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 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 A Worldwide History Spanning Genocide for the Sake of Corporate Profit(2016) Eckstein, Jacob Daniel; Mitchell, Emily; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A Worldwide History Spanning Genocide for the Sake of Corporate Profit is the title of a thesis consisting of four stories. Crosky’s Knife is presented first for the sake of allowing potential readers to embrace a sense of amiable audience engagement and is based on a true story of a veteran of one of the many global conflicts currently raged on behalf of freedom. The three pieces following this feint are reworked versions of stories written from the heart and delivered to machines. As it presents numerous aspects of reality that the average person may not wish to consider, doing so with shockingly casual acceptance of such horror and/or banality, the conscious reception of the duty of engagement and possible appreciation of the text is not advised. Knives, rabid dogs, severed tongues, and a downpour of malnourished Iraqi babies are components intrinsic to the direction of this thesis.Item "Founding a Heavenly Empire": Protestant Missionaries and German Colonialism, 1860-1919(2012) Best, Jeremy; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates the relationship between German Protestant missionaries and secular leaders of colonial politics and culture in the German colonial empire during the nineteenth century. In particular, it examines how missionaries defined their collective identity as an international one against pressures that encouraged mission societies to adopt and promote policies that favored the German colonial state and German colonial economic actors. Protestant missionaries in Germany created an alternative ideology to govern Germans' and Germany's relationships with the wider world. The dissertation examines the formation of an internationalist missionary methodology and ideology by German missionary intellectuals from 1870 and the shift to traditional Protestant nationalism during World War I. It then examines the application by missionaries of this ideology to the major issues of Protestant mission work in German East Africa: territorial rivalries with German Catholic mission orders, mission school policy, fundraising in the German metropole, and international missionary cooperation. In so doing, it revises conventional interpretations about the relationship between Protestantism and nationalism in Germany during this period.Item Royal Subjects, Imperial Citizens: The Making of British Imperial Culture, 1860-1901(2010) Reed, Charles; Price, Richard N; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The dissertation explores the development of global identities in the nineteenth-century British Empire through one particular device of colonial rule - the royal tour. Colonial officials and administrators sought to encourage loyalty and obedience on part of Queen Victoria's subjects around the world through imperial spectacle and personal interaction with the queen's children and grandchildren. The royal tour, I argue, created cultural spaces that both settlers of European descent and colonial people of color used to claim the rights and responsibilities of imperial citizenship. The dissertation, then, examines how the royal tours were imagined and used by different historical actors in Britain, southern Africa, New Zealand, and South Asia. My work builds on a growing historical literature about "imperial networks" and the cultures of empire. In particular, it aims to understand the British world as a complex field of cultural encounters, exchanges, and borrowings rather than a collection of unitary paths between Great Britain and its colonies.