History Commons^™

"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 …

Gustave Vogt's Musical Album Of Autographs: A Scholarly Edition, Kristin Leitterman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Gustave Vogt (1781–1870) was the most famous oboist in Europe during the mid-nineteenth century. Throughout his career he played with the best orchestras in Paris, toured Europe widely, and also taught the next generation of oboists at the Paris Conservatoire from 1802–1853. Although many of the details of his life have been lost to history, he did leave behind a record of the esteem in which he was held. This is preserved physically in the form of an album of short musical compositions honoring Vogt, collected between 1831 and 1859. The album has never been published, and is in the …

Reimagining The Collective: Black Popular Music And Recording Studio Innovation, 1970-1990, Will Fulton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines developments in the production practices of black popular music in the recording studio from 1970 to 1990. The year 1970 marked a transition in the recording practice of popular music that had a distinct impact on styles marketed as R&B, soul, and funk. Multitracking in the 1950s and 1960s had paved the way for a transformed production process, one initiated by Les Paul’s and Sidney Bechet’s overdubbing experiments in the 1940s. The collective sound of instrumentalists and vocalists heard on records no longer resulted from live-to-tape recordings of group performances, but was increasingly the product of constructed …

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 …

A Eurafrican Future: France, Algeria, And The Treaty Of Rome (1951-1975), Megan Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Before the Treaty of Rome (1957) established the European Economic Community (EEC), French officials made it clear that France’s signature on the Treaty was contingent on its partners’ acceptance of Eurafrican policy. Because Algeria held a unique legal status among France’s overseas holdings, the way in which French officials advocated its insertion within EEC regulation merits particular attention. This status stood distinct from that of the associated territories and, when applied to the Treaty, would theoretically extend to Algeria and its residents the guarantees of free labor circulation, development aid, and tariff preferences open to metropolitan citizens through EEC membership. …

The Expansion Of The Mandarin Mind, Tyler Okney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study will examine and contrast two periods of xenophobia and stagnation, late Qing dynasty China, and the PRC under Mao, with a genuine market place of ideas, Shanghai and the other foreign treaty ports in the period 1849 to 1949, and explain how this period of cosmopolitan ferment has had beneficial effects on China today. Countries that have shut themselves off from the outside world have frequently suffered first stagnation, and then decay. While this might appear a commonplace in the abstract, the application of this insight in the development of particular nations has been neither as thorough or …

History And Politics In The Thought Of Karl Jaspers, Nathan Wallace

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A relatively overlooked but important work, The Origin and Goal of History, by Karl Jaspers is examined with regard the intellectual history of its development and influence, and its structure and prospects for contemporary and future relevance for political theory. Emphasis is placed on the argument that the central aspect of the work has been neglected in recent, important literature: its connection of a universal historical narrative with a theory of contemporary politics.

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 …

Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success …

Beyond The Vale: Visualizing Slavery In Craven County, North Carolina, Marissa N. Kinsey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Beyond the Vale is a data visualization project dedicated to the study of slavery in antebellum North Carolina. Focusing on Gooding’s Township, a rural farming community in the eastern county of Craven, it is designed to address basic questions about the experiences of the county’s antebellum enslaved population. These questions represent points of contention between local heritage narratives and the direct testimonies of former slaves. Where former slaves describe a complex, yet undeniably exploitative system in which they had only minimal control over their own lives, county literature echoes larger themes in North Carolina state scholarship by either overlooking slavery, …

Land Of Women: Basilicata, Emigration, And The Women Who Remained Behind, 1880-1914, Victoria Calabrese

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 1880 and 1914, millions of Italians emigrated to all corners of the globe in hopes of earning better wages and forging a better life for themselves and for their families. This dissertation examines the role of the women left behind in the Italian region of Basilicata when their husbands emigrated, and the political, social, economic, and legal changes they experienced in their absence. During the Liberal Period, women had few political rights, and married women were dependent on their husbands, but being left on their own put them in a unique position. I argue that the Southern Italian women …

Nervous Salomes: New York Salomania And The Neurological Condition Of Modernité, Margaret K. Araneo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In January 1907, New York City had its first major encounter with the figure of Salome. Appearing on three large stages in the city simultaneously, the archetype of the dancing girl quickly became an object of controversy. Her appearance at the Metropolitan Opera House in its staging of Strauss’s Salome resulted in public debate and the ultimate closure of the performance by the Met’s Board of Directors. The event brought attention to the Salome archetype’s already contested character. Salome arrived in the United States from Europe where she had been the subject of a quarter century of debates about how …

