College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item The Shadow of the Habsburgs: Memory and National Identity in Austrian Politics and Education, 1918-1955(2006-06-01) Campbell, Douglas Patrick; Rozenblit, Marsha; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how the people of Austria portrayed their past as part of the centuries-old, multinational Habsburg Monarchy in order to conduct a public debate about what it meant to be an "Austrian" during a tumultuous era in Europe's history. As its main sources, It draws upon the public writings of Austrian politicians and intellectuals, as well as on educational laws, curricula and history textbooks used by the different Austrian governments of the era in order to describe how Austrian leaders portrayed Austria's past in an attempt to define its national future, even as Austrian schools tried to disseminate those national and historical ideals to the next generation of Austrian citizens in a practical sense. The first section describes how the leaders of the Austrian First Republic saw Austria's newfound independence after 1918 as a clean break with its Habsburg past, and consequently pursued a union with Germany which was frustrated by the political interests of the victors of World War I. The second section details the rise of an "Austro-fascist" dictatorship in Austria during the mid-1930s which promoted an Austrian patriotism grounded in a positive portrayal of the Habsburg Monarchy in order to remain independent from Nazi Germany. The third section examines Austria's forcible incorporation into the Nazi German state, and the effort by the Third Reich to completely eradicate the existence of a distinctive Austrian identity by casting the Habsburg era in a negative light. The final section describes the rebirth of an independent Austrian state at the insistence of the Allied powers after World War II, and the manner in which the leaders of the Austrian Second Republic used memories of the Habsburg Past in order to portray Austrians as the victims of foreign German aggression who bore no responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich. This study ultimately shows that national identity was variable in post-Habsburg Austria, and that Austrian leaders and educators were able to construct narratives regarding their past which at times argued both for and against Austrian Germanness in response to the changing demands of the European balance of power.Item Miss Schooled: American Fictions of Female Education in the Nineteenth Century(2005-04-20) Alves, Jaime Osterman; Auerbach, Jonathan; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that the emergence of schoolgirl culture in nineteenth- century America presented significant challenges to subsequent constructions of normative femininity. Seeking to understand how literary texts both shaped and reflected the century's debates over adolescent female education, I concentrate on fictional works and historical documents that feature descriptions of girls' formal educational experiences between the 1810s and the 1890s. In Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.'s Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny, selections from the Wreath of Cherokee Rosebuds (a student-written school newspaper), S. Alice Callahan's Wynema: A Child of the Forest, Frances E. W. Harper's Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy, and other texts, I contend that the trope of the adolescent schoolgirl is a carrier of shifting cultural anxieties about how formal education would disrupt the customary maid-wife-mother cycle and turn young females off to prevailing gender roles. To assuage these anxieties and garner support for the controversial work of adolescent female education, schools incorporated into their curricula dominant ideals of femaleness from the contexts of family, the scientific-medical field, the press, and racial and community uplift movements, and delivered these ideals as "lessons" to girls from the white middle- and upper-classes, mixed racial and ethnic heritages, dispossessed Native American tribes, and working-class African-American families. In four chapters, I explore how nineteenth century Americans perceived of and represented the distinct life stage of female adolescence, and how they imagined the processes of institutional sex-role socialization that would involve schools and other organizations in the activity of molding adolescent girls into ideal American women. I have been most intrigued by narratives of female education that depict girls' exploitation of their opportunities at school to consider and respond to their cultures' idealizations of American womanhood. By tracing the figure of the schoolgirl at crossroads between educational and other institutions--in texts written by and about girls from a variety of racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds-- my study joins an emerging critical project to transcend the limitations of "separate spheres" inquiry and enrich our understanding of how girls negotiated complex gender roles in the nineteenth century.