Cultural History Commons^™

Buttressing Britain’S Financial Rise: Anglo-Dutch Brokers In Eighteenth-Century London, Jiwon Han

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the course of the eighteenth century, British financial markets developed remarkably and London established itself as the financial center of Europe, replacing Amsterdam. Scholarship on Britain’s financial developments in the eighteenth century has largely understood it as the result of British efforts and innovation. This dissertation complicates that understanding by investigating the Anglo-Dutch merchants in eighteenth-century London and their contributions to the development of British financial markets. In particular, their support was essential for the British government’s war finances, because Britain’s continuous wars against France demanded an immense amount of money and credit while its financial markets were still …

Gathering Knowledge, Sustaining Science: The Female Forager And American Mushroom Culture, 1880–1930, Madeline S. Dede-Panken

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unearthing origins of modern mycophilia, this dissertation explores the mushroom mania which reverberated through American society at the turn of the twentieth century, empowering Anglo-American women in new ways. America’s largely forgotten first mushroom fad illuminates gendered negotiations of foraging culture and public science. Beginning in the 1880s, a remarkable cohort of women helped turn mushrooms from shunned, mysterious organisms into wholesome delicacies for culinary and intellectual enrichment. Female enthusiasts fostered a vibrant mushroom culture and nationwide network of mycophiles. Culinary applications and poisoning fears legitimized women’s presence in scientific endeavors, positioning mycology as vital female knowledge for public safety …

Conga Santiaguera: A Century Of Innovation And Competition, Nick Herman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Santiago de Cuba is home to the island’s biggest, oldest, and most famous carnival.  Any local resident will confirm that “sin conga no hay carnaval (without conga there is no carnival).” In Santiago, conga refers to a vibrant street procession, the music that drives it, and the ensemble that makes the music.  Conga Santiaguera: A Century of Innovation and Competition presents a musical history of the conga from roughly 1910 to 2010.  This project, https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/conga employs an eBook, musical analysis, oral histories, and audiovisual media to show how the conga has been constantly reinvigorated by innovation, competition, and Afro-Diasporic …

The Maghrebi Silk Road: A Medieval Exploration, Malak Ouammou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Maghrebi Silk Road: A Medieval Exploration is an interdisciplinary historical examination of a variety of intellectual and material cross-cultural interactions and connections between Asia and the Maghreb from 900 to 1492. It primarily revolves around agriculture, sericulture, and immaterial and material culture, with an emphasis on knowledge production and dissemination. In it, I focus on the Mediterranean endpoint of the Silk Road network, illustrating the Maghrebi Silk Road through an exploration of various case studies such as rice, silk, and storytelling that demonstrate the role of and the extent to which these “secondary” Silk Road routes existed and were …

Culture And Its Discontents: Versions Of Matthew Arnold From The 1860s To The 1980s, Jarrett Moran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between the 1860s and the 1980s, the concept of culture articulated by Matthew Arnold provided a widespread and persistent language for making claims about who was ready for inclusion in British politics and identity and who was not yet ready or even incapable of being included. Scholarship on Arnoldian culture has often focused on presenting just one version of Arnold, whether as a cultural elitist, a progenitor of literary studies, or proponent of “doing away with classes.” This dissertation instead shows that Arnold’s concept of culture was so pervasive and persistent because he could be appropriated and redefined by people …

American Utopia: The Evolution Of David Byrne’S Viewpoint Of America From 1977 To Present, Morgan A. Prince

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

David Byrne is a multimedia artist known primarily as the lead singer and main songwriter for the new wave band Talking Heads. Throughout Byrne’s career he has continually written about America and Americans. This thesis traces his writings about America from the beginning of Talking Heads to his most recent projects. In doing so, the thesis puts forward that Byrne’s opinion on America has changed from one that is centered on the American people to one that is instead focused on American institutions. Additionally, the thesis traces how Byrne’s work has evolved from idealization to realism, as his early work …

Deuce Redemption: Grindhouse Cinema, Moral Panic, And Urban Renewal, Robert Brenner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

If you consult standard histories of the “redevelopment” of 42^nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue, AKA “the Deuce,” you will read that it was filled with nothing but criminals and pornographers, that decent people avoided it at all costs, and the only way the block could be “saved” was by seizing it via eminent domain, evicting all the current tenants, and replacing them with Disney and its fellow entertainment corporations.

