UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item EL MERCURIO VOLANTE: EL ESPACIO PÚBLICO Y EL DISCURSO CIENTÍFICO ILUSTRADO EN LA NUEVA ESPAÑA(2013) Calzada-Orihuela, Sofia; Merediz, Eyda; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)With an interdisciplinary approach, this project explores Dr. José Ignacio Bartolache's scientific-medical journal, Mercurio Volante (1772-1773), in the context of New Spain during the last decades of the viceroyalty. I argue that this journal is targeted to an audience as a platform from which enlightened values are transmitted and where knowledge is constructed as it enters into the public sphere. It is in the public sphere where knowledge is formalized and rehearsed as methodologically sound, as it becomes amply available, and gets exposed to criticism and debate. Furthermore, Bartolache consolidates his role as an expert, and his scientific authority that nevertheless transforms him into a moral guide not far from Catholic precepts. I explore the complexities and paradoxes of the Enlightenment in the context of New Spain, as I draw parallels and contrasts with contemporary thinkers, such as Benito Feijoo, José Alzate y Ramírez, and Joaquín Velázquez de León. I propose that Dr. Bartolache contributes to a more inclusive Enlightenment by configuring a local methodology, which fuses European scientific knowledge (Cartesian, Newtonian, and Boerhaaverian) with local experiences. This is especially evident in Bartolache's experiments on the pulque blanco, a native alcoholic beverage, and his observations and treatment of female hysteria. The Mercurio Volante, as I maintain, is a cultural object that reflects and collects traits of the political thought of late colonial Mexico under the House of Bourbon. Even though throughout its pages there is a recurrent objective to convey truths discovered by the demonstrative method, it is also placed as a response to the arguments diminishing the abilities of the inhabitants of the Americas. Dr. Bartolache counter argues the French naturalist Buffon, and his follower, Cornelius de Pauw, by participating in the Defense of the New World and contributing to the construction of criollo protonational identities. I conclude the Mercurio Volante consolidates the public sphere, which in turn strengthens Dr. Bartolache's authority, reinserting his ideas into the República de las Letras.Item Minding the Gap: Western Export Controls and Soviet Technology Policy in the 1960s(2010) Cappiello, Diana Marie; David-Fox, Michael; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the origins and evolution of Western export controls intended to limit the transfer of high technology, particularly computers, to communist countries, and how technology policy within the Soviet Union and other communist states was shaped by these controls. This work intends to demonstrate that Western attempts to control trade in high technology were responsive to changing economic and political realities and that changes in export controls produced corresponding changes in policy within the USSR. Ultimately, policies on both sides served to maintain and widen the technology gap between East and West far more dramatically than anticipated, deepening the economic stagnation of Eastern Europe and hastening the collapse of communism.Item Monsters in Paradise: The Representation of the Natural World in the Historias of Bartolome de Las Casas and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo(2010) Thompson, Katherine A.; Harrison, Regina; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the years following Columbus's landfall, European efforts to describe the physical reality of a hitherto unknown hemisphere led to profound epistemological changes. As recent studies by Canizares Esguerra and Barrera-Osorio have shown, early Spanish accounts of New World nature reflect an unprecedented emphasis on empirical methods of acquiring and systematizing knowledge of the natural world, contributing to the emergence of natural history and ultimately the Scientific Revolution. Sixteenth century texts were not, however, "scientific" in a modern sense. Empirical observation was shaped by scholastic and humanistic philosophy, and mingled with wondrous images derived from classical and medieval sources; these various discourses combined in ways that were colored by the authors' ideological perspectives on the justice of the Spanish conquest. This dissertation examines the interaction between proto-scientific empiricism and inherited epistemologies in descriptions of the natural world in the histories of Bartolome; de Las Casas and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo. While contemporary historians of science acknowledge the importance of these works, they rarely engage in detailed textual analyses. Literary critics, on the other hand, only infrequently concentrate on the role of proto-scientific discourse. Rabasa has studied several natural images in both authors, Myers and Carrillo Castillo have examined the role of empiricism in Oviedo, and Wey Gomez and Padron have studied geographical representations, but few studies have focused exclusively on Las Casas's and Oviedo's portrayals of the natural world in its totality. This