History Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2778
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Item "They're Bringing Home Japanese Wives": Japanese War Brides in the Postwar Era(2009) Tudico, Angela; Muncy, Robyn; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"'They're Bringing Home Japanese Wives': Japanese War Brides in the Postwar Era" explores the immigration of Japanese war brides to the U.S. following World War II and why the United States so swiftly and dramatically reversed its views toward immigration from Japan following the war; the degree to which Americans, both those of Japanese descent and those of other heritages, accepted this influx of newcomers; and the lived experiences of these immigrant women during their first decade in America. Drawing on sources that range from government documents to interviews with war brides conducted in the 1950s, I argue that postwar constructions of racialized gender eased the acceptance of these women into American society. However, sometimes the degree of acceptance was contingent on the race of the war bride's husband to such a degree that one might speak of racial or ethnic coverture in the mid-20th Century U.S.Item "Dear Little Living Arguments": Orphans and Other Poor Children, Their Families and Orphanages, Baltimore and Liverpool, 1840-1910(2009) Wilson, Marcy Kay; Gullickson, Gay; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Orphanages in the United States and England cared for thousands of children between the early decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. These institutions were central to local provisions for the poor during a time period in which state and government poor relief remained limited. Though a small group of studies have focused on American orphan asylums and even fewer works have evaluated English orphanages, no effort has of yet been made to engage in a comparative analysis of the institutions that cared for so many children in both countries. Through analysis of Protestant orphan asylum registers, correspondence, committee minutes, and annual reports, this dissertation investigates the local provisions made for poor children in Baltimore, Maryland and Liverpool, England, between 1840 and 1910, examines the socio-economic realities of the families these children came from, the ways in which poor children in both cities were affected by the needs of their families and the aid available to them, and the similarities and differences that existed between these orphanages and their residents. This dissertation argues that there were significant differences between orphanage inhabitants in both cities when it came to parental survival and to who children ended up with after their residence in these institutions, but that the orphanages were remarkably alike, providing the poor children in their care with similar educational, religious and vocational training that the middle-class reformers who ran these institutions understood as gender and class appropriate. This study reveals a prolonged commitment on the part of orphanage administrators in both cities to the use of indenture as a dismissal method, and suggests as well the existence of a shared trans-Atlantic understanding of poor children and their labor when it came to these asylum officials.Item Second-Wave Feminism in the American South, 1965-1980(2009) Keane, Katarina; Rowland, Leslie S.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the late 1960s and 1970s, second-wave feminism transformed American society, creating new legal rights for women, remaking gender roles, and altering women's position in the economy. Although largely omitted from popular and scholarly accounts, Southern women played critical roles in the second wave. At the grassroots, they engaged in a wide array of feminist activism, from establishing credit unions to opening health clinics, from suing discriminatory employers to opening rape crisis centers, from challenging sterilization abuse to building lesbian community, and from setting up feminist businesses to organizing domestic workers. Their initiatives included efforts to place women in non-traditional jobs, campaigns for political office, and court cases that established reproductive freedom and mandated equal pay. In restoring Southern women to the history of second-wave feminism, the dissertation suggests that the movement was far more widespread than has previously been acknowledged. While drawing on evidence from throughout the South, the dissertation devotes particularly close attention to Atlanta, Georgia, Chapel Hill-Durham, North Carolina, and Austin and Dallas, Texas, all places where feminists were especially active and the sources are especially rich. It demonstrates that Southern women of widely varying backgrounds engaged in feminist activism, but only rarely in organizations that crossed lines of race and class. More commonly, they mobilized in coalitions that preserved separate identities and agendas while addressing common grievances. The women's movement in the South may thus be characterized as multiple movements that overlapped at times, if only in limited ways, and moved along parallel tracks at others. Southern feminists confronted daunting obstacles, including their region's long history of racial injustice, social and economic conditions that lagged behind those of the rest of the nation, a weak welfare state, and entrenched political conservatism. The need to circumvent hostile state and local authorities led some Southern feminists