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 President's Pen: A Literary History of American Presidential Autobiographies(2010) Cole, Allen Fletcher; Levine, Robert S; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: The President's Pen: A Literary History of American Presidential Autobiographies Allen Fletcher Cole, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Professor Robert Levine, Department of English Approximately half of American presidents have produced either a full or partial narrative record of their lives, and recent presidential autobiographies have been released to full-scale media attention. Yet, despite the genre's familiarity, there has been no comprehensive analysis of this set of presidential autobiographies. The goal of this project is to examine a selected number of presidential memoirs in order to chart the development of this genre. Aside from considering the merits of the individual texts through extended readings, this dissertation will trace the history of the publication, marketing, and reception of these texts. In addition, it will trace the formal changes and development of the presidential memoir in the context of the changing relationships between the president and the American people, popular conceptions of public and private, and the confluence of politics and celebrity. In order to achieve these goals, the dissertation is arranged chronologically and centers on selected texts that mark the genre's evolution. The first chapters are devoted to the earliest presidential autobiographies, those of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe. These three works demonstrate a careful delineation between public and private and ostensibly serve public ends. The second chapter focuses on books by James Buchanan and Ulysses Grant, both of whom sought to market their life narratives in order to reach the broadest possible audience. The third chapter takes up the autobiographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, two presidents who used the expansion of technology to project carefully constructed public characters to the American electorate. Therefore, their texts take on the voice and character of these public characters, stamping them distinctively and underscoring both men's popular images. The final chapter posits Ronald Reagan as the ultimate blending of celebrity and politics and suggests that comparing his two autobiographies--one the story of a movie star and the other the story of a president--demonstrates the uneasy line between institutionalized power and popular celebrity.Item MOZAMBICAN NATIONAL ANTHEMS: MEMORY, PERFORMANCE, AND NATION-BUILDING(2010) Curtis, Katherine June; Provine, Robert C; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the national anthems of Mozambique. Crises in Mozambique's history prompted the search for a new national anthem three times, with only two of the searches ended in a new national anthem--namely, "Viva, Viva a FRELIMO" the anthem adopted at independence and the current national anthem "Patria Amada." Using theory from ethnomusicology, anthropology, political science and others, the role of these national anthems in national unification and cultural solidification are discussed. In order to analyze the anthems of Mozambique, national anthems will be explored as static symbols and performed rituals. The history of Mozambique from its first contact with colonization through the present day will add insight to the associations that make anthems powerful in those roles.Item FAITH WITHOUT FUNDING, VALUES WITHOUT JUSTICE: THE BUSH CAMPAIGN'S SUCCESSFUL TARGETING OF AFRICAN AMERICAN EVANGELICAL PASTORS AND CHURCHES IN THE 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION(2009) Wilds Lawson, Tamara M.; Parks, Sheri; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the impact of the Black church on electoral politics through an analysis of the role it played during the 2004 presidential election. By examining this particular election, I illustrate both the complexity and political import of the Black church and how neither can be taken for granted by presidential candidates or major political parties seeking to win elections. Paying particular attention to the strategies the Bush campaign and Republican Party used to target a certain segment of the Black church, I focus on faith-based initiatives and same-sex marriage as two specific issues that connected Black churches to the 2004 presidential election in critical ways. I collected data from historical and political texts as well as newspapers and published reports. My interviews with a cross-section of clergy, party operatives and political activists also provided critical information. This dissertation will examine the significance of the role faith-based initiatives and values centered wedge politics played in impacting Black pastors and churches during the countdown to the general election of 2004. The Bush campaign targeted and successfully reached evangelical Black pastors and congregations across the nation by appealing to their conservative moral values. This is significant for two reasons. First, because in expressing their support for President Bush, these Black churches represented a clear departure from the perception that all Black churches support Democratic candidates. They also complicated the notion that African Americans, often thought of as a racial monolith, are politically predictable. Second, because it signaled a shift in Republican presidential campaign outreach strategy from the previous four presidential elections. This study will interrogate whether that strategic shift was grounded in a desire to broaden and diversify the base of the Republican Party. The Bush campaign capitalized on existing relationships with Black churches and pastors, which were