To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: 20th century american history.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic '20th century american history'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 50 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic '20th century american history.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse dissertations / theses on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
De, Rouvray Cristel Anne. "Economists writing history : American and French experience in the mid 20th century." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2005. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/36/.
Full textAbstract:
If one considers the fortunes of economic history in the 20th century U.S., the 1940s, 50s and 60s stand out as a particularly vibrant time for the field and economists’ contributions to it. These decades saw the creation of the main association and journals - the Economic History Association, the Journal of Economic History for example – and the launching of large research programs – Harvard’s history of entrepreneurship, Simon Kuznets’ retrospective accounts, cliometrics for example. Why did American economists write so much history in the decades immediately following WWII, and why and how did this change with cliometrics? To answer these questions I use interviews with scholars who were active in the mid 20th century, their publications and archival material. The bulk of the analysis focuses on the U.S., yet it relies in part on a comparison with France where economic history also experienced a golden period at this time, though it involved few economists. Instead it was the domain of Annales historians. This comparison sheds light on the ways in which the labels “economist” and “historian” changed meaning throughout the period of study. Economists’ general interest for history is best understood as a part of an ongoing debate on scientific method, specifically about whether and how to observe and what constitutes reliable empirical evidence. These debates contributed both to draw social scientists to history, and change the way they wrote history. In the U.S. the mid 20th century surge in economist-history was principally due to the post-war demand for knowledge about growth and development. The sense of urgency that came with this task increased scholars’ willingness to work with estimated (as opposed to found) data. This was reinforced by American economists’ experience in war planning and ensuing spread of an operations research mentality among graduate students. The issue of whether or not to estimate became a new demarcation line between “historians” and “economists”. By the late 1960s, scholars who wanted to turn to the past to observe economies evolve over several decades, and let these facts “speak for themselves” had largely been replaced by researchers who used modern economic theory to frame historical investigation, and relied on quantification and estimation as their main empirical inputs.
2
Hart, Bradley William. "British, German, and American eugenicists in transnational context, c. 1900-1939." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/283886.
Full text
3
Sutherland, Frederick E. "The Cuyuna Iron Range| Legacy of a 20th century industrial community." Thesis, Michigan Technological University, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10120229.
Full textAbstract:
<p> The Cuyuna Range is a former North American iron mining district about 90 miles(145 kilometers) west of Duluth in central Minnesota. The district was the furthest south and west of the three Minnesota iron ranges (Vermilion, Mesabi, and Cuyuna). In 2011, Students and staff from Michigan Technological University's Department of Social Sciences were asked to identify and promote features of the Cuyuna Range's mining heritage. Methods and approaches of mulitsited archaeology were used to unify the diverse places and themes into a more cohesive narrative. Their investigations focused on sites of technological innovation, social conflict, and important people. One collaborative project involved training a team of local volunteers to survey seven iron mining communities to identify sites with historic importance. In total, 876 sites were documented. The data generated from this effort can be used to develop plans for cultural tourism focused on the iron mining heritage of the Cuyuna Iron Range. It was found that using multiple themes from multisited archaeology strengthened the region’s narrative better than simply focusing on sites from a single thematic viewpoint</p>
4
Zheng, Juan. "African American Cultural Products and Social Uplift, the End of the 19th Century - the Early of the 20th Century." W&M ScholarWorks, 2004. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626432.
Full text
5
Ruffing, Jason L. "A Century of Overproduction in American Agriculture." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2014. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc700066/.
Full textAbstract:
American agriculture in the twentieth century underwent immense transformations. The triumphs in agriculture are emblematic of post-war American progress and expansion but do not accurately depict the evolution of American agriculture throughout an entire century of agricultural depression and economic failure. Some characteristics of this evolution are unprecedented efficiency in terms of output per capita, rapid industrialization and mechanization, the gradual slip of agriculture's portion of GNP, and an exodus of millions of farmers from agriculture leading to fewer and larger farms. The purpose of this thesis is to provide an environmental history and political ecology of overproduction, which has lead to constant surpluses, federal price and subsidy intervention, and environmental concerns about sustainability and food safety. This project explores the political economy of output maximization during these years, roughly from WWI through the present, studying various environmental, economic, and social effects of overproduction and output maximization. The complex eco system of modern agriculture is heavily impacted by the political and economic systems in which it is intrinsically embedded, obfuscating hopes of food and agricultural reforms on many different levels. Overproduction and surplus are central to modern agriculture and to the food that has fueled American bodies for decades. Studying overproduction, or operating at rapidly expanding levels of output maximization, will provide a unique lens through which to look at the profound impact that the previous century of technological advance and farm legislation has had on agriculture in America.
6
Forrester, Katrina Max. "Liberalism and realism in American political thought, 1950-1990." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2013. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/283922.
Full text
7
Häusler, Clemens Albert Josef. "The transatlantic exchange between American liberals, British Labourites, and German social democrats from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609089.
Full text
8
Byers, Mark. "After the new failure of nerve : Charles Olson and American modernism, 1946-1951." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:02478ea1-832a-4ecc-9c47-a264ba746c49.
Full textAbstract:
One medium has dominated accounts of American art in the years following the Second World War. The period witnessed, in the words of one critic, a 'Triumph of American Painting', with advances in the easel picture far surpassing those in other media. Whilst more recent accounts have nuanced this view, drawing attention to developments in music and sculpture, literary contributions to the new American modernism have gone almost without assessment. Were there advances in literature comparable to those of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, David Smith and John Cage? Drawing extensively on his unpublished writings, After the New Failure of Nerve reveals the poet Charles Olson to have been the keenest literary advocate of the new American avant-garde and one of the most astute observers of its conditions and possibilities. Paying special attention to unpublished notes, lectures, and correspondence, the thesis utilises Olson's early writings in order to examine the momentum given early postwar modernism by a potent contemporary reaction against abstract rationality, a reaction identified at the time as a 'New Failure of Nerve'. Born of recent disillusionment with 'scientific' Marxism and New Deal progressivism, the thesis demonstrates the several ways in which this 'New Failure of Nerve' fuelled vanguard American art from the middle of the Second World War to the end of the decade. It argues that the new critique of abstract rationality - which was also reflected in the contemporary American work of the Frankfurt School - defined the way American artists understood the function of postwar modernism, the posture of the postwar modernist artist, and the status of the postwar modernist artwork. This pivotal moment in the history of modernism was shaped, I contend, by a philosophical critique explored most ambitiously by an American poet.