Moving Forward: Railways In Puerto Rico, Gricel M. Surillo Luna

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the second half of the nineteenth century the establishment of railways was essential for the progress and modernization of the Puerto Rican economy. Railroads were fundamental and slowly appeared along the coast reaching their highest level of development in the first decade of the twentieth century. After the First World War, however, the railroads faced economic challenges, and competition with trucks and automobiles became a serious matter. During the depression of the 1930s, the state started to show unwillingness to aid railroads. The exclusion of the railroads from the new industrial model developed during the 1940s when a 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. …

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …

Desertor De Un Ejército Forastero: Seoane Y El Movimiento Para Un Arte Abstracto En Argentina, Pablo García Martínez

Publications and Research

Luís Seoane es un intelectual con una trayectoria propicia para el estudio de los nuevos significados que adquieren las producciones culturales cuando son refractadas a contextos nacionales diferentes de aquellos en los que se originaron. Tomando como referencia las sugerencias de la conferencia de Pierre Bourdieu de donde está sacada la cita inicial, este artículo procura llamar la atención sobre los malentendidos surgidos del hecho de que los textos, y demás producciones artísticas, circulen a menudo sin el contexto desde el que son producidos. Precisamente la reconstrucción de los dos contextos con los que interactúa Seoane constituye un tipo de …

20th Century Bronx Childhood: Recalling The Faces And Voices, Janet Butler Munch

Publications and Research

A popular photographic exhibit on childhood, originally featured in the Lehman College Art Gallery in the Bronx, New York, was brought to life two decades later through a library digitization grant. The website Childhood in the Bronx features 61 photographs of boys and girls with family or friends, at play, on streets, and in parks, schools, shelters, hospitals, and other locales. Oral history sound excerpts about their childhood, not heard in the original exhibit, complement the 18 vintage photographs shown. The combination of images with the spoken word enhances the user's sensory experience with deeper meaning and enjoyment. This article …

I. M. Pei, William Zeckendorf, And The Architecture Of Urban Renewal, Marci M. Clark

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation reevaluates the practice of design and real estate in the United States through an insufficiently understood case study of the architect-developer team of I. M. Pei and William Zeckendorf and their twelve-year partnership in urban renewal. William Zeckendorf (1905-1976) was the most ambitious real estate developer in the United States in the 1950s, with an outsize personality and larger-than-life plans. Unlike most developers of the era, Zeckendorf believed that quality design and visionary planning were critical to remaking city cores through urban renewal. To accomplish this, he hired I. M. Pei (b. 1917), a talented, young designer out …

Clara Lemlich Shavelson: An Activist Life, Sarah B. Cohn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Clara Lemlich Shavelson is primarily known for her impassioned speeches during the 1909 Uprising of 20,000. The majority of histories written about her address her involvement in organizing women garment workers in New York’s Lower East Side from her arrival in New York in 1903 up through the eleven-week general strike in 1909. After this, the literature would have you believe she fades into obscurity, for there is only one book that addresses her life post 1909. Shavelson did not give up organizing after 1909. She got married, moved to Brooklyn, and started a family. In Brooklyn, she organized women …

Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Literary Theories of Circumcision” investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organizes literary experience. In every period of English literature, major authors have employed the penis’s hood as a figure for thinking about reading and writing. These authors belong to a tradition that defines textuality as a foreskin and interpretation as circumcision. In “Literary Theories of Circumcision,” I investigate the origins of this literary-theoretical formulation in the writings of Saint Paul, and then I trace this formulation’s formal applications among medieval, early modern, and modernist writers. My study lays the groundwork for an ambitious …

"The Engine Of Free Expression": The Political Economy Of Copyright In The Colonial British Atlantic And Early National United States, Nora Slonimsky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1985, the Supreme Court of the United States concluded that copyright was included in the Constitution in order to serve as the “engine of free expression.” By providing economic incentive to drive artistic and scientific innovation, the nation received essential information and other tools of learning necessary to make sound political decisions. However, transnational copyright disputes, then and now, frequently resulted in complex and often contradictory understandings of free expression. The formation of copyright in America was thus a far more complex story, and it is that story that forms the basis of this project.

