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 'Jew and American in the Making': Education and Childrearing in the American Jewish Community, 1945-1967(2015) Furman, Joshua J.; Rozenblit, Marsha; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation examines American Jewish ideas about childhood, parenting, and identity within the context of the aftermath of the Holocaust and the beginning of the Cold War, as a pervasive mood of anxiety about the future direction of American Jewry and its prospects for survival set in among communal leaders. I analyze a wide range of prescriptive literature on American Jewish parenting from psychologists, rabbis, and social workers, as well as Jewish children's magazines and educational materials from religious schools and summer camps. I argue that concerns about antisemitism, intermarriage, and the viability of Jewish life in suburbia drove the need for a philosophy of education and childrearing that prioritized positive experiences and attachments to Judaism and Jewish culture, without inhibiting the transition of Jews and Judaism into mainstream middle-class American life. Building on insights from Kurt Lewin and other Jewish psychologists, as well as Cold War-era notions about the Judeo-Christian origins of American democratic values, rabbis and educators argued that Jewish education should produce not only happy, well-adjusted Jews, but well-informed and loyal American citizens as well. As the first full-length study of American Jewish approaches to education and childrearing after World War II, this project sheds light on important and contested issues in several areas of scholarly interest. It demonstrates the central importance of Kurt Lewin's work to the formulation of the guiding motives and methods that directed Jewish education after 1940. It helps clarify what we know about the nature and extent of Holocaust education in the American Jewish community before the mid-1960s. It offers new perspectives into the process by which American Jews articulated a middle-class identity for themselves that was grounded in both customs and ideas from Jewish tradition as well as contemporary insights found in secular American culture. It also offers a case study for considering how minority groups in an open society such as the United States seek both to integrate themselves into American culture and to preserve their distinctiveness.Item "Against the Public": Teacher Strikes and the Decline of Liberalism, 1968-1981(2013) Shelton, Jon K.; Greene, Julie; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the 1930s, the Democratic Party became the party of working people largely through its support of legislation encouraging the formation of labor unions. As the nation moved leftward, a liberal consensus emerged that placed support--in the name of both economic growth and greater social equality--for labor unions at it center. Support for this labor-liberalism declined considerably during the 1970s, paving the way for the neoliberal conservatism that has emerged in the last quarter century of American politics. This dissertation explains this shift by looking at the intersection between culture and the public sector labor movement in the postwar era. As unionized teachers became increasingly visible in American political culture in the 1960s, lengthy strikes by teachers in major metropolitan areas in the 1970s caused many Americans to question their assumptions about the role of the state and the importance of labor unions. Because of teachers' long-time cultural importance as providers of economic opportunity as well as inculcators of moral values, their labor stoppages (which were often violations of the law) caused many white working- and middle-class Americans to blame the excesses of the liberal state for moral decline and to re-think their views about what had made America so prosperous in the years following World War II. Further, the state's failure to solve the thorny problem of teachers shutting down the school system also caused many of these future "Reagan Democrats" to question the efficacy of the liberal state. With labor-liberalism discredited, free-market conservatives began, by the end of the decade, to argue persuasively for a shift to a more austere state, less government regulation of business, and for the privatization of social goods like education. This dissertation charts these larger developments by putting close examinations of teacher strikes in Newark, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and St. Louis in dialogue with the national trajectory of neoliberal conservatism.Item The Ford Foundation-MENC Contemporary Music Project (1959-1973): A View of Contemporary Music in America(2013) Covey, Paul Michael; Davis, Shelley G; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Challenging the widespread belief that serial or otherwise atonal composers dominated the United States' contemporary music scene of the 1950s and '60s (a situation named the “serial tyranny” by Joseph Straus), this study of the Ford Foundation-funded Contemporary Music Project (CMP) concludes that tonality was prevailingly considered an acceptably “contemporary” compositional orientation at the time (1959-1973). The evidence examined includes music by the 73 composers-in-residence the CMP placed in public school systems and communities nationwide, as well as syllabi and lesson plans for 90 Project-sponsored courses on purportedly “contemporary” music, also spread throughout the country, most at college level. Both the former and the content of the latter are placed in tonal or atonal categories, and the result tabulated. The study is in four main parts: Part 1 gives a working definition of tonality and discusses the Project's early stages (1959-63), when it was called the Young Composers Project and featured only composer residencies. Throughout discussion of these residencies, the Project's absence of bias with regard to style is highlighted. Part 2 details its expansion, as the CMP, to include educational programs such as Seminars and Workshops (1964-1966). Part 3 concerns the Institutes for Music in Contemporary Education (IMCE)--which