History Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2778
Browse
107 results
Search Results
Item Doctor's Domain: Innovation and Regulation in the U.S. Medical Device Industry, 1950-2000(2024) Bowrey, Brice; Sicilia, David; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the role of physicians in shaping the development and regulation of medical technologies in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. I argue that physicians became the dominant actors in the medical technology sector by using their preexisting professional prestige to assert the primacy of clinical knowledge and promote a culture of tinkering in private sector research and development. In contrast, the nascent profession of biomedical engineering could not effectively compete for status and influence. By analyzing the professional conflicts between physicians, biomedical engineers, and other stakeholders in the regulatory system for medical devices that emerged during and after Congress enacted the Medical Device Amendments of 1976, this dissertation explores the role of perceived expertise and scientific legitimacy in shaping regulatory policy, business organization, and other social structures that facilitate technological innovation.Item CHAOS AND CONSPIRACY: THE HAGERSTOWN DRAFT RIOTS AND THE WHISKEY REBELLION(2024) Lowery, Kourtney Renea; Brewer, Holly; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Thesis: CHAOS AND CONSPIRACY: THE HAGERSTOWN DRAFT RIOTS AND THE WHISKEY REBELLION Kourtney Renea Lowery, Master of Arts, 2024 Thesis Directed By: Professor Holly Brewer, Department of History This thesis explores the events of Washington County, MD in September 1794 to re-establish the significance of the Hagerstown Riots and their connection to the Whiskey Rebellion in Pittsburgh as well as to broader revolutionary ideals. The riots were a localized event in which the militia openly disobeyed orders. Citizens soldiers used militarized force to display their opposition to the excise tax and militia draft. Residents and many local leaders also opposed these measures and favored a progressive political and economic system. The Hagerstown Riots are an important microhistory and look at early American rebellion, protestors, and redress of grievances. The protestors at the Hagerstown Riots were angry with the excise tax and economic and political policies that the federal government created policies that were antiquated and unfairly administered. Hamilton’s taxation scheme was modeled on a British taxation system which colonials had fought against. They viewed these policies as created by elites in the federal government. State governments and officials, meanwhile were becoming more egalitarian in places like Maryland, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Washington County, Maryland showcases these frustrations and changes by retracing the dynamics of the rioters, officials, and militia. It also seeks to resolve why this event has been forgotten. The riots decenter the Whiskey Rebellion from an isolated large uprising in Pennsylvania to a broad movement that includes local events such as the Hagerstown riots, and that started before the American Revolution.Item THE “UNEQUAL WRONGS AMENDMENT”: STATE COURT INTERPRETATIONS OF THE MARYLAND EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT(2024) Justement, Shelly; Muncy, Robyn; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis answers the question: How did Maryland state courts’ interpretations of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) affect the amendment’s meaning? This thesis explores state courts’ interpretations of the amendment in seven cases involving child support, spousal abandonment, abortion, rape, women’s access to exclusively male clubs, and gay marriage between the years of 1972 and 2006. The state courts’ decisions regarding the Maryland ERA promoted legal equality without providing equity between men and women or heterosexual and homosexual couples. The state courts often interpreted the ERA in narrow ways that did not always benefit women’s rights, and indeed, this thesis demonstrates that the courts’ rulings in ERA cases did not produce material equality between men and women or queer and straight couples. The courts’ narrow interpretations of the ERA were reflected by the fact that the judges interpreted the words of the amendment literally without consideration of Marylanders’ socioeconomic realities; the judges limited the reach of the ERA to state actions, not the actions of private individuals or organizations; and the judges limited the application of the ERA to cases in which men and women were treated as separate classes. In examining the consistently narrow nature of the judicial interpretations of the ERA, this thesis acknowledges the limitations of the ERA for women’s as well as gay and lesbian rights in Maryland. While benefits to men did not inherently mean that the courts took rights away from women, the courts’ interpretations of the ERA ended up limiting women’s equity with men more often than promoting it.Item They 'Boast of Dressing Like Gentlemen': Cross-Dressing, Print Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Gender Ideology(2024) Hemphill, Julia Kay; Lyons, Clare A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Nineteenth-century gender roles were very strict but cross-dressing challenged these extremely binary roles, often being written about in different forms of print media. The press published stories about cross-dressing people in different ways depending on the actions they took in male attire. Soldier women cross-dressed and entered the military, but were not reprimanded for their decisions because their amount of time in male attire was perceived to be finite and because they were performing a service for their country. Women and male-presenting people who wore male attire and went into male workplaces, took wives, and became heads of household were highly reprimanded in the press in lengthy articles and short stories. Finally, women who wore the reform dress and liberated themselves from enslavement in male attire were spoken about in the press in two competing ways, with people supporting their transgressions and others not. Looking at the different ways that print media discussed