History Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2778
Browse
12 results
Search Results
Item "Foreboding Circumstances": U.S. Labor Intervention and the Chilean Labor Movement during the Cold War, 1964-1973(2024) Gutmann Fuentes, Andrea Nicole; Rosemblatt, Karin A.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recent scholarship in Cold War and transnational labor history has examined the role played by U.S. organized labor in neutralizing left-wing labor movements around the world, contributing to U.S. State Department goals of anti-communist containment in the Third World. Research from both within and outside the academy has examined how the AFL-CIO, operating primary through the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), acted to undermine the socialist Unidad Popular government in Chile, helping to set the stage for the U.S.-backed coup d’etat on September 11, 1973. However, this scholarship has suffered from a relative lack of Chilean primary source material and a failure to ground historical analyses in the local Chilean context. This has impeded a full view of how the AFL-CIO’s labor intervention project unfolded in Chile, how it was perceived and responded to by Chileans, and the extent to which it was ultimately successful. This thesis makes use of Chilean national press, books, and trade union and left-wing media, in addition to new source material pulled from the U.S. State Department and the AFL-CIO archives, to assess the successes and failures of the AFL-CIO’s labor intervention project in Chile. The thesis demonstrates that while the AFL-CIO failed to accomplish many of its concrete goals in Chile due to overwhelming opposition to its project among Chilean labor, the AFL-CIO’s relationship with particular sectors of the Chilean labor movement effectively advanced a more general political goal of fomenting labor opposition from labor in strategic sectors of the economy to undermine the Unidad Popular government, thereby contributing to the success of the 1973 coup. By examining AFL-CIO’s complicated and paradoxical relationship with the centrist Christian Democratic Party, this thesis argues that the vast majority of Chilean workers from a broad array of ideological tendencies rejected the AFL-CIO’s promotion of “free trade unionism,” an explicitly anti-communist ideology advocating that workers reject a politics of class struggle in favor of class harmony between labor and management. This thesis then demonstrates that the AFL-CIO encouraged and validated the decision of some conservative labor leaders in the stevedore labor movement to ultimately join the anti-Allende opposition. Under the intensely polarized political context of early 1970s Chile, in which conservative labor leaders faced social and political pressures to move leftward with the majority of the labor movement and to support the Unidad Popular, the decision of these labor leaders to join the right-wing opposition with support from the AFL-CIO was a significant event contributing to the 1973 coup.Item America's Commercial Cold War: Global Trade, National Security, and the Control of Markets(2019) Haddad, Ryan Issa; Sicilia, David; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Previous works considering the history of American trade policy during the Cold War have tended to focus on either the United States’ export control policy in the unilateral and multilateral context or the Cold War’s influence on the formation and evolution on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. While useful, these studies are limited by their narrowness. To date, no single work has emerged accounting for trade’s place in American Cold War strategy or the reciprocal impact that economic globalization and the Cold War had on each other. I argue that American Cold War trade policy was an “economic containment” exercise. The United States’ “Commercial Cold War” was conceptualized by strategists as a struggle between two rival, yet interdependent networks—one liberal and capitalist, and led by the United States; the other communist and led at the outset by the Soviet Union. The United States used trade both positively and negatively to achieve a variety of ends. Its overarching goal was to use trade to develop its network at the expense of the Soviet Union’s. This strategy assumed centralized, flexible control over trade policy in order to capitalize on diplomatic openings. Successive American presidents aspired to such trade policy control. But the diffusion of power throughout the U.S. government and across the Western alliance rendered that impossible. It proved far easier to deny East-West trade than to expand it, and more assertive American initiatives were often stymied. But despite the limits on unilateral action, the multilateral trade architectures that were established during the Cold War proved adequate to their purposes and remain in renovated form in the 21st Century.Item HOUSING DEVELOPMENT: HOUSING POLICY, SLUMS, AND SQUATTER SETTLEMENTS IN RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL AND BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA, 1948-1973(2012) Benmergui, Leandro Daniel; Williams, Daryle; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the role of low-income housing in the development of two major Latin American societies that underwent demographic explosion, rural-to-urban migration, and growing urban poverty in the postwar era. The central argument treats popular housing as a constitutive element of urban development, interamerican relations, and citizenship, interrogating the historical processes through which the modern Latin American city became a built environment of contrasts. I argue that local and national governments, social scientists, and technical elites of the postwar Americas sought to modernize Latin American societies by deepening the mechanisms for capitalist accumulation and by creating built environments designed to generate modern