cultivated as the administration courted their support during Bush's first term with promises of faith-based initiative funding.Item Diversity, Modesty, Liberty: An Essay on State Neutrality(2008) Baltzly, Vaughn Bryan; Galston, William A; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Human beings have long disagreed about the best way to live. Of what significance is this fact for politics? In this dissertation, I argue that it is of the utmost significance, and that substantial theoretical conclusions follow from our decision to take it seriously. Arguing that few accounts of politics have given due consideration to the fact of persistent disagreement, among reasonable and well-intentioned individuals, as to what gives life meaning and value, I articulate what I hope to be the most defensible account of a politics that accommodates this fact. Citing a variety of possible inferences we might make in response to this `fact of diversity', I defend a humble assessment of our cognitive abilities in this regard as the most charitable inference on offer. Formulated from the perspective of those who would claim the right to exercise political power and authority, this epistemically-humble response to the fact of diversity issues in a principled refusal to endorse any particular account of the Good Life as authoritative for public purposes. The state manifests this principled refusal by adopting an attitude of `maximum feasible accommodation' with respect to its citizens' pursuits of their diverse conceptions of life's meaning and value. Such an attitude needs to be fleshed out in terms of policy, however, so in the final chapters I articulate and defend, as the best practical expression of a stance of maximum accommodation, a principle that restricts the use of the state's coercive power to only those measures needed to protect citizens' `expressive liberty' - that is, their right to live lives that express their cherished notions of life's meaning and value, free from coercive interference.Item Reporting from the frontlines of the First Cold War: American diplomatic despatches about the internal conditions in the Soviet Union, 1917-1933(2007-11-27) Asgarov, Asgar Movsum; David-Fox, Michael; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Following the Bolshevik Revolution in November of 1917, the United States ended diplomatic relations with Russia, and refused to recognize the Soviet regime until 1933 when President Franklin Roosevelt reversed this policy. Given Russia's vast size and importance on the world stage, Washington closely monitored the internal developments in that country during the non-recognition period. This dissertation is study of the American diplomatic despatches about the political, economic and social conditions in the USSR in its formative years. In addition to examining the despatches as a valuable record of the Soviet past, the dissertation also explores the ways in which the despatches shaped the early American attitudes toward the first Communist state and influenced the official policy. The American diplomats, stationed in revolutionary Russia and later, in the territories of friendlier nations surrounding the Soviet state, prepared regular reports addressing various aspects of life in the USSR. Following the evacuation of the American diplomatic personnel from Russia toward the end of the Civil War, the Western visitors to Russia, migrants, and Soviet publications became primary sources of knowledge about the Soviet internal affairs. Under the guidance of the Eastern European Affairs Division at the U.S. State Department, the Americans managed to compile great volumes of information about the Soviet state and society. In observing the chronological order, this dissertation focuses on issues of particular significance and intensity such as diplomatic observers' treatment of political violence, repression and economic hardships that engulfed tumultuous periods of the Revolution, Civil War, New Economic Policy and Collectivization. The dissertation also examines the American recognition of the Soviet state in the context of the diplomatic despatches about the Soviet internal conditions.Item Legacies of Stalingrad: The Eastern Front War and the Politics of Memory in Divided Germany, 1943-1989(2007-12-11) Morina, Christina; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The two most monstrous and closely intertwined crimes committed by Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and the "war of extermination" against the Soviet Union, gave rise to two diametrically opposed official memories of the Nazi past in both Germanys: while over the years the annihilation of over six million Jews gained the most prominent position in West German memory of the war, official memory in East Germany centered around the Nazi war against the Soviet Union. The divided political memory of the latter, the Eastern Front war, is the subject of this dissertation. It analyzes and contextualizes the ways in which these memories emerged in postwar German political culture as old alliances crumbled and new alliances formed in the unfolding Cold War. This study thus represents an important contribution to the history of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung. As the first comprehensive analysis of the Eastern Front memory it focuses on the intersection of memory and politics. The politics of memory, i.e. the effort to place a narrative of past events into the service of a present political cause dominated both Germanys. Yet, the analysis pays close attention to the individual biographies of the protagonists arguing that the often selective and ambiguous commemoration of the Eastern Front was not only the result of an ideology-driven instrumentalization of history in the shadow of the Cold War. Rather, it also rooted