UMD Theses and Dissertations
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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 "The Biggest Con in History": American Myth-Making in the Stage and Screen Adaptations of Anastasia(2018) Weyman, Jennifer Elizabeth; Haldey, Olga; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The story of Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova has been engrained in the American imagination for nearly a century. This tale has often been told on stage and screen, depicting Anastasia and her most famous impersonator: Anna Anderson. The adaptation of Anna and Anastasia’s tale that has made the most lasting impact is the 1951 French play, Anastasia, by Marcelle Maurette, and its 1954 English translation by Guy Bolton. Four more adaptations have followed that progenitor play: the 1956 film, Anastasia; the 1965 operetta, Anya; the 1997 animated film, Anastasia; and the 2017 musical, Anastasia. These five artistic adaptations evolved from one another, navigating their own history alongside changing American values. This thesis situates each production within American sociopolitics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, revealing how each production is far more indicative of American ideals than Russian history, particularly with regards to immigration, foreign policy, and feminism.Item COLD WAR II: UKRAINIAN SOVEREIGNTY AND IDENTITY(2017) McCloskey, Thomas Laurence; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity showcases tensions between nationalism and internationalism in a post-Cold War era. Ukraine’s political leaders and ordinary citizens express opposing views about the identity and sovereignty of their nation, as some want closer ties with the European Union, while others seek closer relations with the Russian Federation. The myths and memories of Ukraine’s Cossack past, as well as its time in the former Soviet Union, animate discourses throughout the conflict. These debates result in no clear consensus about Ukrainian identity. The inability of Ukraine to find a unified nationalist identity in the conflict highlights a post-Cold War paradox. Ukraine is unable to articulate a unifying identity because the myths and memories of the Cold War continue to circulate in public discourse. International organizations are largely unable to legitimize either side’s claims of identity in the conflict. This chaos has invited outside intervention, as both the Russia Federation and the United States attempt to influence Ukraine’s decisions about sovereignty and identity in ways benefitting Russian or American interests. These discourses mirror Cold War debates over Soviet satellite countries, as a propaganda battle for the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people rage on in political speeches, online forums, and in international organizations. Ukraine is thus mired in a cycle of unrest, as corruption and language issues continue to prevent the nation from articulating a unified nationalist identity. Ukraine’s crisis showcases the inherent conflict within notions of sovereignty, as both self-determination and freedom from outside intervention often contradict the expected obligations of nations to protect not only their citizens but also those of other nations whose human rights are threatened. This project challenges the notion that post-Cold War states can easily move beyond the legacies of the Cold War, as their past myths and memories continue to define their sovereignty and identity well after the conflict ends.Item The Feeling American: Emotion Management and the Standardization of Democracy in Cold War Literature and Film(2017) Singleton, Kelly Anne; Auerbach, Jonathan; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines how strategies of emotion management influenced the development of American literature and film during the Cold War period. Focusing primarily on the High Cold War Period of 1949 to 1962, it argues that a government-funded postwar boom in the psychological and social sciences resulted in a “psychological turn” in American culture that sought to solve social problems by teaching Americans to manage their emotions in keeping with scientifically-established standards for democratic behavior. Proponents of emotion management believed it could accomplish the Soviet goal of creating a harmonious, classless society without requiring radical social revolution or totalitarian forms of control that would violate American principles of freedom and democracy. To that end, American policymakers used the findings of social scientists to develop narratives that: 1) modeled how to behave in the event of a nuclear attack, 2) equated happiness with the American standard of living, 3) made emotional malleability the foundation for a democratic personality, and 4) linked racism to deviation from the norms of liberal white psychology. The works of several mid-century American authors and filmmakers provide an important counterpoint to the optimism of this official emotion management narrative as they: 1) challenge the government’s sanitized representation of nuclear war, 2) document the unhappy effects of middle-class organization culture, 3) express anxiety over the alienating effects of emotional labor, and 4) reject the equation of mental health and American identity with specifically white cultural standards and forms. In contrast to emotion management’s conservative emphasis on individual psychological adjustment, these works suggest that only systemic structural changes can resolve the problems of American democracy. This historicist approach analyzes propaganda films, government bulletins, popular magazine articles, and period sociological studies alongside close readings of novels (Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow! (1954) and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955)), films (Don Siegel’s The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962)), and the story collections of African American authors Langston Hughes and Alice Childress.Item The Smoking Gun: Toward Understanding the Decision Calculus Behind Repressive Outcomes(2015) Munayyer, Yousef; Telhami, Shibley; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Why do states repress? Why are civil liberties curtailed? Explorations of these questions have departed from the assumption that security concerns motivate decisions that lead to repressive outcomes. If the state is challenged, it will repress. A state, it is assumed, must "strike a balance" between security and liberty. But what if those assumptions are flawed? If the decisions behind politically repressive outcomes are not always motivated by security challenges to the state, then we must ask a different set of questions about what can motivate state behavior and repression. This study examines the validity of these assumptions. A survey of cases of repressive episodes in the United States, using both primary and secondary sources, reveals that the decisions behind enacting repressive measures is not as straightforward as these assumptions would have it seem. A unique case, situated both contextually and historically by the preceding survey, is then explored in depth using data that is rarely available to shed a new degree of light on a decision making process. This data is overwhelming primary source information and includes declassified material from a variety of archives, material obtained from Freedom of Information Act Requests, as well as uniquely revelatory audio evidence that has only recently been made publicly available. After reviewing the case I argue that enough evidence exists to suggest the main assumptions of the repression and civil liberties literature fails to encompass all motivating factors behind repressive outcomes and a deeper understanding of how other factors can lead to repressive outcomes is needed.Item J. EDGAR HOOVER AND THE RHETORICAL RISE OF THE FBI: THE PUBLIC CAMPAIGNS AGAINST VERMIN, THE FIFTH COLUMN, AND RED FASCISM.