The purpose of this thesis is to offer a more nuanced alternative to these standard histories. I will argue that the Deuce was a lower-class, multiracial, queer entertainment …

The Migration Of South Asians From India To Guyana: The Journey, Struggles In A New Land, Reasons For Changes Over Time And Their Cultivation Of A New Culture., Cynthia C. Harry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Indians from different regions of India arrived in Guyana through indentureship in 1838. They were under a five-year contract and had to work on the sugar plantations for the duration of their indentureship. While they tried to persist their Indian culture, assimilation in their new environments and interaction with people of different cultures, allowed them to develop a culture unique to Indo Guyanese heritage.

This thesis focuses on the history of Indian diaspora in Guyana. It evokes the struggles they faced on the ships, and during and after indentureship. It also touches on the political and racial issues they had …

Culturally And Socially Responsive Teacher Professional Learning At The American Museum Of Natural History, Jessica Correa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project consists of a series of professional learning sessions to support teachers in their implementation of Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education (CR-SE) using the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) as a resource and case study. Through the lens of Historically Responsive Literacy, the series also seeks to reestablish social science as a critical element of natural history for teachers. This series can help teachers see the museum as not only a place to explore life and physical science, but also a place to explore identity, social/emotional development, cultural studies and American History. The project includes resources and directions for …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Indigenous Performances In Contemporary Indian Urban Public Theatres: Coloniality, Globalization, And The State, Mayurakshi Sen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Indigenous Performances in Contemporary Indian Urban Public Theatres: Coloniality, Globalization, and the State examines the aesthetic and political dimensions of contemporary public theatres in the major Indian cities of Kolkata, Mumbai, and Delhi, with a special focus on the utilization of India’s indigenous precolonial (or extra-colonial) classical, regional, and folk performance forms, elements, and repertoires in such urban practice. Through dramaturgical, ethnographic, and archival analyses, this dissertation studies significant contemporary productions from representative urban Indian theatre groups, including Nandikar, Rangakarmee, and Padatik in Kolkata; the Indian People’s Theatre Association, Mumbai, Ekjute, and Rangshila in Mumbai; and Circle Theatre Company and …

David Versus Goliath: The Power Of Weakness In Asymmetric Warfare—Lessons From History, Nicholas K. Petaludis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Under what conditions do violent nonstate actors (VNA) succeed against states? Why does David sometimes beat Goliath? Since at least the time of Thucydides and the Peloponnesian Wars, the realist narrative in international relations measures power primarily in relative, coercive, and deterrent terms. Strong states should accordingly face fewer constraints and enjoy more options while pursuing their national interests. Unconventional warfare, and its subsets of terrorism and insurgency, should—given these circumstances, end in VNA failure. Sometimes, however, VNAs find success. By comparing the literature on historical and current case studies, I propose that a set of preconditions and two mechanisms …

Primitivism, Performance Studies, And Modernist Time: Tracing An Alternative Genealogy Of Performance Studies Through Case Studies In Modernist Cultural Appropriation, Stephanie Vella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces a genealogy of research methodologies for documenting, transmitting, and analyzing embodied, non-textual performance practices from the late-nineteenth through early-twentieth centuries. I uncover intersections between these methods and the conflations of race and temporality that are ubiquitously threaded through modernist cultural practices during this time in the form of primitivism. The researchers whose work I analyze all saw European modernity as fundamentally detached from physical culture, while viewing other cultures—especially those of the people most directly threatened by colonial and capitalist expansion during this time—as having access to a “lost” corporeal knowledge. I argue that primitivism is not …

Banarasipan As Revelation: Immanent Utopias In The Performance Of Everyday Life, Bhargav Rani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation locates itself at the intersection of performance theory, South Asian studies and philosophy of history to examine the history of an urban consciousness known as banarasipan (literally, "Banarasi-ness") as performed by the people of Banaras in northern India. Over the course of the twentieth century, banarasipan, as a distinct way of being in everyday life, has been characterized by its valorization of heroic laziness, seditious laughter, subversive obscenities, and by its egalitarian subjectivity that overrides sectarian and class differences. In the context of South Asian history, this dissertation interrogates the theoretical premises of both Marxist and postcolonial modes …