sociabilities and behaviors. Elite discourse and policy understood the urban home to be owner-occupied and built with a rationalized domestic layout. The modern home for the poor would rely upon a functioning local government capable of guaranteeing a reliable supply of electricity and clean water, as well as sewage and trash removal. Rational transportation planning would allow the city resident access between the home and workplaces, schools, medical centers, and police posts. As interamerican Cold War relations intensified in response to the Cuban Revolution, policymakers, urban scholars, planners, defined in transnational encounters an acute "housing problem," a term that condensed the myriad aspects involved in urban dwellings for low-income populations. The policy outcome of these encounters was the arrival of foreign economic and technical assistance dedicated to slum eradication and publically-financed popular housing. Within the policy and social sciences circuits of modernization theory during the Cold War context, housing policy emerged as a discursive and practical antidote to the problem of sheltering a burgeoning urban population and its attendant attributes of underdevelopment, poverty, and social unrest. The dissertation demonstrates how a handful of selected cases of popular housing erected in Rio and Buenos Aires ultimately did not fulfill the stated goals embraced by the proponents of developmentalism and interamerican assistance. It shows the extent to which a shortfall of outcomes relative to goals was indicative in part of hemispheric transitions, but also of the particularities of the modernizing city in the second half of the twentieth century.Item Fractured Front: Gender, Authenticity, and the Remaking of the American Left after World War Two(2012) Larocco, Christina G.; Muncy, Robyn; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is a study of one long&ndashterm, inherently gendered effect of the Cold War. In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, as the emerging Cold War empowered a long&ndashstanding anti&ndashcommunist strain in U.S. political culture, many artists and intellectuals feared the massification of human beings communism allegedly produced. One of the tools they developed to combat this specter of massification was the discourse of authenticity. Authenticity was predicated on the belief that useful analyses of the world came only from individual thought, experience, and emotion&mdashnot existing political theories or overarching explanations. The artists and intellectuals who developed this theory argued that the expression of this individual truth was the best way to combat and prevent totalitarianism. Authenticity continued to be important to the white, left&ndashleaning social movements of the 1960s. Through them, it fed into the identity politics of the 1970s and 1980s. I thus draw a straight line between Cold War anti&ndashtotalitarianism and identity politics. I explore this phenomenon in a range of cultural, intellectual, and political realms, including the anti&ndashtotalitarian thought of Frankfurt School intellectuals, the Method acting of Lee Strasberg, the Beat writing of Jack Kerouac, and the New Left politics of Students for a Democratic Society. In each arena, I trace two key patterns. The first is the gendering of authenticity. The men who dominated these fields often insisted that women were too deeply tied to the conformist &ldquomass&rdquo to be truly authentic. Women like Method actress and teacher Stella Adler, liberal feminist Betty Friedan, Beat writer Joyce Glassman Johnson, and the women's liberationists who broke off from SDS had to fight to be included in this culture. I document their attempts to do so. Second, I argue that the connection between 1950s culture and 1960s New Left activism went far beyond a shared gender politics. The discourse of authenticity also granted special authority to the artist, who was imagined as the figure best equipped to resist the forces of massification. This belief had far-reaching effects on the relationship between cultural production and left politics, precluding the appearance of a 1930s&ndashstyle &ldquocultural front&rdquo.Item A DAVID AGAINST GOLIATH: THE AMERICAN VETERANS COMMITTEE'S CHALLENGE TO THE AMERICAN LEGION IN THE 1950s(2010) Hoefer, Peter Darr; Gilbert, James B; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Document: A DAVID AGAINST GOLIATH: THE AMERICAN VETERANS COMMITTEE'S CHALLENGE TO THE AMERICAN LEGION IN THE 1950s Peter D. Hoefer, Ph.D. 2010 Directed By: Professor James B. Gilbert, Department of History This study joins a nascent body of scholarship that seeks to enrich and complicate understanding of 1950s political culture. While this newer scholarship acknowledges conservative dominance, it has also uncovered considerable evidence that the period was far more politically diverse and contested. This study demonstrates that there was no single, unitary conservative Americanism or patriotism in the fifties decade. Instead, the American Veterans Committee, despite suffering heavy membership losses after purging the Communist Party from its ranks in the late 1940s, survived, regrouped and persistently challenged the hegemonic conservative American Legion, (the nation's largest veterans' organization) throughout the 1950s. Using a liberal version of what I term Cold War Americanism, the AVC attempted to defend and advance the New Deal legacy. The Legion, however, using a conservative version of anti-Communist discourse, joined with its counterparts in the postwar Right to oppose the interventionist liberal state. I explore the role of these contending languages in shaping 1950s political culture by analyzing how these two groups used Cold War Americanism to advance their respective interest concerning two of the period's most important domestic issues: the restriction on civil liberties, and the developing struggle for African-American civil rights. This