9
李百臻 and Pak-tsun Lee. "The late Qing revolutionaries' understanding of the American War of Independence." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1997. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31951399.
Full text
10
MacNeill, Molly. "Church and state : public education and the American religious right." Thesis, McGill University, 1998. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=21237.
Full textAbstract:
In the late 1970's and 1980's, education issues formed a pivotal part of the American religious conservative agenda. The issues of school prayer, textbook content and the teaching of evolution in particular inspired lively debate and committed activism on the part of conservative Protestant leaders and activists. Confronting the behemoth of secular humanism, these leaders sought to win converts and to foment action in the converted through two separate modes of rhetoric: the emotional, which used impassioned arguments, and the intellectual, a more phlegmatic approach used to achieve political ends. Finding their roots in the 1920's, conservative Protestants have placed paramount importance on education issues throughout American history, believing that the United States is a fundamentally Christian nation, founded on a normative Protestant world view, and that American children should be taught according to these principles.
11
Black, Latoya R. "Breaking barriers : oral histories of 20th century African-American female journalists in Indiana." Virtual Press, 2007. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1371196.
Full textAbstract:
This study introduced six African-American female journalists in Indiana and provided an intimate account of their perception of media in regards to African-American female journalists of the 21st century. The women were publicly analyzed with a series of questions and candidly discussed the role of Black female journalists at work, in their personal lives, and their communities in general. The women shared similar responses in regards to four main topics: diversity in media, gender-related challenges, career enjoyment and impact on their communities. The most pressing issue of concern was diversity. All of the women agreed that diversity is ineffectively addressed and provided suggestions. The two research questions concluded (1) none of the women credited any female pioneer in Black journalism to their success and (2) the women did not credit early Black female journalists toward their decision to obtain longevity in journalism.<br>Department of Journalism
12
Bronitsky, Jonathan Bernard. "The Anglo-American origins of neoconservatism." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708897.
Full text
13
Bennett, Sarah. "The American contexts of Irish poetry, 1950-present." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669957.
Full text
14
Enns, James Cornelius. "Saving Germany : North American Protestants and Christian mission to West Germany, 1945-1974." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610651.
Full text
15
White, Steven Robert. "A confluence of thinking: The influence of 20th century art history on American landscape architecture." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/278634.
Full textAbstract:
Since beginning my graduate studies in landscape architecture, I have encountered many situations in class in which references to art were used. I discovered a connection in the usage of the jargon of art in landscape architecture study. People, for the most part, do not know what landscape architects do or who we are. In this thesis I will make the case for aligning the profession of landscape architecture with the fine arts and humanities. An art history component in the curriculum and education and training of landscape architects would augment their design and presentation skills in the workplace. I have included the results of a survey questionnaire that I sent to 65 landscape architecture teaching faculty representing 38 landscape architecture programs in the United States. These individuals held either a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, a Master of Fine Arts degree, or they had a scholarly research interest in art.
16
Januzzi, Angela. "Making an "American Classic": Faulkner, Ferber, and the Politics of 20th Century Canon Formation." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2007. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/JanuzziA2007.pdf.
Full text
17
Yang, Jing, and 杨静. "The construction of the Chinese woman in 1990s American cinema." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2010. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B43813185.
Full text
18
Li, Jing. "Self in community: twentieth-century American drama by women." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2016. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_oa/322.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis argues that twentieth-century American women playwrights spearhead the drama of transformation, and their plays become resistance discourses that protest, subvert, or change the representation of the female self in community. Many create antisocial, deviant, and self-reflexive characters who become misfits, criminals, or activists in order to lay bare women's moral-psychological crises in community. This thesis highlights how selected women playwrights engage with, and question various dominant, regional, racial, or ethnic female communities in order to redefine themselves. Sophie Treadwell's Machinal and Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother are representative texts that explore how the dominant culture can pose a barrier for radical women who long for self-fulfillment. To cultivate their personhood, working class Caucasian women are forced to go against their existing community so as to seek sexual freedom and reproductive rights, which are regarded as new forms of resistance or transgression. While they struggle hard to conform to the traditional, gendered notion of female altruism, self-sacrifice and care ethics, they cannot hide their discontent with the gendered division of labor. They are troubled doubly by the fact that they have to work in the public sphere, but conform to their gender roles in the private sphere. Different female protagonists resort to extreme homicidal or suicidal measures in order to assert their radical, contingent subjectivities, and become autonomous beings. By becoming antisocial or deviant characters, they reject their traditional conformity, and emphasize the arbitrariness and performativity of all gender roles. Treadwell and Norman both envision how the dominant Caucasian female community must experience radical changes in order to give rise to a new womanhood. Using Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun as examples, this thesis demonstrates the difficulties women may face when living in disparate communities. The selected texts show that Southern women and African-American women desperately crave for their distinct identities, while they long to be accepted by others. Their subjectivity is a constant source of anxiety, but some women can form strong psychological bonds with women from the same community, empowering them to make new life choices. To these women, their re-fashioned self becomes a means to reexamine the dominant white culture and their racial identity. African-American women resist the discourse of assimilation, and re-identify with their African ancestry, or pan-Africanism. In the relatively traditional southern community, women can subvert the conventional southern belle stereotypes. They assert their selfhood by means of upward mobility, sexual freedom, or the rejection of woman's reproductive imperative. The present study shows these women succeed in establishing their personhood when they refuse to compromise with the dominant ways, as well as the regional, racial communal consciousness. Maria Irene Fornes' Fefu and Her Friends and Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles are analyzed to show how women struggle to claim their dialogic selfhood in minoritarian communities (New England Community and Jewish Community). Female protagonists maintain dialogues with other women in the same community, while they choose their own modes of existence, such as single parenthood or political activism. The process of transformation shows that women are often disturbed by their moral consciousness, a result of their acceptance of gender roles and their submission to patriarchal authority. Their transgressive behaviors enable them to claim their body and mind, and strive for a new source of personhood. Both playwrights also advocate women's ability to self-critique, to differentiate the self from the Other, to allow the rise of an emergent self in the dialectical flux of inter-personal and intra-personal relations. The present study reveals that twentieth-century American female dramatists emphasize relationality in their pursuit of self. However, the transformation of the self can only be completed by going beyond, while remaining in dialogue with the dominant, residual, or emergent communities. For American women playwrights, the emerging female selves come with a strong sense of "in-betweenness," for it foregrounds the individualistic and communal dimensions of women, celebrating the rise of inclusive, mutable, and dialogic subjectivities.
