UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item Faith in Markets: Christian Business Enterprise in America, 1800-1850(2017) Slaughter, Joseph; Sicilia, David; Ridgway, Whitman; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Faith in Markets: Christian Business Enterprise in America, 1800-1850, answers the question of how theologically conservative Protestants approached business in the expanding market economy of the early national period. Recent Supreme Court cases (such as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.) have cast light on an important and controversial intersection of capitalism and religion in the United States: the Christian Business Enterprise (CBE). Three CBEs of the early nineteenth century form the core of my study: George Rapp & Associates (the Harmony Society of Western Pennsylvania/Southern Indiana), the Pioneer Stage Coach Line (upstate New York), and Harper & Brothers (New York City). These proprietors embraced the most influential strains of Christianity in early America: Pietism, Calvinism, and Arminianism while attempting to create an ethical marketplace. Their efforts produced three distinct visions of a moral economy in the early national period: Christian communal capitalism, Christian reform capitalism, and Christian virtue capitalism. Faith in Markets challenges the prevailing notion in the historiography that concludes CBEs were the product of twentieth century Bible Belt Protestants reacting to the New Deal, World War II, or the Cold War. Instead, Christian Business Enterprise has a deeper history, that dates back to the earliest decades of the American republic. Melding the new history of capitalism with the revived field of American religious history, Faith in Markets demonstrates how individuals’ religiously motivated choices shaped market activity, as well as the market itself. The Methodist Harper brothers, for instance, rose to prominence as the most powerful publishers of the nineteenth century, dramatically shaping American culture with their middle class Victorian literary products, all while serving as a model of trustworthy business in an age of anonymous market exchange. Ultimately, whether reforming the market by successfully limiting the workweek to six days, presenting an alternate vision for republican industry and community, or fostering middle class Victorian values, the key figures in Faith in Markets illustrates how Christian Business Enterprises indelibly shaped antebellum American culture.Item A TALE OF TWO MODERNITIES: A LIBERAL ALTERNATIVE TO A LIBERAL MODERNITY FROM VICO TO HAVEL(2014) Otruba, Alexander Peter; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The resurgence of the political theory of Marx, Lenin and even Communism itself is increasingly seen in left political theory as the only means of successfully mobilizing the "energy and rage" of the people against capitalism in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse. It also threatens to draw politics and political theory back into the dangerous territory of twentieth-century illusions. This dissertation--taking its cue from Jeffrey Isaac's 1995 article in DISSENT condemning the "strange silence of political theory" regarding the revolutions of 1989--looks to introduce the political thought of 1989 into contemporary left political theory. The work of Leszek Kolakowski, Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel and Gyorgy Konrad are representative of a political theory that consciously works to avoid the ideological traps and illusions packaged within modernity's displacement of the authority of the natural world with the Cartesian promise to be able to both know, order, and modify that world. This dissertation places the east and central European dissident theorists of 1989 in conversation with Giambattista Vico--who in his oration On method in contemporary fields of study (1710) recognized the presence of this tension that would undergird modernity--and the Italian antifascist theorists Benedetto Croce, Piero Gobetti and Antonio Gramsci, whom he would later inspire. Through their similar confrontations with modern totalitarian states, both the Italian antifascist theorists and the theorists of 1989 identified within modernity a rupture between "truth", concrete reality, and humanity itself. A rupture that produced regimes and politics that promised humanity's emancipation from absolutism, while normalizing its subjugation in new and increasingly sophisticated ways. Their revised theoretical approach to modernity sets aside the ideological illusions of the twentieth-century in a compelling manner, and instead offer a principled foundation for the active preservation of democracy and human autonomy. Read collectively they represent more just a critique, but also a sophisticated set of political ideas that answer those who would otherwise approach them as naïve revolutionists or even defenders of the status quo.Item "In It We Should See Our Own Revolution Moving Froward, Rising Up": Socialist Realism, National Subjecthood, and the Chronotope of Albanian History in the Vlora Independence Monument(2014) Isto, Raino Eetu; Mansbach, Steven A; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)November 28, 1972 saw the inauguration of one of communist Albania's largest and most significant works of public sculpture, the seventeen-meter tall bronze Vlora Independence Monument. The work, created by Kristaq Rama, Shaban Hadëri, and Muntas Dhrami, represented an unparalleled attempt to visualize both the geographical and historical unity of the Albanian people, assisting in the cohesion of a modern national identity created and reinforced by the communist government. This paper argues that the Independence Monument, as an exemplar of Albanian communist art, represented not the propagandistic revision of national history--as is often claimed of socialist realism--but rather the establishment of a spatial and temporal ground from which its viewers could come to understand themselves as possessing a shared national heritage and participating in the common construction of a uniquely Albanian socialism.Item Dialectics of Disenchantment: Totalitarianism and Partisan Review(2011) Shechter, Benli Moshe; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation takes the literary and culturally modern magazine, Partisan Review (1934-2003), as its case study, specifically recounting its early intellectual history from 1934 to 1941. During this formative period, its contributing editors broke from their initial engagement with political radicalism and extremism to re-embrace the demo-liberalism of America's foundational principles during, and in the wake of, the Second World War. Indeed, Partisan Review's history is the history of thinking and re-thinking "totalitarianism" as its editors journeyed through the dialectics of disenchantment. Following their early (mis)adventures pursuant of the radical politics of literature, their break in the history of social and political thought, sounding pragmatic calls for an end to ideological fanaticism, was one that then required courage, integrity, and a belief in the moral responsibility of humanity. Intellectuals long affiliated with the journal thus provide us with models of eclectic intellectual life in pursuit of the open society, as does, indeed, the Partisan Review.Item Building the Stained Glass Prism: The Development of the Polish Catholic Church's Electronic Media Properties 1989-2003(2004-11-24) Burns, David Paul; Hiebert, Ray E.; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates the Polish political, economic, and social transition from 1989 to 2003 from communism to capitalism, specifically its impact on a powerful Polish institution the Roman Catholic Church - and by extension, the Church's electronic media properties. As Poland changed from an eastern-looking collectivist society to a more western individualist society, its conservative Catholic Church likewise moved from a more autocratic, cohesive force towards a more liberal, Post-Vatican II approach to worship supported by the first Polish pontiff, John Paul II. Various Catholic religious orders with political viewpoints ranging from liberal to ultra-conservative managed the Church's radio, television and Internet properties and shaped the Church's mediated messages along their own religious ideology. This divisiveness was similarly reflected in fragmentation within the Church hierarchy, with individual Polish bishops supporting the media properties that most closely espoused their viewpoint.