these women and male-presenting people is important for looking at how gender roles were structured, and for understanding why powerful men were only threatened by certain cross-dressers.Item Soaked in Blue: Indigo, Enslavement, and Value in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina(2024) Frangoulis, Kelli Marie; Lyons, Clare; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Indigo was the most exported product from South Carolina in the mid-eighteenth century, but little scholarship has been devoted to the enslaved laborers that manufactured indigo dye through gruesome conditions. This thesis highlights their experience and argues that they created value out of indigo through identity creation, spiritual significance, and connections with their West African homeland. By wearing indigo-dyed blue clothing, enslaved people could intentionally associate their identity with the color through repeated wear and trade to create specific blue looks. By painting their living quarters with leftover indigo residue, known today as “haint blue,” enslaved communities received spiritual value from the protective quality culturally associated with indigo blue. By engaging with West African-inspired craftwork traditions that centered indigo, they furthered their heritage and created new significance for indigo within a new enslaved context. This research contributes new understandings of both the indigo industry and how enslaved individuals in South Carolina expressed humanity and choice.Item Hollow Ground: Industry, Extraction, and Ecology in the Floodplains of Early Maryland(2024) Hess, Sophie; Bell, Richard; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Hollow Ground: Industry, Extraction, and Ecology in the Floodplains of Early Maryland,” investigates histories of natural resource commodification, environment, and culture in the Patapsco River Valley, or “The Hollow” as it was called by its first European settlers. Beginning in the seventeenth century, English colonists seized the powerful currents of the Patapsco and the forests surrounding it, the ancestral floodplains of Piscataway and Susquehannock peoples, to build large-scale agricultural projects and industrial factories. These operations altered the environment, and as the valley grew into a center of extractive production, its communities experienced more frequent and severe floods which have continued into the present. This dissertation examines these entwined consequences of environmental capitalism and settler colonialism through a site-specific, multi-century lens, studying how humans, plants, and animals within various spaces of production—iron furnaces, wheat fields, grist and cotton mills, schools, prisons, local governments, and family units —experienced industrialization. It traces trace labor ecologies within communities of enslaved, convict, and low-wage workers, and the ways that soil exhaustion, flooding, and other environmental forces both threatened these enclaves and created opportunities for freedom. This work uses a microhistorical methodology to intervene in histories of energy transition, labor, and the Anthropocene. “Hollow Ground” argues that early American industrialism can help us to better understand how local desires for capital growth have accumulated into global processes of toxic emissions, and how the frontline issues faced by post-industrial communities today relate not only to global production but to local histories of extraction and the culture that perpetuates it. These same communities also hold critical histories of commoning, stewardship, labor resistance, and environmentalism that can help create a blueprint for survival in the face of the climate crisis.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 “GOD RATHER THAN MEN”: AUSTRIAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY AND THE ORIGINS OF THE CHRISTIAN SOCIAL PARTY, 1848-1893(2024) Messersmith, Thomas Martin; Rozenblit, Marsha L; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the changes in Austrian Catholic theology from 1848 to 1893 and the role these changes played in the foundation of the Christian Social Party. Due to a series of crises after 1848, the theology of the Austrian Catholic Church underwent several shifts, ultimately settling on the belief that, in a modern world, direct political action from the Church was not only permissible, but imperative to defend the Church against those who would destroy it. This shift in political theology, which allowed for informal and unofficial theological participation in the realm of politics, was necessary to allow for the development of the Christian Social Party. This dissertation focuses primarily on the German-speaking areas of the Habsburg Monarchy, drawing on a variety of sources, including letters, diaries, meeting notes, legal records, newspapers, theological treatises, and contemporary academic journals to track the theological and political discussions that took place in this portion of the monarchy. The first chapter defines “political theology” as it is used in this dissertation (i.e., as a broader concept, positioned in opposition to the more limited and problematic definition of Carl Schmitt) as “the study of the divine as it relates to politics,” and provides an overview of the state of political theology in both Austria and the Catholic Church as a whole before 1848. Chapter two focuses on the shifts in political theology that occurred as a result of the Revolutions of 1848, with the paradigm of political theology ultimately coalescing around the leadership of Joseph Othmar Rauscher and the notion of a negotiated legalistic political compromise. Chapter three examines the Habsburg Concordat with Rome of 1855 and its subsequent undoing through the May Laws of 1868, which tested the new paradigm of political theology. Chapter four follows the arrest, trial, and conviction of Bishop Rudigier of Linz for “disturbing the peace,” following his attempted publication of a pastoral letter that called for Catholics to disobey laws that went against the Concordat and Church teachings. This proved to be a pivot point in the development of political theology of the Habsburg Monarchy, leading now-Cardinal Rauscher to reassess the political theological paradigm. Chapter five follows the proceedings of the First Ecumenical Council of the Vatican and the Kulturkampf in Germany, both of which resulted in the development of a more aggressive political theological paradigm in Austria. Finally, chapter six examines the completion of the shift from the Vormärz political theological paradigm to the paradigm of popular public political theology employed by Karl von Vogelsang in the ideological creation of the Christian Social Party. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that while other factors, such as antisemitism and the dissatisfaction of the lower clergy, as argued by John Boyer, helped to create the Christian Social Party in Austria, a shift in political theology in the Austrian Church and in the Catholic Church as a whole was necessary before the various ideologies of the Christian Social Party could coalesce.Item The New Old Deal: Colonial Social Welfare and Puerto Rican Poverty During the Great Depression, 1928-1941(2024) Brahms, Darien P.; Woods, Colleen; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The New Old Deal: Colonial Social Welfare and Puerto Rican Poverty During the Great Depression, 1928-1941 Abstract In 1941, at the end of the Great Depression, continental observers noted that Puerto Rico's urban shantytowns were expanding despite the US government's efforts to alleviate poverty through New Deal programs such as low-income housing and slum eradication initiatives. Their consensus was that working-class Puerto Ricans had it far worse than many poor Americans—including African Americans in the Jim Crow South. And yet, over the course of the 1930s, policymakers in Washington, D.C. came to conclude that a large portion of the Puerto Rican population were deserving, “white” American citizens. One would expect that, as they became increasingly categorized as “white” in the national census, federal aid to Puerto Rico would have followed the same patterns of racialized welfare that historians have associated with the New Deal. Why then were so many islanders moving to city squatters’ settlements while the white, continental working class benefitted from New Deal housing and employment initiatives? This conundrum prompted the following exploration of how Puerto Ricans' access to New Deal labor legislation, jobs creation and housing programs influenced the reinforcement of the island’s class structure, entrenched poverty, and the dramatic growth of its urban shantytowns. This dissertation considers how an analysis of island squatters’ settlements and housing programs for the island’s homeless can contribute to our understanding of how the Great Depression unfolded in a U.S. colonial territory as well as the race and class-based exclusions of New Deal aid programs. It also reveals that some U.S. officials did attempt to increase federal aid to the island during the 1930s. However, in addition to a relative lack of funding from D.C., local resistance to the New Deal fomented by insular politicians sympathetic to the colonial sugar industry prevented any meaningful aid from reaching the pockets of the island’s working classes for the bulk of the decade. And finally, this dissertation explores how exclusion from federal programs led to popular unrest that threatened to destabilize colonial rule and eventually caused a political sea change in Puerto Rico beginning in the late 1930s. This work will add to a growing body of transnational literature addressing New Deal scholarship which overlooks Puerto Rico as a topic of analysis. Including the colony in discussions about the discriminatory policies that reinforced the spatial isolation and poverty of mainland minorities will provide a new perspective on the ways power was maintained in America during an era of socioeconomic crisis. The following research also responds to works that privilege Puerto Rico's rural class struggles and agricultural capitalism while obscuring their effects on the island’s urban areas. Rural unemployment fueled migrations that swelled Puerto Rico's shantytowns, which became key sites for policy implementation battles between local and federal authorities. Such factors call for an analytical focus that includes the island's cities more fully. This approach will provide a holistic look at the interplay between the island's rural and urban regions and the mainland during the 1930s while broadening our understanding of class and racial dynamics during the American depression.Item "Empire of the Everglades": Industrial Agriculture, Migrant Workers, and the Nature of the Modern food System(2023) Fanning, Eugene Charles; Greene, Julie; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Taking a longue durée view over the 20th century, “Empire of the Everglades” examines how the consolidation and contestation of the corporate food system and industrial agriculture in South Florida transformed the region from a “river of grass” into an expansive commodity-production hub and moved the region’s farmworkers to build community and organize for change. It bridges the local and global to show how South Florida’s sugar and vegetable growers generated profits by anchoring the region to corporate food supply chains through economic and political organization, the deployment of environmental management technologies that remade the vast Everglades ecosystem, and the construction of new systems of migrant labor recruitment that spanned the Americas. In uplifting the region’s farmworkers’ experiences and organizing, this dissertation also illuminates the resilience of migrant farmworkers and their communities and powerful moments of solidarity amid poverty, exploitation, and social and legal exclusion. Over time, farmworkers built organizations and civil society networks to counter the sector’s means of labor control and forged new community resources and movements for corporate accountability and environmental justice. Examining class formation and conflict in the Everglade’s agricultural sector as it unfolded in a changing environment and amid shifting agribusiness practices and immigration patterns, this work reveals how the corporate food system worked to externalize the costs of low-priced food on the environment, workers, and rural communities, as well as the dynamism and impact of the state’s under-examined farmworkers’ movement.