19
Martin, Ruth Ellen. "American civil liberties, fear and conformity, 1937-1969." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.648218.
Full text
20
Kwoba, Brian. "The impact of Hubert Henry Harrison on Black radicalism, 1909-1927 : race, class, and political radicalism in Harlem and African American history." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0b4a7787-ae07-4131-b051-be0edef5ffca.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis focuses on Hubert Henry Harrison (1883-1927), a Caribbean-born journalist, educator, and community organizer whose historical restoration requires us to expand the frame of Black radicalism in the twentieth century. Harrison was the first Black leader of the Socialist Party of America to articulate a historical materialist analysis of the "Negro question", to organise a Black-led Marxist formation, and to systematically and publicly challenge the party's racial prejudices. In a time of urbanization, migration, lynching, and segregation, he subsequently developed the World War I-era New Negro movement by spearheading its first organisation, newspaper, nation-wide congress, and political party. Harrison pioneered a new form of anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, coloured internationalism. He also inaugurated the socio-cultural tradition of street corner speaking in Harlem, which formed the institutional basis for developing a wide-ranging, working-class, community-based, Black modernist intellectual culture. His people-centred and mass-movement-oriented model of leadership catalysed the rise to prominence of Marcus Garvey and the Garvey movement. Meanwhile, Harrison's African identity and epistemology positioned him to establish an African-centred street scholar tradition in Harlem that endures to this day. Despite Harrison's wide-ranging influence on a whole generation of Black leaders from W.E.B. Du Bois to A. Philip Randolph, his impact and legacy have been largely forgotten. As a result, unearthing and recovering Harrison requires us to rethink multiple histories - the white left, the New Negro movement, Garveyism, the "Harlem Renaissance" - which have marginalized him. Harrison figured centrally in all of these social movements, so restoring his angle of vision demonstrates previously invisible connections, conjunctures, and continuities between disparate and often segregated currents of intellectual and political history. It also broadens the spectrum of Black emancipatory possibilities by restoring an example that retains much of its relevance today.
21
Heckerl, David K. "From Emerson's 'Great guest' to Strauss's Machiavelli : innocence, responsibility, and the renewal of American studies." Thesis, McGill University, 1998. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=35708.
Full textAbstract:
My dissertation explores the intense crisis of sensibility experienced by liberal intellectuals in cold war America, with special emphasis on the desire to renew liberal democratic culture by moving, in mind and spirit, from innocence to responsibility. The latter term, however, expresses sentiments of civic virtue or republicanism very much at odds with liberalism; hence the ultimate failure of liberals to consummate their own sense of what is most needful or necessary. Although liberals clearly desire the sensational execution of innocence, their inability to be "altogether evil" (Machiavelli) consigns them to the equivocating limbo of what R. W. B. Lewis called the "new stoicism." The liberal desire for renewal does find its consummation, however, in Leo Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), which instructs liberals in the salutary benefits of a philosophical republicanism. As embodied in Machiavelli himself, this mode of republicanism promises to emancipate liberals (if only they would listen) from the tyranny of innocence, thereby effecting the desired regenerative movement to civic responsibility.
22
Walker, Lisa Kay. "Anti-Bolshevism and the Advent of Mussolini and Hitler: Anglo-American Diplomatic Perceptions, 1922-1933." PDXScholar, 1993. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4629.
Full textAbstract:
The history of World War II has led many Americans to vie~ Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany as European variants of a single Fascist ideology. Ho~ever, in the early years of the Mussolini and Hitler regimes, the conceptual category of international Fascism was by not so well-established, particularly ~here the Nazis were concerned. American and British diplomats stationed in Germany in the early 1930s only occasionally interpreted the rising Nazi party as an offshoot of Fascism, but frequently referred to it as a possible form of or precursor of Bolshevism in Germany. Published and unpublished American foreign policy documents, published British diplomatic documents, and a wide array of secondary sources have contributed information showing how perceptions of Nazism and Bolshevism were influenced by matters that clouded the issues. The similarity of American and British views on the subjects of Bolshevism, Fascism, and Nazism can be attributed to the new understanding among the policy elites of the two nations as they became the leading status quo powers after World War I. The United States in particular had gone through tremendous organizational changes during and after the war, and was entering into a new era of professional and bureaucratized foreign policy that differed from its ad hoc diplomacy of the past. American foreign policy of the interwar period combined a strong interest in business expansion with a relative lack of desire for international political entanglements. American political commitments of the 1920s, particularly in Germany, were backed primarily by loans and investment, and through reparations revision plans designed by unofficial diplomats recruited from the private sector. As American financial commitments to Germany became more dependent on German repayment, and as the Depression tightened its grip, the rise of the Nazis became an ever greater source of alarm. This concern was related not only to their unclear and ill-defined political ideas, but to the threat they seemingly posed to financial stability -- a threat that increased their resemblance to the Bolsheviks in the minds of many diplomatic observers. Various other factors were important in developing the Anglo-American view of Nazism as related to Bolshevism. These included the almost obsessive intensity of anti-Bolshevism in the United States and Great Britain throughout the interwar period; the close association of Bolshevism with economic chaos in the minds of Anglo-American leaders, with a concomitant tendency to see Bolshevism developing wherever economic chaos occurred in Europe; and the strong admiration for Mussolini's Italy in both Britain and the United States, which precluded possibilities of seeing much in common between Italian Fascism and Nazism during this period. Some important sources of conceptual confusion were inherent in the policies of Germany's post-World War I Weimar Republic. Leading German diplomats and politicians of the republic, such as Gustav Stresemann, used Anglo-American fears of Bolshevism as a cornerstone of their policy to gain revisions and modifications of the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty. In the early 1930s, the "Bolshevism bogey" was used by Ambassador Frederic Sackett, a political appointee of Herbert Hoover, to get Hoover's attention so that he would modify reparations policy in favor of Sackett's friend, the embattled Chancellor Heinrich Bruning. The internal factions of the rising Nazi party, including the left-leaning wing led by Gregor Strasser, appeared to give some credence to the idea that the Nazis could harbor communistic elements. After Hitler's rise to the chancellorship in 1933, American and British observers began to note more resemblances between the Hitler and Mussolini regimes. However, many of their earlier observations about the similarities of Nazism and Bolshevism have validity in terms of the more totalitarian nature of these regimes as compared to Italian Fascism and its other less extreme variants.
23
McCann-Washer, Penny. "An American voice : the evolution of self and the awareness of others in the personal narratives of 20th century American women." Virtual Press, 1997. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1063194.
