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.

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2004 - 200912010 - 20151

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    PUBLIC SPACE \\ THE INTERNET: Public Embodiment of Digital Cultures
    (2015) Hampton, Elizabeth Anne; Rockcastle, Garth C; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Public space is vital to urban society because it lies at the center of social and cultural life, however today the internet acts as a new centrality where interaction and socialization occur in a new invisible setting. Today both physical and digital public space serve as a vital interface for civic engagement and public participation, yet there is much content that often only remains significant on the internet. This thesis seeks to both strengthen the significance of our online public interactions and enliven the urban public realm by translating digital cultures into the urban environment, giving content the ability to flow between both worlds. This hypothesis will be tested through the redesign of Pershing Square in Downtown, Los Angeles, CA.
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    Erasure and Reform: Los Angeles Literature and the Reconstruction of the Past
    (2004-11-24) Elliott, Matthew Edwin; Wyatt, David; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    My dissertation is a literary and cultural history of Los Angeles from 1930-1950. I argue that this particular time and place——this era of Los Angeles history——provides a rich site for an exploration of American identity formations. It was during these years that Los Angeles experienced the extraordinary demographic and cultural changes that transformed the city from a place that in 1930 was still heralded by boosters as a small western outpost of white Americanism into what was by 1950 perhaps the nation’s most multicultural and multiracial city. Yet, this complex history of cultural change has been long invisible, for not only is Los Angeles among the most multicultural U.S. cities, it is also the most heavily mediated of places, and the pervasive images and myths of the city and its past constructed via Hollywood films and Chamber of Commerce postcards have functioned to erase this multicultural past. My study seeks to recover this hidden history of Los Angeles by examining the work of writers who represent and explore the lived complexities of existence in this dynamic setting. I focus on such writers as Chester Himes, Hisaye Yamamoto, and John Fante, who, I argue, not only portray something of the city’s lost past but also examine the process by which marginal voices are repressed and oppositional histories are erased. In addition, I discuss contemporary Los Angeles writers, including Walter Mosley, James Ellroy, and John Gregory Dunne. Focusing on their works of historical fiction, I analyze how each re-imagines and reconstructs this era of Los Angeles’s past and thus contributes to the construction of an imaginary archive of a lost history.