Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Modern American Conservatism'

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.

This thesis examines the career of American conservative activist George S. Benson (1898-1991), who served as President of the Church of Christ–affiliated Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas (1936-1965) and rose to national prominence in the early 1940s, when he established the National Education Program. This examination provides an interpretation of the nature, origins and influence of modern U.S. conservatism. By focusing on the period from the 1930s to the mid-1960s, this work builds on a number of recent studies that have demonstrated the significant advantages to exploring modern conservatism beyond the social and political tumults of the 1960s and 1970s. Benson’s efforts also reveal some flaws in the analytical paradigm that dominates the literature on the modern right: the transition between conservatism’s marginalization in the 1930s and its recapture of the political mainstream by the late 1970s. Tempering this ‘rise of the right’ narrative by accepting both the importance and incompleteness of this resurgence provides the basis for the more nuanced approach that defines this work. Benson’s efforts to promote conservatism were defined – perhaps in equal measure – by failures, successes, and innovations. As a result, his career provides a new perspective on the boundaries of modern conservatism. Much of the work on conservatism focuses on either elites or grassroots activists. Benson operated within a space between these two groups that has rarely been explored. His career relied, almost exclusively, on the financial support of conservative businessmen, who shared his desire to effect a political re-education of the American public. To do this, Benson utilized a remarkable range of outlets for his message, which included a newspaper column, a radio broadcast, a relentless speaking schedule, and the production of approximately fifty films. He also made pioneering efforts to increase the influence of conservatism within the education system. Benson’s appeal to businessmen also resided in his construction of an innovative discourse for communicating the virtues of unfettered corporate capitalism and challenging its critics. Drawing on his own youthful experiences in Oklahoma, one of the last ‘frontier’ outposts, as well as the mythology of frontier individualism and the discourse of populism, Benson offered a folksy rebuke of ‘big government’ and embraced the corporate world as the heir to these virtues (despite the obvious contradictions). Benson’s faith ensured that religion became the second pillar of his ‘Americanism.’ His economic outlook constituted a prescient departure from Church of Christ traditions that, like those of many Southern fundamentalist and evangelical groups, harbored long-standing concerns that economic modernity constituted a destabilizing and amoral influence over a society that required order, stability and a primary dedication to non-worldly ideals. Moreover, Benson offers a new insight into the confluence of the traditionalist and libertarian wings of the right, a defining feature of the modern conservative movement. Benson’s political vision resonated most profoundly in the South and Southwest, where the heartland of modern conservatism emerged from a collision between the region’s remarkable postwar economic transformation and its preexisting religious and political culture. In a more general sense, certain themes within Benson’s crusade, notably including the power and influence of organized labor, provided key successes for the right during these years. These successes were testament to the importance of favorable circumstances, but Benson’s career was defined by the conviction that a more effective communication of conservatism would solve the right’s problems throughout the nation; one key argument of this work is that the message itself had notable limitations. These limitations, in turn, reveal a more profound ambiguity towards conservatives’ economic message within American political culture, the shortcomings of religious conservatism, and the problematic and incomplete nature of Benson’s efforts to ‘fuse’ economic and social conservatism. On the other hand, that conservatives’ ambitions were not met during this period does not suggest that Benson operated in an era of political comity; in one important respect, conservatives such as Benson helped to constrain political discourse and ensure the persistent moderation of their opponents.