dissertation analyzes how the tension between discursive modes produced contrasting images, paradisiacal and stable in the case of Las Casas and liminal or "monstrous" in the case of Oviedo. Chapter One outlines the intellectual formations of both authors; Chapter Two examines spatial and geographical constructs; Chapter Three centers on flora and fauna; Chapter Four concentrates on food and agriculture; and Chapter Five looks at concepts of Nature as active agent. In each of these areas, Las Casas's and Oviedo's attempts to describe unfamiliar and often anomalous New World natural phenomena stretched, altered, and at times subverted existing concepts of the natural world in ways that would have implications for future notions of American nature.Item Whose Story Is It Anyway?: Constructing the Stories and Pathology of Madness/Mental Illness in the Contemporary U.S.(2009) Rector, Claudia; Caughey, John L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Personal stories are always told in the context of broader cultural narratives. Thus, in the contemporary U.S., stories of personal experience of illness and disability are usually informed by Western notions of health and illness, and a binary classification system of normative/non-normative bodies and behaviors. The emerging field of disability studies represents a socially progressive attempt to interrogate and reconfigure discourses that pathologize and medicalize non-normative bodies, challenging medical discourses with an alternate framework of evidence that emphasizes the personal experiences of individuals who have experienced disability or illness and who conceive of these experiences in different ways. Whose Story Is It Anyway? is an interdisciplinary examination of how the cultural authority of medicine compresses a range of individual experiences into narrow, standardized narratives of the experience of depression, for instance, or other phenomena classified as illness. Specifically, my study makes a three-part argument: first, that biological psychiatry has eclipsed psychoanalysis and that medical definitions of mental illness have become the culturally dominant way of determining what kinds of physical or psychological phenomena are classified as bad, e.g., pathological. Second, these definitions then inform and shape stories of personal experience with such phenomena, enough so that standard narrative formats emerge for describing "individual" experiences of both physical disability and madness/mental illness. The personal stories of madness/mental illness then become, in essence, universalized narratives of illness and recovery that reinforce notions of pathology. Third, this standardization of the personal story often aligns with medical narratives in a way that reflects the storytellers' disempowered position in the medical industry, in that telling the "right" story positions them to receive the benefits of working within the medical system, and telling the "wrong" story becomes an act of political activism. Such de facto coercion has substantial implications for intellectual projects, such as disability studies, that rely heavily on the articulation of personal experience as evidence for the need for change. Finally, this study argues for a re-examination of experience-based, identity-focused activism, and for an invigorated humanities project in science studies.Item Communicating Disease: Medical Knowledge and Literary Forms in Colonial British America(2009) Wisecup, Kelly; Bauer, Ralph; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the literary repercussions of encounters between European, Native American, and African medical philosophies throughout the British American colonies. In particular, I examine the formation and transformation of colonial literary forms in an intercultural and a transatlantic context, by investigating the ways in which colonists incorporated Native and African knowledge to produce various literary forms. I employ anthropological and ethnohistorical studies to show that colonists displaced competing rhetorical practices by incorporating non-European knowledge to present firsthand descriptions of New World medicines and illnesses. Additionally, colonists transformed their literary strategies to subordinate Native and African knowledge as witchcraft and to distance themselves from colonial encounters. Early Americans' incorporation and subordination of non-European medical philosophies authorized colonial medical knowledge as empirical and rational and facilitated conceptions of cultural differences between colonists, Native Americans, and Africans. My introduction examines medical encounters in the context of early modern medical philosophies and rhetorical practices. Chapter one examines how Thomas Hariot mixed Algonquian theories that disease originated in "invisible bullets" with Paracelsian medical philosophies, connecting seeing and knowing in his true report. Chapter two examines Pilgrim Edward Winslow's appropriation and subordination of shamans' medical practices to provide firsthand accounts of New World wonders in his providence tale. Chapter three examines the 1721 inoculation controversy in the context of Africans' testimony about inoculation, which minister