study demonstrates that within the community of organized veterans, the American Legion was not the only voice heard in the 1950s. Any account of this period that fails to acknowledge the presence of the AVC would be incomplete and inaccurate.Item Suitcase Diplomacy: The Role of Travel in Sino-American Relations, 1949-1968(2010) Rubin, Daniel Aaron; Olson, Keith; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines U.S. travel in the context of Sino-American relations between 1949 and 1968. Building on recent scholarship on tourism and foreign relations, this dissertation argues that historians cannot develop a comprehensive understanding of the U.S. relationship with the People's Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, and Hong Kong without establishing travel and travelers as significant agents of historical change. Using tourism as a centerpiece of historical inquiry, moreover, adds complexity to the traditional Cold War narrative and suggests that other forces, aside from East-West struggle, defined the international climate in the post-World War II period. The post-1945 boom in recreational tourism did not materialize uniformly around the world. On the mainland of China, swept up in civil war, travel was difficult and unappealing. The emergence of Cold War tensions in the region added a new obstacle to tourism as Washington imposed restrictions on American travel. Using the founding of the PRC as a starting point, this dissertation follows the course of American travel and travel policy in the region. As opposed to being marked by isolation and disengagement, the period from 1949 to 1968 saw incredible activity in the area of travel. In terms of U.S.-PRC relations, travel served as a medium of engagement and both sides showed a willingness to initiate travel exchanges and reforms to travel policy as a means of feeling out the opposing camp. Moving beyond the mainland of China, U.S. officials, private industry, and individual travelers perceived Taiwan and Hong Kong as "alternatives" to the PRC and both destinations experienced huge booms in tourism. In all these realms, travel developed both as a crucial element of U.S. containment policy and as a phenomenon that seemed disconnected from Cold War strategy. Using government archival material, travelogues, travel guides, records from international tourism associations, and popular advertisements, this dissertation demonstrates that tourism was not always the most efficient channel for foreign policy. The expectations and motivations of individual tourists, the overwhelming belief in a "right to travel," and the unpredictable impact of tourism on local economies, all worked to add complexity and nuance to the Sino-American post-World War II relationship.Item Understanding the Class Enemy: Foreign Policy Expertise in East Germany(2009) Scala, Stephen J.; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study makes use of reports, resolutions, analyses, and other internal documents as well as oral history interviews in order to detail the construction, functioning, and output of foreign policy expertise in the GDR. Subordination to the practical needs and political-ideological requirements of the leadership of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) represented the defining feature of East German foreign policy expertise. Yet its full politicization, which was essentially complete by the late 1960s as the SED succeeded in establishing a comprehensive system of foreign policy expertise tailored to meet its particular vision, entailed the maintenance of a degree of professional and intellectual autonomy--the GDR's Aussenpolitiker, or foreign policy professionals, were expected not only to comply with the political and ideological postulates espoused by the party leadership but also to deliver sound, specialist analysis of international relations. The persistent tension between these contrasting objectives was directly reflected in the output of East German experts, who in the conditions of diplomatic isolation prevailing until the early 1970s formulated a GDR-specific conception of international relations that fused clear identification of East Germany's realpolitical interests with the Marxist-Leninist notion of foreign policy as a form of class struggle. Following foreign policy normalization in the first half of the 1970s, however, increasing specialization and professionalization matched with a dramatic increase in East German experts' exposure to the capitalist West, including integration into a transnational network of foreign policy specialists, allowed the specialist element of expertise to gain preponderance over the dogmatic-ideological element. The great challenge to the international position of the Soviet Bloc and the GDR represented by the "second Cold War" in the first half of the 1980s then prompted East German experts to abandon simplistic adherence to Marxist-Leninist foreign policy dogma in favor of prioritization of the concrete realpolitical interests of the GDR. In the process, the GDR's experts formulated a body of non-dogmatic foreign policy thought that mirrored the Soviet New Thinking without taking on its comprehensiveness or overt rejection of inherited postulates.Item History Limited: The HiddenPolitics of Postwar Popular Histories(2009) Christiansen, Erik; Gilbert, James B; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines popular history and collective memory in the mid-20th century. Each chapter studies a different source of politicized history, exploring who created the history to be disseminated, what their goals and motivations were, why the historical trope particularly suited their needs and objectives, how they managed to convey ideologies through representations of the past, and how this popular history related to contemporary social and political issues. All of these "historians" - DuPont's radio and television show, Cavalcade of America; the History Book Club; CBS's