My dissertation demonstrates how housewives manipulated and redefined the image and identity of the housewife in the U.S. during the second half of the twentieth century. From the eras of June Cleaver to Gloria Steinem and Phyllis Schlafly, women invoked motherhood and domesticity for both progressive and traditionalist ends. They did so amid shifting expectations of homemakers. In the decades following World War II, the legalization of contraceptives and abortion transformed understandings of the connections among womanhood, marriage, and maternity; legislation offered limited opportunities for women to acquire education and participate in new sectors of the workforce; and the decline of the family wage and the introduction of no-fault divorce increasingly curbed men's and women's ability to keep mother at home. Whereas in 1962 more than fifty-five percent of women aged twenty-five to fifty-four were engaged in full-time homemaking, by 1985 housewives made up just over twenty-six percent of the same population. Amid this change, the word housewife served as a lingua franca in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s that helped people to organize under the banner of domesticity. The arbiters defining the American housewife included not only members of the conservative Silent Majority, but also members of the feminist National Organization for Women (NOW); not only white television stars like Donna Reed who spearheaded protest against the Vietnam War by the group Another Mother for Peace, but also African American and Catholic and Jewish women working together to promote cross-racial understanding; not only women who earned wages outside of the home, but also non-wage-earning househusbands. I investigate how women's groups in the 1960s and early 1970s turned the dismissals that frequently accompanied the phrase "just a housewife" into an asset. Some groups deployed the housewife as the antithesis of the expert: Housewives' opinions about racism could be trusted as an authentic voice of the people because they did not rely on statistics calculated to fit into theories or models. Others relied on biologically determinist arguments: Motherhood made housewives into specialized experts on specific topics such as peace. Domesticity generally made these women less politically threatening and so better able to enact their agendas. While these housewife activists certainly grew and benefitted from their participation in these groups, the main purpose of their work was never to aid housewives exclusively. Beginning in the mid-1970s, women finally capitalized on the authority of the housewife image to improve the lives of homemakers. The efforts of housewife groups in the 1970s and early 1980s who opposed and supported the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution underscores the flexible definition of "housewife." While they initially organized to lend the authority of the housewife name to a particular cause, these groups ultimately became political organizations that represented and mobilized housewives as a constituency. Despite many differences, traditionalists and feminists could find common ground in recognizing the problems homemakers faced. Both were troubled by the realities of second shifts in which women juggled wage-earning and family obligations. They were concerned by the feminization of poverty, especially among older women. Whereas many traditionalists advocated a performed femininity meant to produce starkly gendered male protector-breadwinner and female dependent-homemaker roles, feminists looked to legislative and social equality solutions to provide both men and women the opportunity to succeed at home and at work. Yet some traditionalists united with feminists to critique the vulnerabilities of displaced homemakers - women who had engaged in years of unwaged homemaking only to be displaced from their vocations by widowhood or divorce. These women drew on previous experience in maternalist, racial equality, and anti-poverty movements. They sought solutions that included transferring the skills of homemaking into well-paid jobs in traditionally-male fields. They accomplished this by simultaneously praising the work of homemaking even as they criticized homemaking as a vocation that put women in a vulnerable economic position. The formation of a movement by and for homemakers crystallized, however, at the same time as the erosion of housewife as a crucial identity for women. Finally, I analyze the extent to which gender is caught up in the potentials and limitations of the housewife role by tracing the ways that Americans have envisioned the housewife as male. So long as the male homemaker was cast as exotic, role models and new precedents could be transformed into freak shows and warnings. Men who made the unusual choice to take on the role of family homemaker were further marginalized. Despite a sometimes overt emphasis on men's domesticity as a means of achieving social equality, the real efforts and the imagined experiences of the male housewife often ran counter to feminist goals. Varying from farcical to feminist, the successes and failures of these visions of male homemaking demonstrate the extent to which domesticity, economic dependency, and gender have been entangled in the American imagination. My dissertation underscores how women (and some men) adopted flexible definitions of homemaking to create complicated and sometimes fleeting alliances through which housewives organized. My research complicates the dichotomous stereotypes of the feminist and the antifeminist by exploring how both progressive and traditionalist women organized as housewives. Although my project considers media and pop culture, I rely primarily on archival research and published primary sources to examine the way that women claiming to be homemakers and mothers actively manipulated cultural understandings of those roles. The definitions they employed demonstrate how perceptions of homemaking are laden with multiple and complex meanings about sex, gender, class, race, citizenship, labor, religion, and identity.

From the late 1970s through the early 1990s, a minority conservative faction took over the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). This project seeks to answer the questions of how a fringe minority within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination could undertake such a feat and why they chose to do so. The framework through which this work analyzes these questions is one of competing worldviews that emerged within the SBC in response to decades of societal shifts and denominational transformations in the post-World War II era. To place the events of the Southern Baptist “crisis” within this framework, this study seeks to refute the prevailing notion put forth in earlier works that the takeover was an in-house event, driven purely by doctrinal disputes between conservative Southern Baptists and SBC leadership. Illustrating the differences between rhetoric and action on both sides of this intra-denominational conflict, this work seeks to provide perspective to the narrative of the Southern Baptist “crisis” by asserting that the worldviews guiding the opposing factions diverged not only on doctrine, but culture and politics as well. Placing the events of the “crisis” within the context of broader worldviews, this project highlights and examines the intertwined nature of religion, culture, and politics in modern American society.

