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 The New Old Deal: Colonial Social Welfare and Puerto Rican Poverty During the Great Depression, 1928-1941(2024) Brahms, Darien P.; Woods, Colleen; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The New Old Deal: Colonial Social Welfare and Puerto Rican Poverty During the Great Depression, 1928-1941 Abstract In 1941, at the end of the Great Depression, continental observers noted that Puerto Rico's urban shantytowns were expanding despite the US government's efforts to alleviate poverty through New Deal programs such as low-income housing and slum eradication initiatives. Their consensus was that working-class Puerto Ricans had it far worse than many poor Americans—including African Americans in the Jim Crow South. And yet, over the course of the 1930s, policymakers in Washington, D.C. came to conclude that a large portion of the Puerto Rican population were deserving, “white” American citizens. One would expect that, as they became increasingly categorized as “white” in the national census, federal aid to Puerto Rico would have followed the same patterns of racialized welfare that historians have associated with the New Deal. Why then were so many islanders moving to city squatters’ settlements while the white, continental working class benefitted from New Deal housing and employment initiatives? This conundrum prompted the following exploration of how Puerto Ricans' access to New Deal labor legislation, jobs creation and housing programs influenced the reinforcement of the island’s class structure, entrenched poverty, and the dramatic growth of its urban shantytowns. This dissertation considers how an analysis of island squatters’ settlements and housing programs for the island’s homeless can contribute to our understanding of how the Great Depression unfolded in a U.S. colonial territory as well as the race and class-based exclusions of New Deal aid programs. It also reveals that some U.S. officials did attempt to increase federal aid to the island during the 1930s. However, in addition to a relative lack of funding from D.C., local resistance to the New Deal fomented by insular politicians sympathetic to the colonial sugar industry prevented any meaningful aid from reaching the pockets of the island’s working classes for the bulk of the decade. And finally, this dissertation explores how exclusion from federal programs led to popular unrest that threatened to destabilize colonial rule and eventually caused a political sea change in Puerto Rico beginning in the late 1930s. This work will add to a growing body of transnational literature addressing New Deal scholarship which overlooks Puerto Rico as a topic of analysis. Including the colony in discussions about the discriminatory policies that reinforced the spatial isolation and poverty of mainland minorities will provide a new perspective on the ways power was maintained in America during an era of socioeconomic crisis. The following research also responds to works that privilege Puerto Rico's rural class struggles and agricultural capitalism while obscuring their effects on the island’s urban areas. Rural unemployment fueled migrations that swelled Puerto Rico's shantytowns, which became key sites for policy implementation battles between local and federal authorities. Such factors call for an analytical focus that includes the island's cities more fully. This approach will provide a holistic look at the interplay between the island's rural and urban regions and the mainland during the 1930s while broadening our understanding of class and racial dynamics during the American depression.Item Invisible Men, Invisible Women: Labor, Race, and the (re)Construction of American Citizenship in New Deal Post Office Murals(2019) Yasumura, Grace Sayuri; Mansbach, Steven; Ater, Renee; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Invisible Men, Invisible Women: Labor, Race, and the (re)Construction of American Citizenship in New Deal Post Office Murals is a meditation on the historical construction and persistent importance of race in the formation of American national identity and citizenship. Centering on an institutionally marginalized and academically neglected aspect of American art, this dissertation explores the depictions of non-white laborers, from images of African American sharecroppers to Mexican American migrant laborers that appear in scores of Treasury Section post office murals across the United States. Organized around three case studies, this work explores the different ways racialized identities were created, contested, and consolidated within the context of larger debates surrounding the relationship between labor and citizenship in the 1930s. This dissertation reads the murals produced under the Treasury Section as part of the New Deal’s epistemological regimes of intelligibility. In other words, these murals are to be understood as sites where collective identities are visualized and “correct” codes of social conduct are shaped in order to foster a particular vision of the citizens-subject. Treasury Section post office murals are therefore interpreted as part of a complex set of instruments deployed by the New Deal government as it sought to translate ideology into practice and thus actualize codes of racial and gendered conduct and ultimately modes of ideal citizenship.Item In Pursuit of Reform, Whether Convict or Free: Prison Labor Reform in Maryland in the Early Twentieth Century(2018) Durham, Erin; Woods, Colleen; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Highlighting the labor actions of inmates and organized labor, this thesis explains the transition from a contract labor system to a state-use system in Maryland’s state prisons. While many northern states abolished the contract labor system by 1911, Maryland continued contract labor into the 1930s. Efforts of prison administrators to maintain discipline and fund prison operating costs despite the labor actions of inmates and