Full textAbstract:
The purpose of this study is to understand the connections between the public and private worlds of American women as described in their journals and diaries and to show how the interaction between the two realms changed the way women thought about themselves, their roles, and their environment.A total of ninety-four personal narratives were examined for the study and from that number, four were profiled. Two personal narratives were examined that were published following the Suffrage Movement and two personal narratives were chosen that were published following the Liberation Movement. Methods of rhetorical analysis were used to focus on changing levels of women's awareness of self, community, roles available to women, and issues appropriate for women's attention. I examined text divisions and organization, sentence structures, and markers of audience awareness.A pattern emerges demonstrating five metamorphoses: as the twentieth century continues, women's personal narratives are exhibiting greater self-awareness, greater audience-awareness, awareness of responsibility to the community of women, and awareness of expanding opportunities for women as well as generating an ever increasing readership.<br>Department of English
24
Slaughter, Carolyn Overton. "Language as disclosure in five modernist American works." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/184311.
Full textAbstract:
"Language as Disclosure in Five Modernist American Works" comprises a series of Heideggerian readings of James's The Turn of the Screw, Williams's In the American Grain, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, and Barth's Lost in the Funhouse. Each text is taken as a single and separate performance of poetic language. The readings do not interpret or explain the texts but attempt to follow them in a thinking, to map what shows up and in what relations. The attempt is to get past the roadblock of "ambiguity" that characterizes modernist texts, not by deciding the undecidable but by exploring it. The dissertation explores the nature or function of language. In James literality works to indicate, to evoke, to found and maintain as well as to violate or subvert a human order. Language borders and opposes the abyss in the story, and it is at this border and in this conflict that reality originates. Williams too revises the notion of origin as he proposes a new "method" of "composition" whereby a poet in the act of asserting and proving himself sets forth not only his own potency but that of his ground, his locality, his period and his time. In the Faulkner story representative language has become disconnected from life, is irrelevant, ineffectual, dysfunctional. However, in spite of its explicit indictment of words, the work discloses a new ontology, a new standard of value, and an originary function for words. In the Hemingway story language or the work of art (the bullfight, here) is the site, the occasion, and the agency in and by which "facts," things that actually happen, rise into appearance upon the horizon of death. In these modernist works we find the function of language to be, in some sense, disclosure. With the Barth story we pass into a milder postmodern atmosphere, but we find the same antagonists, language and not-language. Ostensibly language is impotent; thematically the rational paradigm is overwhelmed by objectivity. I claim, however, that language diminished and exposed is still working by modernist standards to provoke into view the potentiality that representative language cannot express.
25
Jessen, Julie K. "African-American culture and history : northwestern Indiana, 1850-1940 : a context statement for the Indiana State Historic Preservation Office." Virtual Press, 1996. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1027112.
Full textAbstract:
The 1980 amendments to the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act require each State Historic Preservation Office to research and document specific themes important to the history and development of the state. These statements, included in the state's comprehensive preservation plan, aid in the identification and evaluation of historic properties as potential National Register sites.Indiana has developed twelve broad themes to be used in the creation of context statements for the state's seven regions. Area Seven includes Lake, Porter, LaPorte, Pulaski, Starke, Jasper, Newton, Benton and White counties. This context statement provides essential information for defining significant historic properties related to African-American history in northwestern Indiana between 1850 and 1940.<br>Department of Architecture
26
Arthi, Vellore. "Human capital formation and the American Dust Bowl." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ea2309bd-57fd-463b-ac40-a1c2af870b1f.
Full textAbstract:
I use variation in childhood exposure to the Dust Bowl, an environmental shock to health and income, as a natural experiment to explain variation in adult human capital. I also examine a variety of mechanisms by which the Dust Bowl influenced later-life wellbeing, and investigate the scope for recovery from this early-life shock. I find that exposure to the Dust Bowl in childhood has statistically significant and economically meaningful adverse impacts on later-life outcomes, for instance, increasing disability and reducing fertility and college completion. These results hold even after accounting for the possibly confounding effects of the Great Depression, migration, and selective fertility or mortality. The effects I find are more severe for those born in agricultural states, suggesting that the Dust Bowl was most damaging via the destruction of agricultural livelihoods. This collapse of farm incomes, however, had the positive effect of increasing high school completion amongst the exposed, likely by reducing the demand for child farm labor where such labor was not essential to production, and thus decreasing the opportunity costs of secondary schooling; in this outcome, unlike in college completion, family income and student ability were irrelevant. Many of the worst adverse effects are found amongst those exposed prenatally and in early childhood, suggesting that congenital complications in capability development, together with low parental incomes in utero and thereafter, may be to blame for such later-life disadvantage. Together, these findings imply that the Dust Bowl acted largely "indirectly," as an economic shock that in turn affected in utero and early-life conditions, rather than "directly," through personal exposure (e.g. dust inhalation) in childhood. Lastly, results - particularly those on New Deal expenditure - imply both that remediation from early-life disaster is possible under the right circumstances, and that post-shock investment may have compensated for rather than reinforced damage to child endowments. The findings in this study are consistent with a multi-stage model of human capability formation, in which investments in one period respond to endowments in a previous one, and may either reinforce or compensate for these endowments.
27
Bellettiere, Giovanna Marie. "AMERICAN FEMINISM: THE CAMERA WORK OF ALICE AUSTEN, ALFRED STIEGLITZ, AND BERENICE ABBOTT." Master's thesis, Temple University Libraries, 2019. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/578947.
