College of Arts & Humanities
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1611
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
Browse
2 results
Search Results
Item Faucets and Fertilizers: Interpreting Technological Change in Rural Oaxaca, Mexico, 1946-1988(2015) Walker, Joshua Charles; Vaughan, Mary Kay; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Faucets and Fertilizers: Interpreting Technological Change in Rural Oaxaca, Mexico, 1946-1988 argues that peasant farmers in Oaxaca were key actors who helped to oversee the technological modernization of their villages in the twentieth century. From the 1940s to the 1980s, federal and state development programs sought to introduce new tools like chemical fertilizers, water faucets, roads, and mechanical corn grinders to villages in the countryside. These programs were often unevenly distributed and poorly designed, forcing peasants to rely on old skills and customs in order to acquire and use the technologies they wanted. As peasants learned about the benefits of the technologies, they also learned to use them to challenge the power of family patriarchs, village elders, and federal leaders. Far from being the passive victims of modernization described in the historiography of rural Mexico, Oaxacan peasants participated in technological change and used new tools in an attempt to overcome problems with low crop production and restricted mobility.Item Standing Tall: U.S. Efforts at Democratizing Rural Japanese Women During the Occupation of Japan, 1945-1952(2010) Price, Emily Rebecca; Mayo, Marlene J; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)During the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945-1952, dismantling the political and cultural systems that were perceived to have led Japan to war was a primary goal. Democracy, a word that came to encompass much more than its standard definitions, was to be the replacement ideology and coupled with demilitarization. Through a survey of SCAP documents from Record Group 331 located in the National Archives, this paper examines the way in which varying concepts and meanings of democracy were promoted to rural Japanese women by U.S. Occupation forces. It also explores the ways in which Japanese farm women embraced, rejected, and/or modified the evolving ideas about democracy into their daily lives. While the impact of democracy - in all of its many guises - was not as powerful as Occupation members desired, it still had a definite effect on the way rural Japanese women thought about their society and on their daily lives.