working men and women reveal the close relationship of prison labor and revenue generation. By situating prison labor within the broader history of the labor movement in Baltimore, this thesis reveals how the Maryland prison system transitioned from a backwater of Progressive Era reform to a model of New Deal ideology. Its examination of prison profits lends insight into the post-1960s rise in mass incarceration, and is vital to the project of understanding the connections between the criminal state, corporate profit, and incarcerated populations.Item Visualizing American History and Identity in the Ellen Phillips Samuel Memorial(2014) Eron, Abby R.; Ater, Renee; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In her will, Philadelphia philanthropist Ellen Phillips Samuel designated $500,000 to the Fairmount Park Art Association "for the erection of statuary on the banks of the Schuylkill River ... emblematic of the history of America from the time of the earliest settlers to the present." The initial phase of the resulting sculpture project - the Central Terrace of the Samuel Memorial - should be considered one of the fullest realizations of New Deal sculpture. It in many ways corresponds (conceptually, thematically, and stylistically) with the simultaneously developing art programs of the federal government. Analyzing the Memorial project highlights some of the tensions underlying New Deal public art, such as the difficulties of visualizing American identity and history, as well as the complexities involved in the process of commissioning artwork intended to fulfill certain programmatic purposes while also allowing for a level of individual artists' creative expression.Item Alfred E. Smith and Transitional Progressivism: The Revolution before the New Deal(2012) Chiles, Robert; Sicilia, David B.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In New York State in the 1910s and 1920s, two groups of political actors--largely female social work reformers from the settlement house tradition, and legislators from urban ethnic political machines--coalesced to develop a unique political amalgam: transitional progressivism. Transitional progressivism brought together the common interests of these two groups, forging an agenda that sought to expand the role of the state in protecting industrial laborers, ensuring social welfare, and promoting cultural pluralism. Through a complex process, this agenda became Democratic partisan dogma--first in New York and then nationally; and during both the implementation of this program and the articulation of the broader ideology of the transitional progressives in the context of state and national campaigns, transitional progressivism became the political platform of America's urban ethnic working-class voters. Through these voters and their political representatives, many priorities from the transitional progressive tradition became important facets of New Deal liberalism. Thus, by way of transitional progressivism, key elements of Progressive Era reform evolved into hallmarks of the New Deal. The foremost practitioner of this unique progressivism was Alfred E. Smith, a Democrat who served four terms as governor of New York and ran unsuccessfully for president in 1928. Part I explores the rise of transitional progressivism and its implementation during the Smith governorship. Part II presents a revisionist interpretation of the 1928 presidential contest. The conclusion follows the developments of 1928 into the 1930s, suggesting ways in which transitional progressivism exerted an important influence on the development of the New Deal.Item Historic Conservation Landscapes on Fort Hood, Texas: The Civilian Conservation Corps and Cultural Landscape Change in Central Texas(2009) Stabler, Jennifer Anne; Sies, Mary C.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was probably the most popular of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs. Many studies have examined the contribution of the CCC in national and state parks and forests, but less attention has been directed towards soil conservation work performed by enrollees on farms and ranches across the country. This dissertation examines cultural landscapes created by the CCC on farms and ranches in Central Texas that are now part of the Fort Hood Military Reservation. Cultural landscapes created by the CCC in the 1930s are significant because they represent large-scale federal government intervention into farming practices and planning on private land. Dramatic transformations occurred in both the conservation movement and on the land itself. This can be investigated through archaeological sites associated with activities of the CCC on Fort Hood from its period of operation (i.e., from 1933 to 1942). The significance of identified archaeological sites is evaluated based on the Secretary of the Interior's guidelines for evaluating archaeological sites for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places. Through the CCC, America's civilians transformed millions of acres of land across the United States from 1933 to 1942 in an effort to conserve natural resources that had been severely overexploited in preceding decades. Soil conservation and other New Deal agricultural programs primarily benefited land owners, but research on Fort Hood suggests that some tenants and sharecroppers benefited as well. Soil conservation work performed by the CCC on private land changed the way America's farming population operated their farms and included ordinary farmers in the conservation movement. Conservation was no longer the sole concern of academics, but through the efforts of federal, state, and local governments, became a major concern of ordinary farmers. This study also explores how rural planning efforts involved farmers in the decision-making process more than ever before. The reorganization of the rural landscape of Central Texas attests to the degree to which conservation measures were accepted by individual farmers.