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.

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The research proposes to investigate the appropriattion of the artistic thinking of the italian painter Frei Nazareno Confaloni (1917-1977) and his proceding in the context of modernity in Goias from the 1950's, observing it's relation with the scholars linked to the cultural institutions of the state and, consequently, with the projects of renewal who were typical of the artistical environment of the early 1950's in Goias. From the understanding of how art criticism construes the work of the italian artist based in Brazil, this work investigates the appropriation of Confaloni as an icon of modernity and associates him with the founding myth of the city of Goiania. The paper deals with the issues of modernity, modernization and modernism as bridges for the understanding of the modern project of Brazil, considering as the main point the concept of conservative modernization with emphasis on cultural. To achieve this goal, it observes the context of modernization of the city of São Paulo during the first half of the twentieth century so that one can rethink how Goias assumed the demands of modernization during the 1950's and the 1960's. It analyzes the fortuity of the first decades of the construction of the city, the activities related to the creation of the Escola Goiana de Belas Artes (EGBA) and the debate of scholars and artists around a modernist campaign, in which Confaloni is a fundamental piece in the construction of the reasoning of the new, founded on cultural bases. From an idea of the sacralization of the human and the humanization of the sacred in the artistic thinking of Nazareno Confaloni, this paper makes an analytical interpretation of his works based on historical events, exploring the tensions between his religious and artistic formation, confronting them with artistic movements from Europe and Brazil, Besides the religious and socio-political thinking in Latin America. In addition to its construction as a modern inaugural artist, the research points to Confaloni's appropriations of the Brazilian and Latin American conjunctures, evaluanting them as fundamental for their constitution as a religious and as an artist.
A pesquisa propõe investigar apropriação do pensamento artístico do pintor italiano Frei Nazareno Confaloni (1917-1977) e sua atuação no contexto da modernidade em Goiás a partir da década de 1950, observando sua relação com os intelectuais ligados às instituições culturais do Estado, e consequentemente com os projetos de renovação artística, característica do ambiente artístico goiano do início dos anos de 1950. Parte do entendimento de como a crítica de arte interpreta o conjunto da obra do artista italiano radicado no Brasil, investiga a apropriação de Confaloni como ícone de modernidade e o associa ao mito fundador da Cidade de Goiânia. O trabalho aborda as questões que tratam de modernidade, modernização e modernismo como pontes para o entendimento do projeto moderno do Brasil, considerando como ponto principal o conceito de modernização conservadora com ênfase no cultural. Para tanto, observa o contexto de modernização da cidade de São Paulo durante a primeira metade do século XX para que se possa repensar a forma como Goiás assumiu os reclames de modernização nos idos dos anos de 1950 e 1960. Analisa a conjuntura das primeiras décadas da Construção da cidade, as atividades relacionadas à criação da Escola Goiana de Belas Artes (EGBA)e o debate de intelectuais e artistas em torno de uma campanha modernista, na qual Confaloni é peça fundamental na construção do discurso do novo fundado em bases culturais. A partir de uma ideia de Sacralização do humano e humanização do sagrado no pensamento artístico de Nazareno Confaloni faz uma interpretação analítica de suas obras baseada em acontecimentos históricos, explorando as tensões entre sua formação religiosa e artística, confrontando-as com os movimentos artísticos europeus e brasileiros e o pensamento religioso sociopolítico na América Latina. Para além de sua construção como artista inaugural moderno, a pesquisa aponta as apropriações de Confaloni da conjuntura brasileira e latino-americana, avaliando-as como fundamentais para sua constituição como religioso e como artista.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2009.
Title from first page of PDF file (viewed June 23, 2009). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 393-410).