to turn to the federal courts as a more promising arena. In so doing, they launched a number of landmark legal cases that transformed the lives of all American women. Ironically, feminists in the most conservative region of the nation became the vanguard of the women's movement.Item "America was Promises": The Ideology of Equal Opportunity, 1877-1905(2009) Goldstene, Claire; Gerstle, Gary; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"`America was Promises': The Ideology of Equal Opportunity, 1877-1905" seeks to untangle one of the enduring ideas in American history--equal economic opportunity--by exploring the varied discourses about its meaning during the upheavals caused by the corporate consolidation of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In so doing, a new framework is proposed through which to comprehend the social and political disruptions wrought by the transition from an entrepreneurial to a corporate society. This framework centers on a series of tensions that have permeated the idea of opportunity in the American context. As an expression of capitalism, the ideology of equal opportunity historically occupies conflicted terrain as it endeavors to promote upward mobility by permitting more people to participate in the economic sphere and emphasizing merit over inherited wealth, while it concurrently acts as a mechanism to maintain economic inequality. This tension allowed the rhetoric of opportunity to animate social dissent among rural and urban workers--the origins of Progressive reform--even as it simultaneously served efforts by business elites to temper this dissent. The dissertation examines the discourses about the ideology of equal opportunity of prominent figures and groups located along a spectrum of political belief. Some grounded opportunity in land ownership (Booker T. Washington); others defined it as control of one's own labor (Knights of Labor); while others connected opportunity to increased leisure and consumption (Samuel Gompers and business elites). As this occurred, the site of opportunity shifted away from entrepreneurship toward competition for advancement and investment within the corporation. Most social activists and reformers stressed the conditions necessary for equal opportunity to thrive. They thus reinforced assumptions about the benefits of economic competition and differentially rewarding individuals, even as they objected to the results of that system. And, certainly, some of these arguments led to progressive changes. But because the necessary outcome of equal opportunity was an inequality of economic result, to move beyond the boundaries of equal opportunity ideology demanded a rare willingness (Edward Bellamy) to question the system of economic competition itself.Item "Beans are Bullets" and "Of Course I Can!" Exhibiting War-Era Posters from the Collection of the National Agriculture Library(2009) Bernat, Cory A.; Freund, David M; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)An exhibit of food and agriculture posters in the Special Collection of the National Agriculture Library will display posters from World Wars I and II side by side. What did these messages look like and how did they change over time? Public servants produced the earlier WWI posters to reflect "reason-why" approaches to mass communication. During WWII, the Advertising Council's business-minded admen produced posters with their techniques for modern advertising and mass persuasion. Poster text shortened, the tone lightened and images were more frequent and splashier. This collection of posters bears witness to the professionalization and rising influence of the advertising industry in the 1920s and 30s, and reveals the agendas of the creators and their assumptions about homefront populations. The posters raise questions about the sources and ambitions of government sponsored messages designed to encourage cooperation with war efforts and modify homefront behavior.Item Difficulties in Loyalism After Independence: The Treatment of Loyalists and Nonjurors in Maryland, 1777-1784(2009) Nath, Kimberly; Ridgway, Whitman; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the difficulties the Maryland legislature encountered with Loyalists and nonjurors after independence. It follows how the legislation passed by the Patriot controlled legislature was implemented from 1777 to 1784. The Maryland legislature first passed legislation to identify those not supporting the American Revolution, mainly the Loyalists and nonjurors. This thesis explores the identification process and then the punitive measures, such as British property confiscation and treble taxes, taken by the legislature. This thesis argues that Patriots succeeded in identifying Loyalists, but struggled to seize all British property and failed to generate vast amounts of revenue.Item Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990(2009) Chase, Robert Terry; Gerstle, Gary L.