Full textAbstract:
Art History<br>M.A.<br>This thesis explores the work of photographers: Alice Austen, Alfred Stieglitz, and Berenice Abbott in relation to the American landscape of New York from approximately 1880 through 1940. Although the artwork of Georgia O’Keeffe is not addressed specifically, her role as an artist communicating her modern self image through Stieglitz’s photography is one area of focus in the second chapter. Previous scholarship has drawn parallels between women artists and photographers solely in terms related to their gender identity. In contrast, my project identifies a common theoretical thread that links the work of these artists: namely, that photography allowed professional women of this time to react and rise above the constrictions of gender expectations, and moreover, how their own attitudes based in feminist sensibility enabled them to fashion and broadcast bold, liberated self-images. Inspired by the radical transformations of women’s social roles in the United States, each artist produced photographs that represented the evolving role of women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using visual analysis and historical context associated with the “New Woman” movement, I argue that each artist discussed in this thesis not only challenges the domestic sphere conventionally assigned to women photographers, but also makes new strides by engaging in work that allows for them to autonomously travel within their own territories or new expansive locations. This thesis gives fresh insight as to how photography provided novel opportunities for elevating women’s place in society, as well as in the artistic realm. Overall, photography was an important tool for each artist as these three women act as agents of change by demonstrating a control of womanhood while the role of a female was beginning to become less constrained by the domestic and social norms of society.<br>Temple University--Theses
28
Matsumaru, Takashi Michael. "Unmasking a City: Blacks, Asians and the Struggle Against Segregated Housing in 20th Century Seattle." Research Showcase @ CMU, 2017. http://repository.cmu.edu/dissertations/1094.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation maps the roots of systemic inequality within Seattle’s housing market, zeroing in on the residential mobility of Japanese and African Americans over the course of the 20th century. It analyzes the experiences that have led Japanese and African Americans to occupy distinctive positions within the city’s housing market, as they fought for belonging in a segregated city. Though they shared the burden of living in segregated neighborhoods through much of the first half of the 20th century, Japanese and African Americans occupied distinct economic positions within the city. While Japanese Americans far outnumbered African Americans until World War II, the segregation of African Americans within the city followed a separate trajectory. Shaped by the legacy of slavery and the nation’s Jim Crow order, African Americans became increasingly set apart within the housing market. Seeing how Japanese and African Americans have navigated a segregated housing market is crucial to understanding the racial dimensions of Seattle’s development. While the ghettoization of Japanese Americans facilitated their incarceration during World War II, the city’s fixation on restricting black mobility during the 1950s and 1960s opened up spaces for Japanese Americans. Rather than simply refuting the model minority image, this dissertation examines how it came to shape Seattle’s housing market after World War II. The city’s open housing movement brought about fair housing laws but also a renewed commitment to property rights and the exclusion of African Americans. Weak and unenforced fair housing legislation – though it opened doors to those of a particular class – led to growing divides. These divides are explored in the last part of this dissertation, which highlights the dimensions of post-civil rights era segregation and the struggles waged by low-income black renters to challenge the city’s raced, classed, and gendered boundaries.
29
Strecker, Geralyn. "Reading prostitution in American fiction, 1893-1917." Virtual Press, 2001. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1213148.
Full textAbstract:
Many American novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries discuss prostitution. Some works like Reginald Wright Kauffman's The House of Bondage, (1910) exaggerate the threat of "white slavery," but others like David Graham Phillips's Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917) more honestly depict the harsh conditions which caused many women to prostitute themselves for survival. Contemporary critical interpretations of novels addressed in this dissertation began before major shifts in women's roles in the workplace, before trends towards family planning, before women could respectably live on their own, and especially before women won the right to vote. Yet, a century of progress later, this vestigal criticism still influences our study of these texts.Relying on primary source materials such as prostitute autobiographies and vice commission reports, I compare fictional representations of prostitution to historical data, focusing on the prostitute's voice and her position in society. I examine actual prostitutes' life stories to dispel the misconception that prostitution was always a lower-class business. My chapters are ordered in regards to the prominence of the prostitute characters' voices: in Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) the heroine seldom speaks for herself; in two Socialist novels--Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) and Estelle Baker's The Rose Door (1911)--prostitutes debate low wages, political corruption, and organized vice; and in Phillips's Susan Lenox, the title character is almost always allowed to speak for herself, and readers can see what she is thinking as well as doing. As my chapters progress, I demonstrate how the fictions become more like the prostitutes' own autobiographies, with self-reliant women telling their stories without shame or remorse. My conclusion, "Revamping `Fallen Women' Pedagogy for Teaching American Literature," suggests how social history and textual scholarship of specific "fallen women" novels should affect our teaching of these texts.<br>Department of English
30
Turner, Robert Charles Grey. "Counterfeit culture : truth and authenticity in the American prose epic since 1960." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709455.
Full text
31
Stein, Eric 1973. ""Living right and being free" : country music and modern American conservatism." Thesis, McGill University, 1998. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=21267.
Full textAbstract:
The rising popularity of country music in the United States since WWII is a cultural phenomenon intimately related to the ascendance of conservative values, leaders, and movements over the same period. By routinely celebrating themes like heterosexual love, the patriarchal nuclear family, hard work, individualism, freedom, patriotism, religion, and small-town life, country music provided the soundtrack for the insurgent conservatism of politicians like George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. In the sixties and seventies, while other forms of popular music (rock, folk, soul) articulated the values of liberals, socialists, hippies, war protestors, feminists, and civil rights activists, country music alone stood for the "traditional" values cherished by the so-called "silent majority" that powered the rise of the Right. The spread of both country music and conservatism is also a reflection of the "southernization" of America---the diffusion across the nation of cultural and political traits long associated with the South.
32
Burns-Watson, Roger. "Co-Starring God: Religion, Film, and World War II." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1273520794.
Full text
33
Ondaatje, Michael L. "Neither counterfeit heroes nor colour-blind visionaries : black conservative intellectuals in modern America." University of Western Australia. History Discipline Group, 2008. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2008.0029.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis focuses on the rise to prominence, during the 1980s and 1990s, of a coterie of African American intellectuals associated with the powerful networks and institutions of the New Right. It situates the relatively marginalised phenomenon of contemporary black conservatism within its historical context; explores the nature and significance of the racial discourse it has generated; and probes the intellectual character of the individuals whose contributions to this strand of black thought have stood out over the past three decades. Engaging the writings of the major black conservative figures and the literature of their supporters and critics, I then evaluate their ideas in relation to the key debates concerning race and class in American life debates that have centred, for the most part, on the vexed issues of affirmative action, poverty and public education. In illuminating this complex, still largely misunderstood phenomenon, this thesis reveals the black conservatives as more than a group but as individuals with their own distinctive arguments.
34
Jozajtis, Krzysztof. "Religion and film in American culture : the birth of a nation." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/1501.
