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
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item "The Mobs All Cryd Peace With America": The Gordon Riots and Revolution in England and America(2023) Michalak, Lauren K; Brewer, Holly; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In June 1780, London was brought to its knees by a week-long insurrection. Rioters broke open and set ablaze nearly all of London’s prisons, ransacked and burned the properties of government officials, and attacked the Bank of England. The riots were in response to the British government’s rejection of a mass petition demanding the repeal of a 1778 law granting rights to Catholic subjects to encourage enlistment in the military to fight in the American Revolutionary War. The rioters’ reaction to the rejected petition reflected broader, transatlantic concerns about government operating without the consent of the governed, echoing grievances raised by American colonists prior to their declaring independence. To regain control over London, George III ordered 15,000 troops into the city, commanding them to bypass the necessary approval of civil magistrates and fire-at-will, hence abandoning legal restrictions on his power. After the insurrection was over, American Patriots and Loyalists deliberated at length over their meaning; many Britons, in turn, blamed the riots on dangerous ideologies and American conspirators. This dissertation explores how the June 1780 riots demonstrate the connections between the American Revolution and wider struggles across the British empire. While building on scholarship of the riots, British politics, and the American Revolution, I argue that these riots brought the American rebellion home to British soil, posing a significant challenge to the stability of the British nation and empire. I examine how the riots gave rise to rumors about the true culprit behind the uprising, with different groups laying blame at the feet of Catholics or Methodists, or as a plot of the British Ministry or the Americans and French. I interrogate how Patriots and Loyalists utilized the riots to reaffirm commitment to their political ideologies. I explore how news of the insurrection influenced delicate diplomatic negotiations amidst an imperial war. By investigating the myriad connections between the London riots and the American Revolution, I show how power was contested on both sides of the Atlantic and how ideas and information spread and shaped political ideology. In doing so, I argue that the London riots were a crucial event during the American Revolution.Item Infectious Disease in Philadelphia, 1690-1807: An Ecological Perspective(2006-05-15) Anroman, Gilda Marie; Sies, Mary Corbin; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the multiple factors that influenced the pattern and distribution of infectious disease in Philadelphia between the years 1690 and 1807, and explores the possible reasons for the astonishingly high level of death from disease throughout the city at this time. What emerges from this study is a complex picture of a city undergoing rapid cultural and epidemiological changes. Large-scale immigration supplied a susceptible population group, as international trade, densely packed streets, unsanitary living conditions, and a stagnant and contaminated water supply combined to create ideal circumstances for the proliferation of both pathogens and vectors, setting the stage for the many public health crises that plagued Philadelphia for more than one hundred years. This study uses an ecological perspective to understand how disease worked in Philadelphia. The idea that disease is virtually always a result of the interplay of the environment, the genetic and physical make-up of the individual, and the agent of disease is one of the most important cause and effect ideas underpinned by epidemiology. This dissertation integrates methods from the health sciences, humanities, and social sciences to demonstrate how disease "emergence" in Philadelphia was a dynamic feature of the interrelationships between people and their socio-cultural and physical environments. Classic epidemiological theory, informed by ecological thinking, is used to revisit the city's reconstructed demographic data, bills of mortality, selected diaries (notably that of Elizabeth Drinker), personal letters, contemporary observations and medical literature. The emergence and spread of microbial threats was driven by a complex set of factors, the convergence of which lead to consequences of disease much greater than any single factor might have suggested. Although it has been argued that no precondition of disease was more basic than poverty in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, it is shortsighted to assume that impoverishment was a necessary co-factor in the emergence and spread of disease. The urban environment of Philadelphia contained the epidemiological factors necessary for the growth and propagation of a wide variety of infectious agents, while the social, demographic and behavioral characteristics of the people of the city provided the opportunity for "new" diseases to appear.