This thesis analyses the roles played by international, national, regional and local organisations and discourses in the heritage valorisation and conservation of modernist architecture – a process that has so far spanned some three decades. A leading role in this narrative has been played by international conservation organisations, which have acted as a unifying front for conservation advocacy and defined a conservation ideology that integrates the principles of both the modern movement and the conservation movement. Partly, this international emphasis has stemmed from the characteristics of the 20th century Modern Movement itself, including its strong strain of cosmopolitanism, as well as its still controversial reputation today at a local level. This initially gave the proselytising of modernist conservation a somewhat elite, trans-national character, exemplified by pioneering organisations such as DOCOMOMO. Yet the ‘internationalism’ of modernist conservation is only part of the story – for to establish this innovative new strand of heritage on a more entrenched basis, the familiar, more locally specific organisations and discourses that had supported previous phases of conservation growth were also increasingly applied to ‘MoMo’ heritage. This ‘on the ground’ involvement represented a convergence with more ‘traditional’ conservation practices, both in advocacy and campaigning, and in the research-led documentation required to document buildings’ significance and continued fitness for purpose. These geographically-specific forces operate at both a national level and also a regional or even local scale, as the thesis illustrates by the two national case studies of Great Britain and the United States of America. Although both countries shared numerous cultural similarities, especially the 19th century veneration of private property, the far more emphatic 20th century turn towards state interventionism in Britain led to a strong divergence regarding modernist heritage, both in the overall character of the modernist architecture built in the two countries (far more ‘capitalistic’ in the US) and in the approach to heritage conservation (more state-dominated in GB). In Great Britain, following on from the comprehensive post-WWII government ‘listing’ programme, the statutory heritage bodies – ‘regionally’ differentiated between England and Scotland - have maintained their leading role in the conservation of modern movement heritage through initiatives to identify buildings of significance, and powerful city planning authorities have provided co-ordinated enforcement. In the US, on the other hand, heritage protection has stayed faithful to its philanthropic roots and the onus of modern movement conservation is left to voluntary advocacy groups who then must campaign to have buildings protected piecemeal by local city or state preservation bodies.

This applied anthropology dissertation aims to enhance public policy and best practices for conserving potable water resources, using the Tampa Bay region of southwest Florida as a case study. It addresses not how humans conserve, but why they may or may not choose to do so. To date, a limited anthropological focus on water conservation behavior in western, urban settings has created a gap in the role culture plays in understanding why people conserve. The research problem is to identify how water conservation behavior in Tampa, Florida can be enhanced through a better understanding of beliefs and values reflected in individual mental models of water users, and subsequent cultural models that emerge. Applied anthropologists are paying increasing attention to "cultural models," those shared, simplified, formal representations of explicit and implicit knowledge, interests, beliefs, and values that help individuals understand the world and their behavior in it. Environmental anthropologists, especially, have recognized the power of this analytic tool to find solutions to complex environmental problems by incorporating cultural and political contexts. Though Florida’s water resources appear abundant, they are highly variable in time and space with a well documented flood and drought recurrence, 90% of the 2007 population of 18.7 million living in coastal areas and most fresh ground water, which 93% of the population relies on for drinking supplies, situated inland. By 2020, Florida’s projected total water use will grow from 7.2 to 9.1 billion gallons per day, with public significant water “source” by overcoming public apathy and better understanding conserving behavior. The research methodology emphasizes a qualitative approach to address beliefs and values most related to water conservation, and identify cultural models. Key methods employed were: a comprehensive contextual analysis of Florida’s history, environment and water law; use of recent results of a Tampa Bay Water Conservation Public Opinion Survey; and semi-structured interviews with twenty City of Tampa households (half high water users and half low water users) and seven water resource experts. All twenty-seven interviews were recorded and transcribed for textual analysis to reveal mental and cultural models, and let informants speak for themselves to share their beliefs and values. Direct quotations were coded and used to illustrate key points, including the three cultural domains that emerged: 1) Why conserve water?; 2) Sources of conservation values; and 3) Lack of water conservation awareness and involvement. The primary beliefs and values identified by informants included: 1) the need to avoid waste and greed protect existing water supply sources perception of fairness among water users . Both the archival research (past opinion surveys, media coverage) and semi-structured interviews indicate people feel conservation is not being shared fairly among water users. This view is closely linked to waste and greed values, and applies to watering lawns excessively as well as use by other sectors (agriculture, golf courses, businesses, etc.). Informants felt strongly rules are not being enforced equitably. The clear danger is this perception may serve as rationale for non-conserving behavior. , both for current benefits and generations to come; and 3) the perception of fairness among water users . Both the archival research (past opinion surveys, media coverage) and semi-structured interviews indicate people feel conservation is not being shared fairly among water users. This view is closely linked to waste and greed values, and applies to watering lawns excessively as well as use by other sectors (agriculture, golf courses, businesses, etc.). Informants felt strongly rules are not being enforced equitably. The clear danger is this perception may serve as rationale for non-conserving behavior. Two other shared beliefs and values were put forward by informants. A significant majority believe existing policy areas of education, regulation and incentives should be used to achieve water conservation . Finally, the predominant role of family as the source of conservation values was strongly supported. The specific “cultural model” for water conservation in Tampa would be based in family as a source of conservation values, emphasize avoidance of waste while protecting existing sources and directly address widespread perceptions of inequity among water users. The theory and methods of anthropology, including cultural models, can contribute to enhancing water conservation. This dissertation is an example of those possibilities, setting the stage for ongoing research, including: • Refinement of methods specific to the water use culture of the Tampa region. • Exploring cultural models of diverse sub-cultures such as youth, Hispanics and others to enhance water conservation. • Overcoming social desirability impacts as part of refining cultural models.