Full textAbstract:
This research addresses an emerging scholarship examining relations between media, religion, and culture in contemporary society. Whilst it acknowledges the value of this growing body of work, the study is based on a recognition that an overwhelming concern with the contemporary scene has resulted in a neglect of the history responsible for the conditions of the present. Given the prominence of America as both a source and an object of this scholarship, moreover, the particular national context in which the institutions and practices of the US media have developed has been taken for granted somewhat. Oriented towards these perceived lacunae, this thesis examines the interaction between religion and film as an influence upon the development of American culture in the twentieth-century. The dissertation is divided into two main parts. The first of these is devoted to an extended discussion of the scholarly background to the research, and argues that the historical dimension of the interrelationship between religion and film in America is worthy of more attention than it has hitherto received. In particular, it stresses the fundamental importance of religion within the discourse of national identity in the United States, and posits the notion of a non-denominational American civil religion as a useful theoretical tool with which to examine Hollywood as a distinctively 'American' form of cinema. Part Two develops this position through a case study of The Birth of a Nation, directed by D.W. Griffith, and one of the most famous films of all time. Discussing the picture as a response to a crisis in American Protestantism, the study argues that the race controversy prompted by its Southern viewpoint was, to some extent, a function of Griffith's ambitions to revive the traditional religious bases of U.S. national identity via the medium of film. Furthermore, it suggests that the impact of Birth helped enact a broader transformation of American culture, wherein the cinema became instrumental in sustaining the belief that the United States was a nation uniquely favoured by Providence.
35
Hazzard, Oli. "Trying to have it both ways : John Ashbery and Anglo-American exchange." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:87f922c5-79dc-4fd5-85dd-50c4a7661015.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation explores John Ashbery's interactions with several generations of English poets, during a period which ranges from the late 1940s to the present day. It seeks to support two principle propositions: that Ashbery's engagements with contemporaneous English poets had a decisive influence on his poetic development; and that Ashbery's own poetic and critical work can be employed to revise our understanding of mid-to-late 20th century English poetry. The dissertation demonstrates that Ashbery's relationships with four English poets - W.H. Auden, F.T. Prince, Lee Harwood and Mark Ford - occurred at significant junctures in, and altered the course of, his poetic development. Ashbery's critical and poetic engagements with these poets, when read together, are shown to constitute an idiosyncratic but coherent re-reading of the English poetry of the past and present. The dissertation addresses the ways in which each poet theorises the difficulties posed, and opportunities afforded, by perceived changes in Anglo-American poetic relations at different points during the 20th century. Chapter one re-evaluates Ashbery's relationship with Auden. It traces the legacy of Auden's coterie poetics in The Orators for Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, offers a revisionary reading of The Vermont Notebook as a strident response to Auden's late-career conservativism, and reads in depth Ashbery's unpublished, highly ambivalent elegy for him, "If I had My Way, Dear". Chapter Two attends to the extensive correspondence between Ashbery and Prince, argues that Prince's work provided a model for Ashbery's "encrypted" early lyrics addressing his homosexuality, and reads "Clepsydra" as an early elaboration of Ashbery's conception of a reciprocal influential model. Chapter Three examines Lee Harwood's "imitations" of Ashbery, and considers the latter's first critical formation of an English "other tradition" through his association of Harwood with the work of John Clare. Chapter Four portrays Ashbery's relationship with Mark Ford as a successful enactment of reciprocal influence, a form of engagement which allows Ashbery a means to "shake off his own influence" and to retain his status as a "major minor writer".
36
Travis, Isabelle. "The poetry of pain : trauma, madness and suffering in post-World War II American poetry." Thesis, University of Reading, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.553108.
Full text
37
Whiting, Sarah. "The jungle in the clearing : space, form and democracy in America, 1940-1949." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8748.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2001.<br>"February 2001."<br>Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-248).<br>Combining aesthetic theory with theories of the public sphere, this dissertation examines the brief appearance of a publicly empathetic civic realm in the United States during the 1940s. The argument begins with a reevaluation of the debate over monumentality initiated in modernist architectural circles, which included such figures as Sigfried Giedion, Lewis Mumford, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and Philip Johnson. Centering on the city, this debate recast monumentality in terms more progressive than commemorative; it posited open-ended architectural and urban strategies that offered a non-restrictive yet sympathetic public resonance. If empathy is understood as the viewer's physical and psychological engagement with an object, then the 'publicly empathetic' collects and communicates the public 's individualized engagements. The term 'publicly empathetic' underscores the distinction between totalitarian consensus, exemplified by the modernism of Mussolini's fascist Italy, and what Alexis de Tocqueville identified in 1835 as America's collective individualism, which persisted in the 1940s under the umbrella of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Springboarding from Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer's philosophies of symbolic form as unconsummated symbol, I argue that the modernism of this period did not define the public but rather expressed architecture's publicness through the recasting of form, programming, and modernism's public mandate. The chapters of this dissertation examine in turn the texts, projects and urbanism of this empathetic modernism. The projects constituting this realm are both public and private in nature; they include Charles Franklin and ...<br>by Sarah Whiting.<br>Ph.D.
38
Stewart, Robert Earl. "The catastrophe of entertainment : televisuality and post-postmodern American fiction." Thesis, McGill University, 1999. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=30220.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the effects of television and entertainment culture on American fiction. Focusing primarily on the novels of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, with a secondary focus on the films of American film director David Lynch, the thesis proposes that post-postmodern fiction, fiction in which the familiarizing trends of postmodern fiction are reversed, is a response to the powerful influence of television and other forms of electronic media on American culture.
39
Smith, Lyndsay Danielle. "A Temperate and Wholesome Beverage| The Defense of the American Beer Industry, 1880-1920." Thesis, Portland State University, 2018. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10825196.
Full textAbstract:
<p> For decades prior to National Prohibition, the “liquor question” received attention from various temperance, prohibition, and liquor interest groups. Between 1880 and 1920, these groups gained public interest in their own way. The liquor interests defended their industries against politicians, religious leaders, and social reformers, but ultimately failed. While current historical scholarship links the different liquor industries together, the beer industry constantly worked to distinguish itself from other alcoholic beverages. </p><p> To counter threats from anti-alcohol groups, beer industry advocates presented their drink as a wholesome, pure, socially and culturally rich, and economically significant beverage that stood apart from other alcoholic beverages, especially distilled spirits. Alongside these responses, breweries industrialized, reflecting scientific and technological innovations that allowed for modern production, storage, and distribution methods. </p><p> Despite popularity and economic successes, the beer industry could not survive the anti-saloon campaigns, the changing nature of the American economy and taxation, political ambitions of the anti-liquor interests, and the influence of the First World War, which brought with it anti-German sentiments. This thesis will uncover the story of the American beer industry’s attempt to adjust to several threats facing it and how beer was ultimately condemned to the same fate as wine and spirits when National Prohibition went into effect. </p><p>
40
Sagorje, Marina. "Self and society in Mary McCarthy's writing." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8fd1de71-c10c-4341-8283-ccebfeebf2a7.