Humoring The Third Republic: Le Rire In French Politics And Popular Culture, 1894–1918, Andrew C. Kotick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies the illustrated satirical periodical Le Rire in its historical context between its debut during the Dreyfus Affair and the conclusion of World War I. Adopting a multivalent approach to the historical study of graphic humor, it argues that Le Rire constitutes a significant corpus of evidence for understanding the political, commercial, social, and cultural novelties of its time, and maintained an ambivalent relationship with the young institutions and functionaries of the French Third Republic. As France’s leading satirical periodical, Le Rire served as a powerful medium for broadcasting nascent and extreme ideas to a mass reading public …

Homotextualité Réaliste: Cryptosexualité Et Subculture Homosexuelle Masculine Chez Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Vincent Sallé

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cette thèse étudie les romans du canon réaliste français, en particulier Le Rouge et le noir et L’Éducation sentimentale, sous l’angle d’une textualité parallèle ancrée dans la langue érotique et les pratiques et les lieux de la subculture pédéraste. Principalement étudiée jusqu’ici dans des corpus identifiés comme érotiques ou dans des passages représentant l’homosexualité, cette homotextualité est ici inscrite dans la diégèse hétérosexuelle qu’elle permet de relire de manière située et historicisée.

La période de 1830 à 1870 est perçue par l’histoire et la littérature comme un hiatus sur le thème de l’homosexualité, pris entre son histoire moderne à …

Play: A Normative Theory Of Agency And Culture, Maxaie Belmont

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From the beginning, people are introduced to many different attempts at engaging with various “cultures”, and of course, are born into their own. The extant literature of various fields in the social sciences have afforded us the realization that no one culture holds neither moral ground nor blueprint for how to be a culture, as our own culture is one of many, all a part of the world. Yet, because of the way our culture specifies how we are to engage and live, we tend towards the assumption that our culture has monopoly on the definition of culture. The following …

El Ritmo Del Westside: Exploring The Musical Landscape Of San Antonio’S Historic Westside, Valeria Alderete

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The westside of San Antonio, Texas fostered a uniquely diverse musical landscape throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, demonstrating the results of cross-cultural exchanges reflected in music. From Conjunto and Ranchera music, to R&B and Jazz, a wide range of music genres was celebrated in the historic westside, eventually shaping the birth of the area’s own Westside Sound, which remains a staple in many Chicano communities to date. Despite the cultural significance and rich history, the historic westside’s musical past remains widely unknown, often overshadowed by research and documentation surrounding the area’s violent history with gang networks and crime.

Committed to …

The Feminine Harp As Feminist Tool: Early Professional Footing For Women In Mid-Twentieth-Century America, Chelsea Lane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1930s North America, women—for the first time—were accorded permanent principal positions in significant American orchestras. Edna Phillips, Alice Chalifoux, and Sylvia Meyer, all students of the legendary harp pedagogue Carlos Salzedo, have been celebrated as pioneers for the prestigious employment they obtained in the Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra, respectively, between 1930 and 1933. Despite the impressiveness of these accomplishments, however, the narrative of their “firstness” is not wholly accurate. In actuality, female harpists have occupied orchestral posts as acting principals, substitutes, and second harpists since the very inception of orchestras. The cause for their early …

Homage To Eleanora: A Musical Journey Through The Billie Holiday Songbook, Keith A. Dames

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Billie Holiday was a singer, songwriter, vocalist, bandleader and composer in the fields of music, black culture and more specifically the genre of jazz. The primary focus of this study is Billie Holiday’s discography, music, and compositions as treated in relation to the black culture of production. This study will explore a secondary content analysis of Billie Holiday’s music, musicianship, musicality and compositional skills within the American jazz mainstream, broader jazz audience and world at large. This project will take an analytical look at the structure and form of the compositions of Billie Holiday. Billie Holiday is credited with composing …

Go Off: The Geography And Labor Of Off- And Off-Off-Broadway, Sean C. Mellott

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Off- and Off-Off-Broadway remain ill-defined and misunderstood sectors of New York City’s theatre industry, at least when compared with Broadway. This capstone project examines these dual sociocultural spaces and defines some of their contours through a primary analytical lens of geography (the physical locations where Off- and Off-Off-Broadway are produced) and a secondary lens of labor (the professional contexts in which Off- and Off-Off-Broadway are produced). Both elements speak to the material conditions of theatrical production in New York City, offering clues as to Off- and Off-Off-Broadway’s position within the entertainment industry and their relationship to the larger social structure …

