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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    TWO STRIKES AND YOU’RE OUT: THE CONVERGENCE OF COLD WAR POLITICS, LABOR, AND ETHNIC TENSIONS IN THE JULY 1946 STRIKES AT KIRKUK AND ABADAN
    (2019) Hobson, Tiffany Claire; Wien, Peter; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This thesis explores the convergence of Cold War politics, labor issues, and ethnic conflict on the local scale during the labor strikes which occurred in July 1946 at the oil refineries in Kirkuk, Iraq and Abadan, Iran. The roles of the local communist parties in leading the strikes are weighed against the workers' economic concerns to determine that the workers’ motivations for striking extended beyond political support for any particular party, and claims that the violence which ended the strikes was the result of inherent ethnic conflicts are debunked through examination of both regions’ ethnic histories.
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    City of Grace: Power, Performance, and Bodies in Colonial South Carolina
    (2014) Shifflett, Matthew; Nathans, Heather S.; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Colonial Charles Town, South Carolina, was widely reputed to be one of the most refined and genteel cities in the early British Empire. As its planters and merchants grew rich from the overseas rice trade, they sought to embody their new elite status by learning the courtly styles of European social dancing, using dances such as the minuet to cultivate a sense of physical "grace." This sense of grace allowed them to construct cosmopolitan identities and differentiate a social order that consolidated their power over the colony. Meanwhile, other social factions, such as the colony's large slave majority and the emerging class of middling tradesmen, sought their own share in controlling the vocabulary through which bodies might mean. "City of Grace: Power, Performance, and Bodies in Colonial South Carolina" puts colonial Charles Town's "bodies" into conversation in order to highlight how bodily behaviors such as dancing, posture, and comportment could organize power relations in an eighteenth-century British colony. This dissertation considers in turn the part that four groups played in the conflict over the values assigned to Charles Town's bodies: the wealthy elites who sought to use "grace" as a means to proclaim and ensure their status, the dancing masters who sought to capitalize on the elites' need for training, the African slaves whose syncretized performances of their own ethnically-specific dances troubled elite ideals of a graceful "white" body, and the emerging cohort of middling tradespeople and evangelical believers who critiqued the pretensions of elite manners. By using sources such as dancing manuals, paintings, and private letters, I put the colonial body back "on its feet," in order to understand the kinesthetic qualities of movement itself as a site for creating and transmitting meaning. Within this framework, I suggest that genteel grace was a strategy by which eighteenth-century elites sought to perform class status without betraying the artificiality of the performance.
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    Two Parties
    (2014) Burnett, Sara; Plumly, Stanley; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Two Parties is an exploration of personal experience, history, and the coincidental as it pertains to the shaping of one's individual identity. This collection of poems is arranged into three sections. The first section focuses primarily on the inheritance of culture, language, and familial identity. The second section imagines what happens to this inheritance when it is interrupted by or is in proximity to a natural disaster, namely a volcano. Lastly, the final section delves into the individual need to make meaning from both what happened and what could have been.
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    LEARNED BEHAVIOR: RACE, RELIGION, ETHNICITY AND THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION IN 19TH CENTURY BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, 1825 - 1872
    (2012) Ryan, Meghan Higgins; Mar, Lisa R; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This thesis examines the complex relationship between religion and racial/ethnic identity through the perspective of the evolving systems of public and private education in 19th century Baltimore. In doing so, this thesis argues that public education was constructed as a means of shaping a unified American identity, and that this purpose was understood by all relevant stakeholders. These stakeholders, regardless or their religious, racial or ethnic affiliation all fought to shape the public schools into something that validated their affiliations and included them in the definition of American citizenship.