included experimental musicianship courses at 33 universities--and the final years of school system residencies. Part 4 outlines the Project's final years, which continued workshops and moved composer residencies from schools to communities. The study's account of the content of the CMP's educational programs provides a statistical image of the contemporary canon as of the mid-to-late 1960s: the works and composers from within then-living memory that were considered most significant. Tonal music forms unambiguously the greater portion of this canon, and is also prevalent within the output of the resident composers, a group including many later well-known names. In addition to these findings, the study documents the remarkable collaboration of numerous significant composers and other musical figures, with various individual proclivities, on a massive undertaking that had both the goal and effect of cultivating and promoting contemporary music in a full and open-minded range of styles.Item Indigenismo and its Discontents: Bilingual Teachers and the Democratic Opening in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico, 1954-1982(2012) Dillingham, Alan Shane; Vaughan, Mary Kay; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the relationship between indigenous peoples and modernizing schemes in Mexico during the second half of the twentieth century. As such, it explores the relationship between indigeneity, educational and development policies, and Cold War politics. The study is grounded in a particular indigenous highland region of southern Mexico, the Mixteca Alta, while at the same time investigating indigenous-state relations as they were articulated on national and international levels. I examine policy debates, institutional reforms and labor struggles within indigenista agencies between 1954 and 1982. I ask how ideas about the value of indigenous language and culture shaped projects of incorporation and the struggles of meaning inherent in those processes. In other words, this dissertation is an investigation of the micropolitics of indigenous education and development efforts in the second half of the twentieth century. I argue that in the late 1970s a confluence of factors-including postwar development projects engaging indigenous brokers, transnational discourses of anti-colonialism, and grassroots struggle with an authoritarian regime-crystallized to shift official policy to the recognition and celebration of indigenous linguistic diversity. The dissertation deepens our understanding of post-1940 Mexican political culture and the transformations it underwent. Specifically, it plots a new periodization for regions, such as the Mixteca Alta, which did not experience significant agrarian reform during the 1930s, by demonstrating how federal agencies (other than the military) only began to exert influence in the early 1950s. The period of liberalizing reforms known as the apertura democrática, or democratic opening, is frequently described as an effort to coopt government opponents. I argue against this cooptation narrative by demonstrating how President Luis Echeverría (1970-1976) employed tried and true tactics of negotiation with mobilized sectors to both concede to and control emerging aspirations. It is in this regard that the Mexican regime, earlier than most of its Latin American counterparts, employed the rhetoric of indigenous cultural and linguistic rights to reformulate its corporatist rule.Item Unsatisfactory Progress: The Pursuit of Good Schools in Suburban America, 1940-1980(2011) Sullivan, Jeremy Patrick; Gerstle, Gary; Sicilia, David B.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project is a case study of educational politics in Montgomery County, Maryland, an affluent suburban county bordering Washington, D.C., from 1940 to 1980. Following World War Two the county experienced significant population growth due to the baby boom and migration, transforming it into a thriving suburb. Concurrently, state party control over the county's school system was replaced by a pluralist system characterized by local grassroots activism, allowing groups of citizens to articulate and organize around distinct educational visions influenced by attitudes about race, class, and political ideology. Citizens debated the meaning of good schools and discussed the best way to achieve them, and over time conflicts between proponents of different educational philosophies revealed clearly defined segments of people within the county. These divisions developed within a consensual yearning for excellent public schools, and this dissertation explores the tension between the shared desire for educational excellence and the specific, competing desires of activists to define educational quality and influence educational policy. Current scholarship on the history of education in America focuses on urban schools or examines particular issues, like desegregation or teacher unionization, in isolation. This investigation highlights suburban educational politics and explores how suburbanites confronted numerous challenges simultaneously as they worked to make good schools in their community. Four groups of county residents emerged and sorted themselves into associations and activist organizations during the postwar decades: liberals, African Americans, conservatives, and teachers. Members of competing activist organizations defined good schools differently and employed different strategies to implement their preferences, including lobbying, electoral activism, petitioning at public hearings, and direct action such as protests and strikes. Cooperation between activists seemed possible initially, but over time the democratic mechanisms of pluralist educational politics helped cultivate suspicion in the minds of many citizens, splintering the consensus about the quality of the school system and prompting people to view public schools as a limited resource, with benefits available only to some, as opposed to a common good. In this way, the democratization of educational politics constrained what these suburbanites thought public schools could achieve and tempered their hopes for the future.