Full textAbstract:
My thesis analyses the oeuvre of the American writer Mary McCarthy (1912-1989), with the focus on the figure of the outsider looking in. McCarthy uses outsider figures in her texts as prisms through which distinctive historical moments as well as problems of gender, race and religion are studied against the backdrop of the changing climate of the American 'red' 1930s, the anxious '50s, and the late '60s torn by the Vietnam war. Examples of McCarthy's recurring protagonists are the New York Bohemian girl of the '30s in the predominantly male world marred by the Great Depression, the Jewish character stereotyped as the Other by the poorly hidden anti-Semitism of the American society of the early 1940s, and the orphan child exposed to adult cruelty, who finds her only solace in the Catholic religion. Their position of being outsiders who live in a society not their own by birthright, is shown to be crucial for their acquisition and knowledge of truth, and links insight to marginality, which is reinforced by McCarthy's technique of ironically detached observation, the 'cold eye' of her prose. McCarthy herself appears as an outsider character throughout her writing, both as the historical figure and as the protagonist of her autobiographies. Her self-image, shaped by her orphaned childhood and her youth as a Bohemian girl among leftist intellectuals, is subject to conflicting impulses of confession and concealment. McCarthy's wide use of autobiographical details in her fiction and elements of fiction in her autobiographies led most critics to study her work from a chiefly biographical point of view. My own approach to Mary McCarthy's writing takes their findings into consideration, and includes the analysis of the historical, political, and social contexts of McCarthy's texts, as well as the intertextual dialogue with a few select writings by McCarthy's contemporaries such as Philip Roth and Sylvia Plath.
41
Shishkin, Timur. "Marginalized Characters in Contemporary American Short Fiction." PDXScholar, 2011. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/297.
Full textAbstract:
The focus of the present research work is the contemporary American short stories that bring up issues of compulsory norm and the conflict between marginalized characters and their environment. This research was based on those short stories that seemed to represent the idea of being "different" in the most complex and multilayered way, and its goal was to unfold new aspects of the conflict between "normal" and "abnormal"/"different". Variations of norm as well as diversity within the marginalized raise a number of questions about the reasons for their inability to coexist peacefully. The close reading and the analysis of the selected stories show that all the conflicts in them, in one way or another, repeat similar patterns and lead to the same root of the problem of misunderstanding, which is fear. To be more precise, all the cases of hate towards "different" characters can be explained by the hater's explicit or implicit fear of death in its various forms: inability to procreate one's own kind, cultural or personal self-identity loss, actual life threat in the form of a reminder of possible physical harm and death. Most often it would be the case where shame and fear of death overlap in a very complex way. In general, the cases of characters' otherness fall into three major groups. The nature of the alienation for each of these groups is described and analyzed in three separate chapters. Prejudice and stereotypes are playing a great role in formation of fears and insecurities which need to be dismantled in order to make peaceful coexistence possible. This work concludes with pointing out the crucial role of taking an approach of representation of various perspectives and diversification of voices in creative writing, academia and media in the context of multicultural society.
42
Kwong, Tsz Ching. "The archived future : North American apocalyptic fiction and the ambiguous construction of the present." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2013. http://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/1514.
Full text
43
Beckner, Chrisanne. "Cultural Demolition: What Was Lost When Eugene Razed its First Black Neighborhood?" Thesis, University of Oregon, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/9976.
Full textAbstract:
xii, 167 p. : ill., maps. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.<br>In the 1940s, Eugene, Oregon's first African-American neighborhood took root
on a riverbank north of the city. In 1949, county officials demolished the homes and
church of the ad hoc community and relocated the residents. In the 21st century, no
physical evidence of the former neighborhood remains, but the history continues to
circulate among Eugene's contemporary African-American community. This thesis
documents the history of Eugene's first black neighborhood, examines the roles that race
and class played in its demolition, and develops recommendations for public
commemoration. To do so, it critically examines methods of historic preservation and
their relationship to sites of intangible history. Through an analysis of various models of
commemoration, a multi-disciplinary approach emerges that may apply to similar sites.<br>Committee in Charge:
Kingston W. Heath, Chair;
John Fenn
44
Harmsworth, Thomas. "Gary Snyder's green Dharma." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e4c2e123-0b71-45c9-8535-eb09ac8cfa15.
Full textAbstract:
Twentieth-century environmentalist discourse often laid the blame for environmental degradation on Western civilization, and presented the religious traditions of the East as offering an ecocentric antidote to Western dualism and anthropocentrism. Gary Snyder has looked to Chinese and Japanese Buddhism to inform his environmentalist poetry and prose. While Snyder often writes in terms of a dualism of East and West, he synthesizes traditional forms of Buddhism with various Western traditions, and his green Buddhism ultimately undermines more simplistic oppositions of East and West. The first chapter reads Snyder's writing of the mid-1950s alongside several of his West Coast contemporaries - Kenneth Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac - showing that these writers evoked the natural world together with Buddhist themes before the advent of the modern environmental movement in order to mount a critique of Cold War American culture. Snyder's early interest in Buddhism was motivated largely by translations of Chinese poetry and Chapter Two examines his own translations of the Tang Dynasty poet Hanshan. In Snyder's translations and contemporaneous original poetry, Buddhist poetics mingle with American conceptions of wilderness. Chapter Three shows how Snyder's Buddhism was influenced by Anglophone writers such as D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, and argues that from the late 1960s Snyder aimed to Americanize Buddhism as ideas of localism became more central to his environmentalism. Chapter Four examines Snyder's synthesis of Hua-yen Buddhism and Western scientific ecology in the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter Five examines 'The Hokkaido Book,' an unfinished prose work on environmental attitudes in the Far East in which Snyder considers the relationship between the civilized and the primitive. Chapter Six examines the influence of Chinese landscape painting and Japanese No drama, two forms steeped in Buddhist ideas, on the poems of 'Mountains' and 'Rivers Without End'.
45
Sorrells, David J. "The Evolution of AIDS as Subject Matter in Select American Dramas." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2600/.