Amidst the many moving …

Theory For A Starving Obese, Ishai Shapira Kalter

Theses and Dissertations

Theory for a Starving Obese (2017) is both a book and an installation. During the years 2015-2017 I began writing Theory for a Starving Obese; a collection of essays and art criticism about exhibitions that took place in white cubes in New York. I was following my dissatisfaction, and hoped to delve deeper into the question “What is Contemporary Art?” At the end of a process, I sent seventeen envelopes to artists who exhibited solo shows in New York and whose works I have criticized. Each envelope consists of one digital drawing (שרבוט, pronounced Shirbut), DVD with the …

Tuff Breeches, Arkadiy Ryabin

Theses and Dissertations

In consideration of language and it’s relationship to information and knowledge, the author explores personal set of events in relationship to that of the public, via forms of orality. 19th century American literature is posited as a hangover influencing contemporary events.

Hell In Hand: Fear And Hope In The Hellmouths Of The Hours Of Catherine Of Cleves, Stephanie Lish

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is an attempt to investigate how well the borders and miniatures of The Hours of Catherine of Cleves facilitated the method of meditation recommended by Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen and therefore was a useful tool in Catherine’s search for eternal salvation.

A Charitable Scheme: William Smith, Michael Schlatter, And The German Free Schools, Daniel M. Crown

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes William Smith’s development of “German Free Schools” in Pennsylvania between 1753-1755. It argues that these schools, ostensibly meant to acclimatize German immigrants to a British colony, were in fact intended to increase pro-Proprietary sympathy, isolate sectarian preachers, and end Quaker dominance over the Pennsylvania General Assembly.

The Breath Seekers: Race, Riots, And Public Space In Harlem, 1900-1935, Allyson Compton

Theses and Dissertations

This study seeks to explore the historical intersection of public space and equality by examining Harlem, New York, between 1900 and 1935.

"A Vigorous Propaganda": The Peace Conferences Of 1899 And 1907, The Peace Palace, And Internationalism Through Design At The Hague, 1899–1920, Daniel Pecoraro

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uncovers the history of the Peace Palace and The Hague’s role in the early days of the internationalist movement. In the process of localizing the early twentieth century history of The Hague, this thesis examines the development of international imagery and culture through design. The Peace Palace as we know it today was ultimately a result of tensions between internationalist ideas (cooperation, arbitration, modernity) and the pride of Old World nationalism. The final design by Louis Cordonnier and J. A. G. Van der Steur repudiates the feeling of modernity surrounding the idea of peace through arbitration. It is …

Rethinking The Bronx’S ‘Soundview Slums’: The Intersecting Histories Of Large-Scale Waterfront Redevelopment And Community-Scaled Planning In An Era Of Urban Renewal, Kara M. Schlichting

Publications and Research

In the 1910s, the bungalow colony Harding Park developed on marshy Clason Point. Through the 1930s–1950s, Robert Moses sought to modernize this East Bronx waterfront through the Parks Department and the Committee on Slum Clearance. While localism and special legislative treatment enabled Harding Park’s preservation as a co-op in 1981, the abandonment of master planning left neighboring Soundview Park unfinished. The entwined histories of recreation and residency on Clason Point reveal the beneficial and detrimental effects of both urban renewal and community development, while also demonstrating the complicated relationship between localism and largescale planning in postwar New York City.

Teaching The French Revolution From A Global Perspective, Frank Jacob

Publications and Research

The French Revolution (1789-1799) is a process of events in world history that had a tremendous global impact. Regardless of this fact, it is, however, still rather taught in its European context. Without this revolution, it seems, Western modernity could not be the same and many countries in Europe remember the impact of the events at the beginning of the so called “long” 19th century in their national historiographies. While the First World War, called “the seminal catastrophe”3 of the 20th century by George F. Kennan (1904-2005) in the late 1970s, marks the end of this long century, the French …

Pence Teaches, Studies The History Of Germany., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

“I’m really happy to talk about history because

I find it a very exciting thing that helps us to understand

the present and figure out how to analyze all

the different things around us.” That is the way Dr.

Katherine Pence explains why studying history is

important beyond the stereotype of being a subject

about dates and names.

“It’s good to have few dates in mind so you can

figure out causes and effects and what comes before

and after a certain date, such as the end of World

War II in 1945. The world changed dramatically after

that date,” …