Control, Allegiance, And Shame In Male Qing Dynasty Hairstyles, Carolle Pinkerton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is about the politicization of hairstyles in imperial China. They indicated conformity with social norms, or rebellion against them. This was especially true under the country’s last dynasty. The Manchu conquerors imposed their own hairstyle, the queue, on their Han Chinese subjects to make their rule palpable to China’s illiterate millions. “Hair martyrs” who refused to accept this “barbarous” hairstyle were ruthlessly eliminated. The Manchus had feared assimilation into the much larger Han population. But the introduction of one uniform male hair style for both Manchus and Han blurred the lines between the two groups. In this way …

Armored Feelings: Romantic Love, Sexual Consent, And Gender-Based Violence In French First World War Narratives (1914–1956), Angélique Ibáñez Aristondo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Armored Feelings examines how the First World War reconfigured how the French thought and wrote about romantic love, sexual consent, and gender-based violence. It posits this devastating event as a critical juncture during which the misogynistic and racist notion of amour à la Française took its modern shape as a rhetoric buttressing the nation’s brittle sense of cultural superiority while obscuring diverse forms of gendered aggression – especially those perpetrated by its citizens against women. This dissertation also establishes that the notion of women’s sexual consent coalesced during the period under examination as a troubled and troubling response to the …

Virility And Defeat: Masculinities In Italy Between Fascism And The Sexual Revolution, Davide Giuseppe Colasanto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is the history of how masculinity evolved in a postfascist western European country. Militaristic virility was a core tenet of fascist Italy. World War Two weakened it profoundly, as men’s and women’s conceptions of their own sexual identities were fundamentally reshaped by violence and defeat. At the same time, consumer culture, exemplified by American GIs and expanding continuously through the 1950s and 1960s, encouraged the emergence of a new kind of man, only for this type, too, to be contested in turn in the wake of the New Left rebellions of 1968 and through the tumultuous 1970s. In all …

Suicidality As A Discourse Of Safety In The Queer Youth Movement, Robert M. Cleary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In November 1991, a group of queer teenagers gathered to rally at the Massachusetts State House in Boston. Two years later, the state passed the first law in the nation adding sexual orientation to the list of protected classes in the state's schools. The November rally was the first public expression of what became the safe schools movement, which went on over the following decade to transform the landscape in public education for LGBTQ students. A notable feature of the rally was the staging by the youth of a mass performative act of queer suicide. This paper uses Foucauldian concepts …

Lobster Palaces In Times Square: The Public Stage Where America Discovered Itself Through Play And Leisure, Lydia E. Ravnikar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 1870 and 1920, the period known as the Gilded Age, New York City became the acknowledged national leader in finance, manufacturing, technology, and entertainment. As the country’s leader, it attracted both new millionaires who wanted to validate their social importance in an attempt to rid themselves of a small-town past and immigrants, who were searching for better opportunities. However, to New York’s elite society, the Four Hundred, led by Mrs. Astor, both groups were not welcomed. While the immigrants proved easier to control physically, the new millionaires, however, were indeed a legitimate threat. With this real threat including pressure …

Auto®Ficción Latinx De Nueva York (1999–2020), Jacqueline Herranz Brooks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research on the intersection of Literary Criticism, Latino Studies, Persona Studies, and Performance Studies has led me to question the accepted definitions of autoficción (Doubrovsky, Gasparini, Alberca, Casas, Schlikers) and expand that definition into a more multifaceted and operational term. Hence, I created auto®ficción, a new term describing the hybrid creations of a group of underrepresented contemporary Latinx authors living/producing/circulating their work in New York City, during the first two decades of the 21^st Century. For these authors, their life experiences and quotidian uses of this city’s spaces are the subjects of their work. Auto®ficción draws attention …

Locke’S Rebellious Progeny: Phenomenology And Ethics Of Leopardi’S A-Dialectical Materialism, Paolo Pellecchia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With this study I reconstruct a genealogy of the a-dialectic materialism that defines the production of 19^th-century Italian author Giacomo Leopardi and with which he criticizes canonical metaphysical stances. In this regard, I consider John Locke as the first instance of a philosophical outlook that stands as an alternative to the anthropocentrism demanded by traditional metaphysics. By focusing on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and its significant influence on Leopardi’s philosophical and aesthetic work, I emphasize how Locke’s system finds a synthetic formulation in the hypothesis, at the time highly contested yet groundbreaking, that matter might be endowed …