in the manifold individual encounters with the horrors of genocidal war on the various fronts of this unparalleled conflict. In case of the East German communists' master narrative, the hitherto neglected centrality of the Eastern Front significantly alters the perception, that the German Democratic Republic was built upon an "antifascist founding myth." Rather the political memory of "Operation Barbarossa" was the central ingredient in the communist founding narrative of a socialist dictatorship allied in unconditional "friendship" with the Soviet Union. This calculated presence of the Eastern Front war stands in contrast to an enduring absence of the same event in West Germany. Here it served as rallying point against the continuing "Bolshevist menace", both deriving from and sustaining the antitotalitarian consensus of the young democracy.Item Essentially Powerful: Political Motherhood in the United States and Argentina(2007-04-29) Gibbons, Meghan Keary; Peres, Phyllis A.; Rosenfelt, Deborah; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Essentially Powerful" explores the roles of essentialism around motherhood in the political protests of two groups in the United States and Argentina. Another Mother for Peace in the U.S. and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina based their protests on their identities as mothers, authorizing themselves to challenge their states' actions around their children. The states themselves also used the figure of the mother to promote specific behaviors that limited political opposition. The contrast between these two approaches problematizes the figure of the subject within poststructuralist and feminist debates about resistance. The subject is seen alternately as an active agent who can use essentialism strategically and a discursive construction that can be easily manipulated by ideology. This study explores the ground between these two poles, mapping the ways in which essentialisms around motherhood can be proscriptive in the hands of hegemons, but empowering when used by subjects themselves, who blend experience with essence. Interviews with participants in both groups as well as testimonial accounts, films and media coverage of the groups combine to allow a rich exploration of essentialisms by the mothers and their states. My first chapter explores how the Madres and the dictatorship used essentialism to struggle for discursive control over Argentine motherhood. The Madres' authorization of themselves as public, political subjects -in interviews, testimonies and letters-- challenged the dictatorship's formation of motherhood as a private, domestic identity. Chapter two examines the representation of the Madres' protests in film, exploring the ambivalence that Argentine audiences experienced in the women's blurring of several traditional binaries: emotion and reason, family and state, private and public. My third and fourth chapters analyze the narrative strategies of Another Mother for Peace. These North American mothers used essentialism to justify their movement into the public, political sphere, while still performing traditional, domestic motherhood in strategic ways. My final section explores how distinct cultural, religious and historical paradigms inflected the experiences of these two mothers' groups differently, facilitating and/or problematizing their uses of essentialist identities. This analysis critiques the limitations of both proscriptive and biological essentialisms, and allows us to see how the mothers' own experiences of motherhood pushed them beyond the boundaries of traditional essentialism and into new subjectivities.Item Beyond Political Neutrality: Towards A Complex Theory of Rights in the Modern Democratic State(2006-10-23) Mason, Chataquoa Nicole; McIntosh, Wayne; Williams, Linda F; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As of late, women, racial and ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, and other similarly situated groups have begun to make right-claims that once again test liberal notions of neutrality and raise significant questions concerning whether or not full equality and autonomy is possible in modern democracies. This study focuses on the impact of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other markers of difference on the realization of rights in the modern democratic state. This dissertation uses three case studies, which separately and together demonstrate attempts to realize full freedom and autonomy through practices of direct democracy, the California Referendum Initiative; appeal to the courts, the issue of Gay Marriage; and the creation of public policies and landmark legislation, the Violence Against Women Act. The findings of my research suggest that at all levels of government, race, class, gender, sexual orientation and other markers of difference shape the realization of rights in the modern democratic state. In this study, I extend the insights offered by critical race scholars by proffering a complex theory of rights that is able to account for the impact of identity and culture to the realization of rights and rights-claims made by individuals and groups in the public sphere. Employing a complex theory of rights, the findings of this study confirm that there are a variety of factors that influence the realization of rights in the modern democratic state. Chief among them are: (1) A notion of the good operating in society that is connected to deeply entrenched societal values and norms and that privileges the dominant culture; (2) the structures and institutions that govern society are enmeshed in race, class, sexuality, and ethnic hierarchies; (3) the accumulated advantages gained through historic practices of exclusion, conquest, and enslavement; (4) the representation of the dominant group and