historical news program, You Are There; the American Heritage Foundation's "Freedom Train"; and the Smithsonian Institution - attempted to mold collective memory into an ideological foundation for their agendas. During a tumultuous period, at home and abroad, the past became a safer forum for political discourse, and reexamining these sources of historical information and interpretation sheds new light on postwar politics. Surprisingly, deep ideological divisions persisted well into the age of apparent consensus. However, despite significant differences, the key people in all of these cases shared the same basic assumption about the relevance of history to contemporary society. The widespread acceptance of a strong relationship between past and present in postwar American society contrasts with later attitudes toward the past. The new technologies that enabled the communication of particular historical representations and interpretations changed too, and rapidly matured into forms less suited to the dissemination of historical lessons. As these attempts to control the public's views of the past began to fail, popular history was increasingly driven by marketplace considerations and was less confined to perspectives carefully chosen by a particular group of elites.Item History, Identity and the Struggle for Land in Northeastern Brazil, 1955-1985(2008-12-11) Sarzynski, Sarah R; Weinstein, Barbara; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Drawing from Edward Said, Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Junior has argued that through a repetition of texts and images, Northeastern Brazil was "nordestinizado," or turned into an imagined area of misery, violence, folklore, fanaticism, and rebellion that became the Other of the modern, urban center-south of Brazil. My research builds on Albuquerque's arguments about the construction of o Nordeste in the twentieth century by situating them in the milieu of political and cultural debates that attempted to redefine Northeastern Brazil during the Cold War. Rural social movements (associated with the Catholic Church, the Communist Party, and the Ligas Camponesas), large landowners, filmmakers and intellectuals, popular poets, U.S. and Brazilian politicians and journalists, and Brazilian military officers proposed projects to change the structures that they saw as perpetuating regional inequalities. To gain support for their political projects, these social, political and cultural movements appropriated regional historical symbols and narratives, imbuing them with new meanings. In doing so, they sought to redefine regional identity, and to a certain extent, also looked to redefine national and Third World identity. During the Cold War, identity expanded to becoming a product of local, national and transnational discussions, facilitated by the expansion of film as a medium of mass culture. The debates over the meaning of regional historical symbols and regional identity in Northeastern Brazil are at once an exaggerated and exemplary microcosm of Cold War political and cultural struggles in Latin America and in the Third World. The characters in the story had counterparts in other countries, and the setting was one of the most socially unequal areas in the world espousing all of the problems and possibilities of impoverished areas during the Cold War. The struggles also occurred at a key moment in Cold War history in Latin America: the era of the Cuban Revolution. But, the Northeast was not a blank slate for Cold War policies; in fact, the region had entrenched cultural symbols and historical narratives that composed the framework for the debates over regional identity.Item The Berlin Radio War: Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin and the Shaping of Political Culture in Divided Germany 1945-1961(2008-11-18) Schlosser, Nicholas; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores how German radio journalists shaped political culture in the two postwar Germanys. Specifically, it examines the development of broadcast news reporting in Berlin during the first sixteen years of the Cold War, focusing on the reporters attached to the American sponsored station RIAS Berlin and the radio stations of the German Democratic Republic. During this period, radio stations on both sides of the Iron Curtain waged a media war in which they fought to define the major events of the early Cold War. The tension between objectivity and partisanship in both East and West Berlin came to define this radio war. Radio stations constantly negotiated this tension in an attempt to encourage listeners to adopt a specific political worldview and forge a bond between broadcaster and listener. Whereas East German broadcasters ultimately eschewed objectivity in favor of partisan news reporting defined by Marxist-Leninist ideology, RIAS attempted to combine factual reporting with concerted efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the German Democratic Republic. The study contributes to a number of fields of study. First, I contribute to scholarship that has examined the nature, development, and influence of political culture. Related to this, the study considers how political ideas were received and understood by listeners. This work also adds to a growing field of scholarship that goes beyond examining the institutional histories of Germany's broadcasters and analyzes how German broadcasters influenced society itself. Related to this, the dissertation adds to the historiography on how the United States used media outlets as a means of fighting the Cold War. The dissertation is based on archival research done in Germany and the United States. It draws on files from the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv in Babelsberg, the Bundesarchv in Berlin and Koblenz, the Landesarchiv in Berlin, the archive of the former East German Ministry for State Security in Berlin, and the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, MD.