Cotton Mather transcribed to connect words and things in his plain style, and which physician William Douglass satirized to reveal the gap between slaves' words and the true, dangerous nature of inoculation. Chapter four examines how James Grainger incorporated obeah, Africans' medico-religious practices, into his georgic poem to produce images of productive slaves and to construct new conceptions of obeah as witchcraft. Finally, the conclusion examines the ways in which colonists' disavowal of Native and African knowledge as magical continued to haunt U.S. Americans' literary practices, as seen in Arthur Mervyn's gothic tale of his encounter with a healthy black hearse driver during a yellow fever epidemic and Richard Allen and Absalom Jones' argument that blacks possessed superior knowledge of the epidemic.Item Chaos and the Microcosm: Literary Ecology in the Nineteenth-Century(2009) Scott, Heidi; Fraistat, Neil; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates literary responses to environmental change in nineteenth-century England. Two tropes, chaos in narrative and the microcosm in lyric poetry, suggest how literary works may have been precursors of ecological science. I argue that literary epistemology in the long nineteenth-century developed precocious theories of the way nature operates based on contingent narrative and microcosm systems. These ideas were adopted as empirical strategies once scientific ecology emerged in the twentieth-century, and both tropes are prominent in twenty-first century ecological science. Ecology appeared late among scientific disciplines partly because it relies on cooperation between reduction and holism: climate change theory, for example, uses microcosm models to develop narratives of environmental contingency. Five chapters consider these two tropes from historical, literary, and scientific perspectives. The first chapter is a historical introduction to nineteenth-century science that traces the development of environmental awareness from industrial pollution and early studies of nature in microcosm, especially in the work of Charles Darwin and Stephen Forbes. Chapter two investigates four narratives of environmental chaos spanning the long nineteenth-century: Gilbert White, Mary Shelley, Richard Jefferies and H.G. Wells emplot the radical new notion of a post-apocalypse environment in narratives that rely on chaotic discontinuity, rather than the coherent gradualism that marked evolutionary theories of the time. Chapter three examines microcosmic imagery in the work of several important poets, including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, John Clare, Percy Shelley, and Matthew Arnold. I argue that the imagination and close observation of nineteenth-century poets helped the nascent sciences conceive of ways to simplify nature without dismembering its complex structures. Chapter four, devoted to the ecological thinking of John Keats, traces his abandonment of teleological narrative in Hyperion in preference for the microcosmic Odes. Finally, chapter five reconciles the two tropes with an excursion into modern ecosystem science, paying particular attention to our contemporary strategies for investigating climate change. This chapter serves as a summation of the dissertation by complicating the dichotomy between chaotic narrative and model-microcosm, and it brings the study into concerns of the present day.Item The Practical Engineers' Rebellion: Evans Patent Safety Guard and the Failure of Scientific Technology in the Steam Boat Inspection Service, 1830-1862(2008-07-31) Bernhardt III, John A.; Friedel, Robert; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The U.S. Congress's initiative to solve the problem of steamboat boiler explosions in the mid-nineteenth century resulted in the Steamboat Act of 1852. The Act brought radical changes to the western rivers, including reform of the engineering cadre, introduction of new safety devices and procedures, and the creation of a new bureaucracy (the Steam Boat Inspection Service). One of the new safety devices introduced by the Treasury Department was the controversial Evans Patent Safety Guard. This is the story of the safety guard as a central actor in framing the expertise of scientists, inventors, and practical engineers in attempting to make technology safe. The safety guard helps us to understand where expertise came from, how it was defined and justified by government officials, and why the notion of technological expertise depends on a complex mix of technical, institutional, and socioeconomic factors.Item Instrument to Evidence to Argument: Visual Mediation of Invisible Phenomena in Scientific Discourse(2008-07-15) Buehl, Jonathan; Fahnestock, Jeanne; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how scientists and scientific editors have approached specific problems related to visualization and visual argumentation in scientific texts. These problems are related to the following research questions: (1) How are new visualization practices established as scientifically credible? (2) How do scientists modify existing instrument output to make new visual arguments? (3) How do scientists use verbal and visual means to transform problematic data into acceptable