Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item Acts of Livelihood: Bodies and Nature in International Garden City Movement Planning, 1898-1937(2018) Clevenger, Samuel Martin; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Urban planning and reform scholars and policymakers continue to cite the “garden city” community model as a potential blueprint for planning environmentally sustainable, economically equitable, humane built environments. Articulated by the British social reformer Sir Ebenezer Howard and his 1898 book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, the model represented a method for uniting the benefits of town and country through a singular, pre-planned, “healthy” community, balancing spaces of “countryside” and “nature” with affordable, well-built housing and plentiful cultural attractions associated with city life. The book catalyzed an early twentieth-century international movement for the promotion and construction of garden cities. Howard’s garden city remains a highly influential context in the history of town planning and urban public health reform, as well as more recent environmentally-friendly urban design movements. To date, while historians have long examined the garden city as an agent of social and spatial reform, little analysis has been devoted to the role of prescribed embodiment and deemed “healthy” physical cultural forms and practices in the promotion and construction of garden cities as planned communities for “healthy living.” Informed by recent scholarship in Physical Cultural Studies (PCS), embodied environmental history, cultural materialism, and theories of modern biopower, this dissertation studies the cultural history of international garden city movement planning in early twentieth century Britain and the United States. Studying archival materials related to some of the prominent planners and resultant communities of the movement, I focus on the biopolitical dimensions of the planners’ contextual designs for “nature,” “health,” and “healthy” physical culture as they devised material garden city community layouts. I argue that the intentional British and American garden cities created during the movement were planned as spatialized strategies for the regeneration of laboring bodies through organized, bourgeois physical cultural practices and access to nostalgic spaces of “naturally healthy environments and outdoor recreation.Item YOU HAVE TO CONSIDER THE SOURCE: AN INVESTIGATION OF 8TH GRADE STUDENTS USING HISTORY’S SOURCING HEURISTIC TO LEARN ABOUT AMERICA’S PAST(2013) Wooden, John Alan; VanSledright, Bruce A; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Research in history education suggests disciplinary approaches to teaching and learning about the past lead to considerable growth in students' historical thinking capabilities. This study investigated how an historical inquiry approach to instruction influences the ways adolescents read, think and write about American history. The researcher created and taught a series of lessons centered on the sourcing heuristic and other aspects of the discipline of history to students in two sections of an 8th grade American history course in a major school district in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. The lessons, exercises and pedagogical moves were based on a literature-based, theoretically-grounded framework for learning to think in history. In addition to exposure to curriculum and instruction based on historical investigation, students in one class received a structured intervention in historical thinking that gave them opportunities to critique and discuss each other's written historical arguments and engage in discourse about evidence and other history-specific concepts and strategic knowledge. It was assumed that these sessions of Peer Scrutiny and Discourse (PSD) would deepen students' knowledge of history (in a disciplinary sense) and lead them to outperform the students who did not engage in PSD on various measures of historical thinking and understanding. History-specific instruction took place over a five-month period. A range of data were collected to chart students' growth in historical thinking, including pre and post-study surveys of students' views and knowledge of history, journal entries they created after key lessons and exercises, six historical argumentation writing tasks, a think-aloud task on African Americans' experiences with Southern Reconstruction and exit interviews with primary informants, and the researcher's observations of the teaching and learning that took place. The data were also used to discern the influence of PSD. The researcher found that the majority of students in both classes made gains in historical thinking, especially in the area of written historical argumentation. There appeared to be changes in students' beliefs about history in both classes; and there was some indication that primary informants who experienced PSD developed slightly deeper ideas about evidence and interpretation. The quality of historical writing was higher among students who experienced PSD until the final historical argumentation task. This study suggests that learning about America's past through historical investigations informed and driven by a theoretical framework for learning to think in history causes forward movement along the novice-toward-expert continuum of historical thinking for most adolescents with little or no prior experience with disciplinary history.Item Jim Crow, Politics, and Economic Empowerment: The Afro-American Ledger, 1902(2011) Carmack, Karisse A.; Roberts, Eugene; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This case study of Baltimore's The Afro-American Ledger in 1902 analyzes the news and editorial content, demonstrating the power of advocacy journalism at the turn of the last century. The Ledger used its pages to persuade readers to fight the