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study, "Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990," offers a new perspective on the historical origins of the modern prison industrial complex, sexual violence in working-class culture, and the ways in which race shaped the prison experience. This study joins new scholarship that reperiodizes the Civil Rights era while also considering how violence and radicalism shaped the civil rights struggle. It places the criminal justice system at the heart of both an older racial order and within a prison-made civil rights movement that confronted the prison's power to deny citizenship and enforce racial hierarchies. By charting the trajectory of the civil rights movement in Texas prisons, my dissertation demonstrates how the internal struggle over rehabilitation and punishment shaped civil rights, racial formation, and the political contest between liberalism and conservatism. This dissertation offers a close case study of Texas, where the state prison system emerged as a national model for penal management. The dissertation begins with a hopeful story of reform marked by an apparently successful effort by the State of Texas to replace its notorious 1940s plantation/prison farm system with an efficient, business-oriented agricultural enterprise system. When this new system was fully operational in the 1960s, Texas garnered plaudits as a pioneering, modern, efficient, and business oriented Sun Belt state. But this reputation of competence and efficiency obfuscated the reality of a brutal system of internal prison management in which inmates acted as guards, employing coercive means to maintain control over the prisoner population. The inmates whom the prison system placed in charge also ran an internal prison economy in which money, food, human beings, reputations, favors, and sex all became commodities to be bought and sold. I analyze both how the Texas prison system managed to maintain its high external reputation for so long in the face of the internal reality and how that reputation collapsed when inmates, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, revolted. My dissertation shows that this inmate Civil Rights rebellion was a success in forcing an end to the existing system but a failure in its attempts to make conditions in Texas prisons more humane. The new Texas prison regime, I conclude, utilized paramilitary practices, privatized prisons, and gang-related warfare to establish a new system that focused much more on law and order in the prisons than on the legal and human rights of prisoners. Placing the inmates and their struggle at the heart of the national debate over rights and "law and order" politics reveals an inter-racial social justice movement that asked the courts to reconsider how the state punished those who committed a crime while also reminding the public of the inmates' humanity and their constitutional rights.Item Under the Arch of Friendship: Culture, Urban Redevelopment and Symbolic Architecture in D.C. Chinatown, 1970s-1990s(2009) Khoo, Evelyn; Gao, James Z; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis explores the history of the urban development and architectural changes in Washington, D.C. Chinatown in the late twentieth century. Urban development in D.C. Chinatown traces the way in which local politics, ethnic community elites and the larger international backdrop of geopolitics and the globalizing economy found expression in the visual streetscapes and architecture in the neighborhood perceived to be a predominantly ethnic site. This essay argues that the case of D.C. Chinatown represents a larger call for a spatial turn in Chinese American history, where more emphasis can be placed on the uses of symbolic architecture in determining Chinese American identity and settlement.Item Teaching the Confederacy: Textbooks in the Civil War South(2009) Kopp, Laura Elizabeth; Rowland, Leslie; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)During the Civil War, at least 136 textbooks appeared in the states that made up the Confederacy, more than half of them in 1863 and 1864. The production of so many textbooks under difficult wartime circumstances suggests their significance in the promotion of Confederate values and ideologies. This thesis examines the Confederate textbook campaign, including the motives of authors and publishers, and analyzes the content of the textbooks themselves, including such themes as patriotism, gender roles, war, and death. While similar to antebellum textbooks in many respects, Confederate textbooks portrayed slavery as central to Southern society and offered explicit defenses of the institution. They also sought to promote Confederate nationalism among the new nation's youngest citizens and instructed children to honor and memorialize the Confederacy. The pages of Confederate textbooks constituted vital terrain for the shaping of the hearts and minds of Southern children.Item Ships of State: Maritime Policy as Foreign Policy Under the Merchant Ship Sales Act of 1946(2009) Beers, Lloyd Anthony; Sicilia, David B.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)U.S. maritime policy immediately following World War II included the disposal of surplus merchant vessels to foreign countries under the terms of the Merchant Ship Sales Act of 1946. Concurrently, U.S. foreign policy was directed toward restoring balanced international trade and monetary flows. The U.S. Maritime Commission and the U.S. Department of State found a common purpose in the sales of surplus ships to foreign nations. The Maritime Commission wanted to rid itself of vessels it had no need to operate or maintain, and the State Department was anxious to facilitate vessel sales to further its foreign policy goals that included rapid global economic recovery, thriving multilateral trade, and containment of communism. This thesis examines the international objectives and outcomes of the combined efforts of the U.S. Maritime Commission and the U.S. Department of State to distribute surplus war-built merchant vessels to the maritime nations of the world.