae of the natural world. Also, she questioned the strict social structure that caused her mother to be outcast as a widow, while, at the same time, young women were beginning …

A Critical Study Of Contemporary Palestinian Musical Culture, Karl H. Hausmann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is concerned with the field of musical culture and practice in Palestine, and the connotations of musical expression, whether as music or songs. It addresses the period extending from the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, through the first intifada of 1987 and then the era of the Oslo Accords until today.

This study deals with the artistic meanings and expressions associated with the music and singing that was produced in that period, assuming that it was created within the socio-political context in which it existed, specifically that music that was associated with the …

Jus Soli And Jus Sanguinis: Politics, Race, Culture, And Citizenship In The Dominican Republic And Haiti, Guido A. Proano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The promulgation of laws such as the Dominican Republic’s Constitutional Court’s Judgment TC-168-13 serves as a basis upon which to argue the major impediments presented by the Dominican government to deny Haitians and Dominicans of Haitians descent citizenship. The right to citizenship is based on legal principles of jus soli and jus sanguinis and is recognized in a series of international legal documents. Following a Marxist framework, this research demonstrates the uncounted possible relationships between modern social forces and politics that have been working closely following European productions of knowledge for decades against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent in …

International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …

Writing As Liberation: Challenging Yemeni Patriarchal Practices, Sheema Alamari

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Patriarchal societies create an environment where men hold power and women are often treated as second-class citizens or are often held as having an inferior status. Throughout history and across cultures, literature has provided a platform for writers to share their stories and express themselves. However, Yemeni women have often been silenced and marginalized due to limited education and censorship. In recent times, Yemeni and Yemeni-American women have turned to storytelling as a means of creative expression and emotional release. This thesis analyzes Zubaida “Jasmine” Sharif’s memoir, Caged in America: One Woman’s Journey Through the Veil, and Nadia Al-Kowkabani's …

Changing Homelands: The Election Of Menachem Begin And The Diplomatic Campaign To Bring Ethiopian Jews To Israel, Abraham Silberstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines diplomatic efforts by Israel, the United States, and non-governmental organizations to facilitate the immigration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel. While much of the historical literature on this topic has focused on the 1980s and 1990s, when tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews were airlifted to Israel, this thesis largely considers the mid-late 1970s. For the first 25 years of its existence, the State of Israel had not been eager to see Ethiopian Jews enter the country, and the government deemed them non-Jews for the purposes of immigration. This started to change in 1973, when the Sephardi Chief …

Understanding The Afghan Diaspora: Exploring The Factors Driving Migration And The Impact Of Migration Policies On Recent Afghan Evacuees Resettling In The United States, Aya H. Mohamed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Afghanistan has been at war with the West since the late 1900’s, remaining in a state of constant turmoil. During the Cold War (1979), Afghanistan had fought a war with the Soviet Union, known as the Soviet- Afghan War. During this time, Afghanistan was invaded by both the Soviet and US, creating a ground for terrorism and the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. In order to then eradicate the terrorist regime, the Taliban, the United States went to war with Afghanistan in 2001. The Taliban were suppressed by U.S. forces until August 2021, during which President Biden executed a …