(2012) Underhill, Stephen Michael; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines J. Edgar Hoover's rhetorical leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman administrations (1933-1953). Hoover launched and sustained a concerted domestic propaganda program that helped enhance his own political power and invented the FBI as a central force in domestic and international matters. In the process, he re-envisioned conceptions of U.S. citizenship by promoting notions of idealized citizenship. Hoover entered law enforcement and U.S. politics during the early decades of the twentieth century--a time of increased use of public campaigns sponsored by the U.S. government and presidential administrations to alter public opinion on important policy matters. This period witnessed, for example, the country's experimentation with domestic propaganda during World War I. While the Soviet Union and Germany used disease, vermin, parasite, and body metaphors to organize their own domestic propaganda campaigns in the following decades, Hoover used these same metaphors to advance the need to purify America and exterminate its social pariah. Through his public campaigns against vermin (1933-1939), the Fifth Column (1939-1945), and Red Fascism (1945-1953), Hoover constructed a reality in which corruption and subversion were immutable elements of democratic life. Increasingly, Hoover's tactics of threat and intimidation began to mimic the tactics of threat practiced by America's enemies, moving the country closer to what many at the time called a police state. Hoover's coupling of propaganda and coercive tactics ultimately helped him to rapidly expand the FBI and undermine his superiors and counterparts in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Whereas Roosevelt benefited politically from building up a secret police force, Truman inherited a cunning FBI director eager to use his power to expand and exploit the rhetorical presidency during the Red Scare.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 (Re)Placing America: Cold War Mapping and the Mediation of International Space(2011) Barney, Timothy; Parry-Giles, Trevor; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The United States emerged from World War II as an undeniably global power, and as the Cold War unfolded, America faced decisions about where to place and display its power on the globe. The Cold War was a battle between two ideologies and competing world systems, both of which were vying for space and had the tools and technologies to control those spaces. Maps became a central vehicle for the testing of these new boundaries. Mapping projects and programs emerged from a variety of popular cartographers, foreign policy strategists, defense leaders, Congressional representatives, scientists, oppositional movements, labor unions, educational publishers, even everyday citizens. As each of these sources confirms, the scope of American commitments had expanded considerably; to account for this expansion, a cartographic impulse underwrote the continually evolving Cold War, and the tensions of art and science, realism and idealism, and space and place inherent in this impulse helped form the fault lines of the conflict. (Re)Placing America looks largely at the ways that cartography adapted to such changes and tensions in the second half of the twentieth century, and how the United States marshaled the practice of mapping in a variety of ways to account for the shift to internationalism. This dissertation explores how cartography mediated visions of space, and particularly, how it defined America's place within those spaces. Treating cartography as a complex rhetorical process of production, display, and circulation, the five chapters cover major geopolitical thematics, and the responding evolution of maps, from World War II until the Cold War's end in the early 1990s. Some of these driving themes include the "air-age" expansion of visual perspectives and strategic potential in journalistic maps; the appropriation of cartography as a medium for intelligence and national security objectives; the marshaling of maps as evidential weapons against the Soviet Union in diplomatic exchanges, Congressional reports, and government-sponsored propaganda; the shifts from East/West antagonisms to North/South ones as cartography was drafted into the modernization efforts of the U.S. in mapping the Third World; and the Defense Department's use of maps to argue for nuclear deterrence, while protest groups made radical cartographic challenges to these practices of state power. (Re)Placing America reads closely the maps of the forty-years-plus conflict and considers the complexity of their internal codes (in colors, shapes, icons, etc.), while also reaching out externally to the intersecting interests and visions of the cartographic producers and the Cold War contexts in which they emerged. The project seeks out and explores particular nodal points and thematics where maps consolidated and shaped changing shifts in perception, where cartographic fragments cohered around the defining moments, but also sometimes in the everyday politics of the Cold War. Ultimately, this project offers four conclusions about and conduct and operation of American mapping during the complex, ideologically charged time of the Cold War. First, the function of the map to both "fix" and "unfix" particular perceptions of the world is relevant to assessing how America sought to stabilize its place in a rapidly changing world. Second, the internationalism of the Cold War was bound up in the capacities for cartography to document and adapt to it. Third, the humanistic notion of a geographical imagination is central to understanding why particular Cold War agents and institutions continually drew on cartography to represent their interests. Finally, combining an ideological approach to reading maps as articulators of contextual tensions and historical ideas with an instrumental approach to maps as material, strategic documents can best help to situate cartography as an ongoing process of production, circulation, and display.