Full textAbstract:
Dramatic works from America with AIDS as subject matter have evolved over the past twenty years. In the early 1980s, dramas like Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, William Hoffman's As Is, and Robert Chesley's Night Sweat educated primarily homosexual men about AIDS, its causes, and its effects on the gay community while combating the dominant discourse promoted by the media, government, and medical establishments that AIDS was either unimportant because it affected primarily the homosexual population or because it was attributed to lack of personal responsibility. By the mid-eighties and early nineties, playwrights Terrence McNally (Love! Valour! Compassion!)and Paul Rudnick (Jeffrey)concentrated on relationships between sero-discordant homosexual couples. McNally's "Andre's Mother" and Lips Together, Teeth Apart explored how families and friends face the loss of a loved one to AIDS. Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America epic represents living beyond AIDS as a powerful force. Without change and progress, Angels warns, life stagnates. Angels also introduces the powerful drugs that help alleviate the symptoms of AIDS. AIDS is the centerpiece of the epic, and AIDS and homosexuality are inextricably blended in the play. Rent, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical by Jonathan Larson, features characters from an assortment of ethnic and social backgrounds - including heterosexuals, homosexuals, bi-sexuals, some with AIDS, some AIDS-free, some drug users - all living through the diverse troubles visited upon them at the turn of the millennium in the East Village of New York City. AIDS is not treated as "special," nor are people with AIDS pandered to. Instead, the characters take what life gives them, and they live fully, because there is "no day but today" ("Finale"). Rent's audiences are as varied as the American population, because it portrays metaphorically what so many Americans face daily - not AIDS per se, but other difficult life problems, including self-alienation. As such, Rent defies the dominant discourse because the community portrayed in Rent is the American community.
46
Kent, Timothy. "The Birth of the American Social Spirit: The American Child Labor Reform Movement and Urban Social Consciousness at the Turn of the 20th Century." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2017. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1570.
Full textAbstract:
This paper examines the National Child Labor Movement in America at the turn of the 20th century and how it affected collective American social consciousness and civic engagement. One of the first and most important social movements of the Progressive Era led by the National Child Labor Committee, reformers sought to use multiple focal points to unite the American public around the issue of children and the greater good of the nation’s future. In doing so, the movement embedded a new urban social awareness in which Americans finally caught a glimpse into the lives of their fellow citizens, of all classes and backgrounds, and began to develop empathetic practices to initiate social change. Ultimately, this had a significant effect on the future of urban social reform.
47
Dowthwaite, James. "Ezra Pound's theory of language." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b7fdc3da-8442-478f-8dbf-4a401cf29e27.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines Ezra Pound's linguistic theory in relation to literary, philosophical and academic treatments of language in the modernist period. Pound is a central figure in the history of twentieth century literature, and his poetic career marks a sustained engagement with questions of how language can register thought, how it can transmit and communicate images, and, ultimately, how language is able to mediate between artists (or, indeed, language speakers as a whole) and the world. I read Pound's statements on language against the disciplinary history of linguistics, assessing the extent to which his positions are representative of his period, or, conversely, the ways in which they form part of an idiosyncratic worldview. My approach is broadly historical. I begin with Pound's educational background, and move chronologically through his career to the concluding passages of his Cantos. I investigate the extent to which Pound's critical writing engages with new departures taking place in linguistics in the late nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century. The scope of my investigation ranges from the legacy of nineteenth century philology to the approaches taken by William Dwight Whitney, Michel Bréal, and Ferdinand de Saussure, to name but a few, in focusing linguistic scholarship on synchronic study of language as function in the early twentieth century, to Franz Boas's and Edward Sapir's studies in the relationship between language and culture between 1910 and 1939. In situating Pound in relation to the history of linguistics as a discipline, I argue that his work asks some of the period's most apposite questions about language and culture, even if his conclusions differ from the dominant academic positions of the time.
48
Kocela, Christopher. "Fetishism as historical practice in postmodern American fiction." Thesis, McGill University, 2002. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=38213.
Full textAbstract:
This study contends that postmodern American fiction dramatizes an important shift of philosophical perspective on the fetish in keeping with recent theories of fetishism as a cultural practice. This shift is defined by the refusal to accept the traditional Western condemnation of the fetishist as primitive or perverse, and by the effort to affirm more productive uses for fetishism as a theoretical concept spanning the disciplines of psychoanalysis, Marxian social theory, and anthropology. Analyzing the depiction of fetishistic practices in selected contemporary American novels, the dissertation utilizes fetish theory in order to clarify the unique textual and historiographic features of postmodernist fiction. It also emphasizes the way in which conventional ideas about history and teleology are necessarily challenged by an affirmative orientation toward the fetish. Part One of the dissertation, comprising the first two chapters, traces the lineage of Western thinking about fetishism from Hegel, Marx, and Freud to Derrida, Baudrillard, and Jameson, among others. Recognizing that traditional theories attribute the symbolic power of the fetish to its mystification of historical origins, Part One posits that poststructuralist and postmodernist contributions to the subject enable, but do not develop, an alternative concept of fetishism as a practice with constructive historical potential. Part Two of the study seeks to develop this historical potential with reference to prominent descriptive models of postmodernist fiction, and through close readings of five contemporary American authors: Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and Don DeLillo. The four chapters of Part Two each examine the fictional representation of fetishism within a different theoretical framework, focusing on, respectively: temporality and objectivity in postmodern fiction theory; the interrelation between psychoanalytic theory and female fetishism in novels by Pynchon and Acker
49
Harvey, Matt. "Bread, Bullets, and Brotherhood: Masculine Ideologies in the Mid-Century Black Freedom Struggle, 1950-1975." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2018. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1248506/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the ways that African Americans in the mid-twentieth century thought about and practiced masculinity. Important contemporary events such as the struggle for civil rights and the Vietnam War influenced the ways that black Americans sought not only to construct masculine identities, but to use these identities to achieve a higher social purpose. The thesis argues that while mainstream American society had specific prescriptions for how men should behave, black Americans were able to select which of these prescriptions they valued and wanted to pursue while simultaneously rejecting those that they found untenable. Masculinity in the mid-century was not based on one thing, but rather was an amalgamation of different ideals that black men (and women) sought to utilize to achieve communal goals of equality, opportunity, and family.
50
Greenshields, Mary Clare, and University of Lethbridge Faculty of Arts and Science. "The Amazon in the drawing room : Natalie Clifford Barney's Parisian salon, 1909-1970 / Mary Clare Greenshields." Thesis, Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Dept. of English, c2010, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10133/2606.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis is organised into two chapters and an appendix. The first chapter explores the significant American expatriate movement in France in the early part of the twentieth century, in an effort to answer the question ―Why France?‖ The second chapter examines the life and work of Natalie Clifford Barney, an American expatriate writer in Paris, who wrote predominantly in French and ran an important weekly salon for over sixty years. Specifically, her aesthetic and subject matter, her life, and her fraught publishing history are considered. The appendix is a translation of Barney's 1910 book of aphorisms entitled Éparpillements.<br>v, 110 leaves ; 29 cm