support for novel claims? (4) What are the practical and ethical boundaries of modifying visual artifacts for scientific arguments? (5) How do scientists refute established (but incorrect) visualizations that have been widely accepted as accurate representations of reality? This project considers these issues rhetorically by examining a number of recent and historical cases. The first three case studies explore how scientists created both compelling and uncompelling visual arguments by mediating the visual output of instruments with rhetorical strategies. These case studies focus on visualizations from physical science: x-ray diffraction photographs, graphics establishing the theory of plate tectonics, and visualizations of atmospheric phenomena. In each case, visualizations articulated invisible phenomena in new ways, transforming unclear or seemingly unremarkable data into convincing knowledge claims. My analysis of these cases explores how scientists integrate visuals into the analogical, causal, transitive, symmetrical, and dissociation arguments that are so essential to the practice of science. The later case studies examine broader concerns regarding ethics, persuasion, and modern scientific visualization. I examine recent issues related to the digital generation and manipulation of scientific images and rhetorical issues related to scientists' increasing dependence on complicated computer algorithms for creating visual arguments.Item Commanding Men and Machines: Admiralship, Technology, and Ideology in the 20th Century U.S. Navy(2008-08-05) Hagerott, Mark Regan; Sumida, Jon T; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation engages the important historical and sociological question: how do organizations develop leaders? As technological complexity increased, the military struggled to produce leaders who could understand technology and yet integrate the operations of disparate parts of large organizations. In the late 20th century, the senior leader model in the U.S. military shifted from a 'generalist' to what can be described as a 'technical specialist' model. The commanding elite that resulted have been criticized as overly technical in orientation, and the system of leader development has been subject to several reform efforts. Missing from the reform debates is an historical understanding of how and why the officer system changed. This study contributes to the history by exploring the shift in U.S. Navy leader models from 'generalist' to 'technical specialist'. It is widely believed in military circles that the shift in leadership models from 'generalist' to 'specialist' was natural, an inevitable consequence of technological change. Among scholars, the shift in the U.S. Navy from 'generalist' to 'specialist' is typically associated with aviation, circa 1935-47. This dissertation challenges these notions. The shift in leader models was not fated by technology, but was the result of highly contingent bureaucratic battles fought between general line officers (generalists) and nuclear reactor specialists for control of the development of young officers. Chance events-- in particular, the sinking of USS THRESHER-- also shaped officer policy. This study argues that for six decades--from 1899 to 1963-- navy leadership affirmed the 'generalist' as the preferred model for commander. But in the 1960s the Navy abandoned the 'generalist' model. Admiral H.G. Rickover was largely responsible for the change. In the space of a decade, Rickover restructured assignment and education processes to produce technically expert officers for his nuclear machines. Naval Academy admissions criteria and curricula were changed such that specialized technical majors replaced general degrees and universal language education. The restructured processes encouraged officers to value specialized technical expertise over general knowledge, that is, integrated operational, strategic, and cultural knowledge. Aviators and surface officers followed Rickover's cue and by the 1970s adopted more specialized models of development for their respective officers.Item The Maintainers of Safety and Efficiency: The Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, 1900-1940(2008-05-09) Williams, Robert C; Sicilia, David; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen is a little-known technical and political organization that gained power during the opening decades of the twentieth century through the increasingly complex nature of members' work, the vision of its leaders, and their abilities to gather support from other unions and the federal government. This thesis is organized around three themes: first, how the growing complexity of signal systems continually challenged signalmen to broaden signalmen's skills, which, in turn, gave them an advantage in asking for recognition as a skilled craft union; second, how the skills that signalmen employed brought them into conflict with other unions over signal department jobs; and third, how, despite having only between 10,000 and 19,000 members, the organization's leaders learned to negotiate using reason, evidence, and logic to demonstrate the union's importance in the industry as the custodians of public safety and rail traffic efficiency.