subjugated groups in the public sphere through texts, the media, and discourse; and (5) whether or not individuals or groups are recognized as bearers of rights under the law.Item Public Relations in a "Jolted" Political Environment: An Exploratory Study of Boundary-Spanning Government Relations Professionals in Maryland(2006-05-30) Tuite, Leah Simone; Grunig, Larissa A; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This qualitative study examined government relations, an academically underexplored specialized form of public relations. It explored the individual lived experiences of boundary-spanning government relations professionals (GRPs), those organizational members who manage organizational interdependence with political stakeholders, in organizations enduring a major "jolt" (A.D. Meyer, 1982) in the political environment. The jolt in question is the election of Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr., in November 2002, as Maryland's first Republican governor in nearly four decades. The study then explained the implications of this jolt for GRPs, their work, and their organizations. Further, the study considered those experiences and implications in light of whether the jolt was perceived as a boon or a bane to an informant's organization. From the conceptual framework built from public relations and organizational theories, the study specifically looked at GRPs' perceptions of the jolt and the political environment, organizational worldviews, communication practices, their work activities and responsibilities, and organizational political legitimacy. Active interviews were conducted with forty "informants" who functioned as either in-house or for-contract GRPs for IRS-designated 501c nonprofit organizations in Maryland. Among other findings, the analysis demonstrated the ways in which partisan conflict among political stakeholders, a polarized political environment, and changes in organizations' political legitimacy affected in the work-lives of informants. Of greatest concern to them were the jolt's effects on their networks of social and professional contacts ¾ their social circles (Kadushin, 1968). Social circles were found to be the ultimate linchpins to GRPs' effectiveness and success. The analysis also revealed that dialogue, used in the course of jointly implementing the personal influence and cultural interpreter models of public relations, best described both the positive and normative practices of government relations. This study made significant contributions to the body of knowledge on public relations and government relations. It advanced a positive-normative theory of government relations, resolved speculation about why government relations is an anomaly to the Excellence theory of public relations (J.E. Grunig, 1992), filled gaps in the scholarly literature, and suggested organizational justice (Thibaut & Walker, 1975) as a conceptual framework for understanding symmetry and dialogic processes in government relations.Item Effective government affairs in an era of marketization: Strategic issues management, business lobbying, and relationship management by multinational corporations in China(2005-12-07) Chen, Yi-Ru Regina; Grunig, Larissa A.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Little public relations research on government affairs has been conducted. Even less research of this kind has yet been conducted in a non-western context. The purposes of this study were to explore how public relations professionals in multinational corporations (MNCs) in China practice government affairs activities at different levels of Chinese government and to develop a normative theory of strategic government affairs. Government affairs in this dissertation refers to the organizational function that encompasses issues management, policy formation, and relationship management. I applied the perspectives of public relations and political economy to examine the MNCs' management of government affairs. I conducted 27 long interviews with executives or managers responsible for government affairs from the China offices of 25 MNCs. The MNCs cover several industries and three business entry modes. I also conducted a two-phase document review and informal interviews with Chinese journalists and public relations scholars and practitioners. My data suggested that with China's socialist market economy and authoritarian political system, MNCs must interact with the government to strategically manage opportunities and threats in their environments. I found that government affairs performs six functions. Government affairs contributes to organizational effectiveness by participating in the MNCs' strategic management processes through four roles, managing issues, and cultivating the MNCs' relationships with key stakeholders through communication and corporate behaviors. My data showed common political strategies and consistent patterns of political involvement of the MNCs. MNCs selected their political strategies based on factors such as economic conditions and organizational characteristics. Only a few MNCs evaluated their government affairs practices based on goal achievement. Drawing on the results, I developed three models that construct my theory of strategic government affairs. These models apply general public relations theories to the context of government affairs. The model of strategic management of government affairs identifies government affairs' participation in an organization's strategic management and the strategic nature of government affairs programs. The situational theory for government affairs allows professionals to separate active publics from stakeholders. The model of effective government affairs provides a framework for the development of government affairs programs that reflect long-term strategic management.