Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

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

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

Browse

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    “A Beautiful Mind: Faces, Beauty, and the Brain in the Anglo-Atlantic World, 1780-1870”
    (2018) Walker, Rachel; Lyons, Clare A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In the years surrounding the Enlightenment and the American Revolution, Americans began critiquing slavery and arguing for women’s intellectual equality. Yet by the early decades of the nineteenth century, white male scientists increasingly described the minds and bodies of white men as innately and unalterably superior to those of white women and African Americans. How did early Americans reconcile this Enlightenment and Revolutionary commitment to universal human equality with the very real persistence of inequality in their society? To answer this question, “A Beautiful Mind” focuses on physiognomy: a popular transatlantic science predicated on the idea that facial features revealed people's inner nature. Because most individuals in early America believed the head and face were the physical features that best revealed the internal capacities of individuals, this project begins from the premise that we cannot comprehend how Americans understood human difference or navigated social relationships unless we unravel the connections they made between faces, bodies, and brains. At the most basic level, it argues that physiognomy constituted an influential scientific discourse and widespread social practice—a technology of character detection that people used to rationalize the hierarchies that defined their worlds. Through this new science of beauty, many Americans suggested that social inequalities were not only necessary facts of life, but also empirically verifiable realities. Perhaps the minds and faces of some people were simply better than others, they posited, and perhaps there were superior human specimens who truly deserved the social, political, and economic dominance they currently retained. Yet even as some people used this popular science to argue for white supremacy, justify gender inequities, and enforce class hierarchies, numerous Americans manipulated physiognomy’s slippery language for a wide array of purposes, using it to undermine existing inequities. This dissertation highlights their voices and experiences, showing how women and people of color created unique forms of scientific knowledge and shaped the trajectory of American intellectual thought. In doing so, it not only asks scholars to rethink what might have counted as science in the early republic; it also challenges us to reimagine who might have counted as a scientist.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    "Against the Public": Teacher Strikes and the Decline of Liberalism, 1968-1981
    (2013) Shelton, Jon K.; Greene, Julie; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In the 1930s, the Democratic Party became the party of working people largely through its support of legislation encouraging the formation of labor unions. As the nation moved leftward, a liberal consensus emerged that placed support--in the name of both economic growth and greater social equality--for labor unions at it center. Support for this labor-liberalism declined considerably during the 1970s, paving the way for the neoliberal conservatism that has emerged in the last quarter century of American politics. This dissertation explains this shift by looking at the intersection between culture and the public sector labor movement in the postwar era. As unionized teachers became increasingly visible in American political culture in the 1960s, lengthy strikes by teachers in major metropolitan areas in the 1970s caused many Americans to question their assumptions about the role of the state and the importance of labor unions. Because of teachers' long-time cultural importance as providers of economic opportunity as well as inculcators of moral values, their labor stoppages (which were often violations of the law) caused many white working- and middle-class Americans to blame the excesses of the liberal state for moral decline and to re-think their views about what had made America so prosperous in the years following World War II. Further, the state's failure to solve the thorny problem of teachers shutting down the school system also caused many of these future "Reagan Democrats" to question the efficacy of the liberal state. With labor-liberalism discredited, free-market conservatives began, by the end of the decade, to argue persuasively for a shift to a more austere state, less government regulation of business, and for the privatization of social goods like education. This dissertation charts these larger developments by putting close examinations of teacher strikes in Newark, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and St. Louis in dialogue with the national trajectory of neoliberal conservatism.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    MODERNIZATION AND VISUAL ECONOMY: FILM, PHOTOJOURNALISM, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN BRAZIL AND ARGENTINA, 1955-1980
    (2010) Halperin, Paula; Weinstein, Barbara; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation explores the relationship among visual culture, nationalism, and modernization in Argentina and Brazil in a period of extreme political instability, marked by an alternation of weak civilian governments and dictatorships. I argue that motion pictures and photojournalism were constitutive elements of a modern public sphere that did not conform to the classic formulation advanced by Jürgen Habermas. Rather than treating the public sphere as progressively degraded by the mass media and cultural industries, I trace how, in postwar Argentina and Brazil, the increased production and circulation of mass media images contributed to active public debate and civic participation. With the progressive internationalization of entertainment markets that began in the 1950s in the modern cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires there was a dramatic growth in the number of film spectators and production, movie theaters and critics, popular magazines and academic journals that focused on film. Through close analysis of images distributed widely in international media circuits I reconstruct and analyze Brazilian and Argentine postwar visual economies from a transnational perspective to understand the constitution of the public sphere and how modernization, Latin American identity, nationhood, and socio-cultural change and conflict were represented and debated in those media. Cinema and the visual after World War II became a worldwide locus of production and circulation of discourses about history, national identity, and social mores, and a space of contention and discussion of modernization. Developments such as the Bandung Conference in 1955, the decolonization of Africa, the Cuban Revolution, together with the uneven impact of modernization, created a "Third Worldism" and "Latin Americanism" that transformed public debate and the cultural field. By researching "peripheral" nations, I add to our understanding of the process of the transnationalization of the cultural field and the emergence of a global mass culture in the 1960s and 1970s.