The rate of acceleration of the biologic and synthetic world has for a while now, been in the process of exponentially speeding up, maxing out servers and landfills, merging with each other, destroying each other. The last prehistoric relics on Earth are absorbing the same oxygen, carbon dioxide and electronic waves in our biosphere as us. A degraded .jpeg enlarged to full screen on a Samsung 4K UHD HU8550 Series Smart TV - 85” Class (84.5” diag.). Within this composite ecology, the ancient limestone of the grand canyon competes with the iMax movie of itself, the production of Mac pros, a YouTube clip from Jurassic park, and the super bowl halftime show. A search engines assistance with biographic memory helps our bodies survive new atmospheres and weigh the gravities that exist around the versions of an objects materiality. Communication has moved from our vocal chords, to swipes and taps of our thumbs on a screen that predicts the weather, accesses the hidden, invisible, and withdrawn information from the objects around us, and still ducks up what we are trying to say. This txt was written on a tablet returned to stock settings and embedded with content to mine the experience in which mediated technology creates, communicates and obscures new forms of language. Life in a new event horizon — a dimensional dualism that finds us competing for genetic and mimetic survival — we are now functioning as different types of humans.

This study examines the legal struggle over school desegregation in Alabama in the two decades following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision of 1954. It seeks to better understand the activists who mounted a litigious assault on segregated education, the segregationists who opposed them, and the ways in which law shaped both of these efforts. Inspired by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) campaign to implement Brown, blacks sought access to their constitutional rights in the state’s federal courts, where they were ultimately able to force substantial compliance. Whites, however, converted massive resistance into an ostensibly colorblind movement to preserve “law and order,” while at the same time taking effective measures to preserve segregation and white privilege. As soon as the NAACP implementation campaign began, self-styled moderate segregationists began to abandon self-defeating forms of resistance and to fashion a creed of “law and order.” When black activists achieved a litigious breakthrough in 1963, the developing creed allowed segregationists to reject violence and outright defiance of the law, to accept token desegregation, and to begin to stake their own claims to constitutional rights – all without forcing them to repudiate segregation and white supremacy. When continuing litigation forced school systems to abandon ineffective “freedom of choice” desegregation plans for compulsory pupil assignment plans, these so-called moderates began using their individual rights language to justify flight to private segregationist academies, independent suburban school systems, and otherwise safely white school districts. Political and legal historians have underappreciated the deep and broad roots of the narrative of white racial innocence, the endurance of massive resistance, and the pivotal role which school desegregation litigation played in channeling both into a broader movement towards modern conservatism. The cases considered here – particularly the statewide Lee v. Macon County Board of Education case – demonstrate the effectiveness of litigation in bringing down official state and local barriers to equal opportunity for minorities and in enforcing constitutional law. But they also showcase the limits of litigation in effecting social justice in the face of powerfully constructed narratives of resistance seemingly built upon the nation’s founding principles.