Jim Crow car bill, and to provide information about the bill's status. When blacks in other Southern states lost their right to vote and participate in the political process, the Ledger encouraged readers to use their vote and their voices to speak out against the Democratic and Republican parties during an election year. As a black-owned and operated newspaper whose founders were also men of the cloth, the Ledger encouraged more black Baltimoreans to own their own businesses, self-govern themselves, and obtain respectable jobs. Many of the editorials were devoted to finding ways to uplift the black community morally, spiritually, economically, and politically. This thesis puts the meaning and purpose of the news articles and editorials within the context of the time period in which they were published: the Jim Crow era, which is of enduring interest.Item How Cadillac Became Cadillac(2010) Benson, Edwin John Mortimer; Sicilia, David B; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the process by which General Motors' Cadillac brand of automobiles came to dominate the U.S. luxury car market between 1927 and 1960. In 1927, Cadillac was only one among a crowded field of U.S. and European automobiles priced above $3000, the threshold of the luxury car market at the time. Through a skillful process of marketing, the corporate strength of General Motors, and the mistakes and ill-fortune of its competitors; Cadillac came to hold at least 50% of the U.S. luxury car market throughout the 1950s, and in some years accounted for nearly 70% of that market. It also briefly examines the reasons for Cadillac's decline in the market during the years since 1960.Item The Demise of the Congress for Cultural Freedom: Transatlantic Intellectual Consensus and "Vital Center" Liberalism, 1950-1967(2011) Kamen, Scott C.; Giovacchini, Saverio; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)From the 1950 to 1967, the U.S. government, employing the newly formed CIA, covertly provided the majority of the funding for an international organization comprised primarily of Western non-communist left intellectuals known as the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Paris-based Congress saw its primary mission as facilitating cooperative networks of non-communist left intellectuals in order to sway the intelligentsia of Western Europe away from its lingering fascination with communism. This thesis explores how the Congress largely succeeded in the 1950s in establishing a cohesive international network of intellectuals by fostering a transatlantic consensus around "vital center" liberalism as a necessary guardian of the Western cultural intellectual tradition in the face of perceived communist threats. By examining the ways in which developments in the 1960s shattered this transatlantic consensus this thesis demonstrates how the Congress suffered an inevitable demise as Western intellectuals became disillusioned with American liberalism of the "vital center."Item WORLD WAR II AND U.S. CINEMA: RACE, NATION, AND REMEMBRANCE IN POSTWAR FILM, 1945-1978(2011) Chester, Robert Keith; Gerstle, Gary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation interrogates the meanings retrospectively imposed upon World War II in U.S. motion pictures released between 1945 and the mid-1970s. Focusing on combat films and images of veterans in postwar settings, I trace representations of World War II between war's end and the War in Vietnam, charting two distinct yet overlapping trajectories pivotal to the construction of U.S. identity in postwar cinema. The first is the connotations attached to U.S. ethnoracial relations - the presence and absence of a multiethnic, sometimes multiracial soldiery set against the hegemony of U.S. whiteness - in depictions of the war and its aftermath. The second is Hollywood's representation (and erasure) of the contributions of the wartime Allies and the ways in which such images engaged with and negotiated postwar international relations. Contrary to notions of a "good war" untainted by ambiguity or dissent, I argue that World War II gave rise to a conflicted cluster of postwar meanings. At times, notably in the early postwar period, the war served as a progressive summons to racial reform. At other times, the war was inscribed as a historical moment in which U.S. racism was either nonexistent or was laid permanently to rest. In regard to the Allies, I locate a Hollywood dialectic between internationalist and unilateralist remembrances. On one hand, narratives of the U.S. as the dominant wartime power affirmed the nation's benevolence and might, attesting to the United States' right to dictate the terms of postwar international politics. On the other, progressive filmmakers used images of the Allies to challenge postwar U.S.-centrism and bemoan the Cold War nation's military and economic mismanagement of international relations. Emphasizing the contested character of the war's cinematic image, the dissertation recuperates a tradition of dissent, complicating our understanding of World War II remembrance and postwar Hollywood history. The project also considers the relationship between the Department of Defense (DoD) Pictorial Division - the military's liaison with Hollywood - and the film industry. Drawing on DoD records, I show how the postwar state influenced representations of racial diversity, and how the military shaped images of the U.S. in interaction with its wartime Allies.Item Abigail Adams(2004-05-04) Lloyd, Erin Marie; Ridgway, Whitman; HistoryAbigail Adams was the key to the success of her husband's life and career. By studying the roles she played in her adult life, as a mother, a farm manager, a political advisor, a first lady, and a politician, one will see that Abigail Adams was more than a wife and mother. She was a multifaceted woman, who was the integral part of major success in President John Adams career.