The purpose of this Master’s Report was to determine an appropriate preservation strategy for a particular set of buildings and their accompanying art from the Modern Architecture Movement. The research question was: What type of strategy is best suited for the preservation of installed art created for Modern style buildings? The study analyzed preservation strategies afforded to Modern art and architecture during rehabilitation of the buildings. The case studies are Modern Movement office or bank buildings with art commissioned for the space by the architects or owners. An analysis of the main case study’s preservation strategies looks at all the actions taken and proposed to protect, not only the material fabric of the art, but the primary interior space. The main case study was the American National Bank building in Austin, Texas designed by Kuehne, Brooks and Barr Architects with a mural by Seymour Fogel. The secondary case studies were: Harry Bertoia sculpture + Manufacturers Trust Building, New York City, Pietro Belluschi mural + Equitable Building, Portland, Oregon, Richard Lippold sculpture + Inland Steel Building, Chicago, and Roger Darricarrere dalle de verre + Columbia Savings Buildings, Los Angeles. After study and analysis, the preservation strategies were categorized in four categories: in situ conservation, removal, recreation/replacement and demolition/destruction. It was concluded that there is not a general approach for these projects, and each should be analyzed through various factors (Design Intent, Intrinsic Value, Collaboration and Context) to determine the appropriate intervention.
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abstract: This work investigates the effects of non-random sampling on our understanding of species distributions and their niches. In its most general form, bias is systematic error that can obscure interpretation of analytical results by skewing samples away from the average condition of the system they represent. Here I use species distribution modelling (SDM), virtual species, and multiscale geographically weighted regression (MGWR) to explore how sampling bias can alter our perception of broad patterns of biodiversity by distorting spatial predictions of habitat, a key characteristic in biogeographic studies. I use three separate case studies to explore: 1) How methods to account for sampling bias in species distribution modeling may alter estimates of species distributions and species-environment relationships, 2) How accounting for sampling bias in fossil data may change our understanding of paleo-distributions and interpretation of niche stability through time (i.e. niche conservation), and 3) How a novel use of MGWR can account for environmental sampling bias to reveal landscape patterns of local niche differences among proximal, but non-overlapping sister taxa. Broadly, my work shows that sampling bias present in commonly used federated global biodiversity observations is more than enough to degrade model performance of spatial predictions and niche characteristics. Measures commonly used to account for this bias can negate much loss, but only in certain conditions, and did not improve the ability to correctly identify explanatory variables or recreate species-environment relationships. Paleo-distributions calibrated on biased fossil records were improved with the use of a novel method to directly estimate the biased sampling distribution, which can be generalized to finer time slices for further paleontological studies. Finally, I show how a novel coupling of SDM and MGWR can illuminate local differences in niche separation that more closely match landscape genotypic variability in the two North American desert tortoise species than does their current taxonomic delineation.
Dissertation/Thesis
Doctoral Dissertation Geography 2018

While documentation of the work of a select group of modernist landscape architects of the mid-twentieth century is available, little is known about the professional contributions of transitional landscape architects active in the period following World War II. Using selected projects framed by existing literature covering contemporary social, economic, political, and artistic influences, this study examines the career of one such transitional figure, Sidney Nichols Shurcliff (1906-1981). Project descriptions and analysis measure the scope of Shurcliff's work and the degree to which he contributed to the discipline and its transition to modernism, thereby augmenting the history of landscape architecture practice.

The City of Holyoke, Massachusetts is one of many aging, industrial cities striving to revitalize its economy based on the promise of increased digital connectivity and clean energy resources. But how do you renovate 19th century mills to meet the demands of the information age? This architectural study explores the potential impact of sensing technologies and information networks on the definition and function of buildings in the 21st century. It explores the changes that have taken place in industrial architecture since 1850 and argues for an architecture that supports local relationships and environmental awareness. The author explores the industrial history of Holyoke, appraises emerging uses of sensing technologies and presents a thorough narrative of her site analysis and conceptual design of a digital fabrication and incubation center within an existing textile mill.