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This dissertation investigated the development of stereotypes surrounding public school children in Brazil, primarily focusing on poor students of Afro descent. It explored how these stereotypes have influenced education policymaking and examined the efforts of Darcy Ribeiro and Paulo Freire to challenge these prevailing notions. Employing archival research to trace the historical creation of stereotypes about Black Brazilians from impoverished backgrounds since the country's declaration of independence, the study delved into historical accounts and perspectives offered by various political actors--policymakers, educators, families, and society in general. The aim was to understand how ideas and images about poor and Black students have been constructed and impacted the education policy process in the country. The findings revealed that historically, governing elites associated vulnerable populations with societal problems such as crime, diseases, and idleness. Consequently, different policies were designed and implemented, predominantly proposing work as a solution to restrain Black and poor populations. For children, schools emerged as spaces where they should be disciplined and tailored to meet the needs of the workforce. To understand the historical construction of these stereotypes, I conducted interviews with education stakeholders to assess the persistence of these ideas and the efforts schools make, or fail to make, to counteract the influence of negative social constructions on public school students. The research also delved into Ribeiro's and Freire's perspectives on public education--how they attempted to translate their theories into practice, and the complexities encountered during the design and implementation of their policies in the state of Rio de Janeiro and the city of Sao Paulo, respectively. This occurred during a pivotal period: the redemocratization of Brazil. As influential figures in policymaking, they faced resistance from those adhering to traditional narratives reinforcing stereotypes. Archival research and interviews with individuals who worked with Ribeiro and Freire in the design and implementation of their policies were central to understanding the challenges they faced in attempting to transform public schools in Brazil. The findings underscore the intricate connections among historical narratives, policy formulation, and the persistent endeavor to reshape the educational landscape for marginalized communities in Brazil. This research contributes to unraveling the dynamics of challenging stereotypes in education and delves into the transformative potential inherent in policy interventions. By focusing on Brazilians who are most reliant on public policies, the study not only informs the academic discourse but also provides insights for policies that can meaningfully impact the lives of those historically underserved. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The modern college instructor in the United States faces several unique dilemmas due to students' increased access to information via the internet and social media, increased polarization across the nation, and increased unrest resulting in more experiences impacting mental health. As such, modern instructors are faced with the challenge of balancing the hard reality of honestly teaching about society's history and current issues with optimistic realism for progress already made and progress yet to come. This research examines how using focused, optimistic pedagogical approaches, based in learning theory, can positively influence students' outlook on the world and their place in it by using pre-testing and post-testing to gauge pedagogical success. Seven unique pedagogical approaches are developed and tested to aid instructors in this endeavor. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The dissertation focuses on the Chinese literacy experiences of different generations of Thai Chinese families in Thailand, spanning periods characterized by varying ideologies toward the Chinese language, which have either constrained or facilitated its acquisition. This qualitative work examines how evolving national policies and international politics have shaped language ideologies and the valuation of Chinese literacy within these families. The research began by investigating documents and conducting interviews with Thai Chinese individuals who attended Chinese schools during the politically turbulent period of the 1940s to 1960s when the Chinese language was unwelcome and treated as a threat. Then, it traces the subsequent generations in these families and the shifting policies up to present-day Thailand, where Chinese is highly regarded for its economic benefits. The central question is: How do different generations of Thai Chinese families in Thailand experience historical changes in policies and ideologies around literacy and language? Through narrative inquiry and ethnography within the language ecology framework, this research underscores the interplay of language ideologies, individual experiences, local dynamics, and global politics. The intergenerational lens reveals the power dynamics that time plays in personal and familial language acquisition amid globalization and neoliberalism. By exploring intergenerational narratives and memories, the research demonstrates the loss of heritage literacy and the changing ideologies regarding the valuation of Chinese across generations. It also reveals the promising power of individuals, families, and communities to resist dominant language pressures while safeguarding their unique heritage language and culture. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

I conducted qualitative research utilizing a descriptive method while also conducting an historical comparison analysis. The purpose of this research was to uncover parallels and understand the economic, population and political similarities between the 1970s/80s and the United States today, while also discovering how the current economic, population and political realities impact the recruitment and enrollment of students to higher education today. I collected data through semi-structured interviews, focus group interviews and document content analysis of a small, institution in central Ohio’s higher education enrollment trends from the past decade. I interviewed a total of 13 participants, with five identifying as females and eight identifying as males, and of the 13, 12 identified as Caucasian and one as African-American. From my research I discovered that there are numerous commonalities between the 1970s/80s and the United States today and that there is a lot of uncertainty that exists for the future of higher education. I also found that the economic, political and demographic events and conditions of society directly contribute the enrollment and recruitment of students to higher education.

This thesis reveals relationships between the neoliberal subject and the suburban subject relative to the built environment. It argues that today's "architecture" is an integration of digital and analog worlds. The thesis articulates that American society's subjectivity is imposed by a consumer condition that is tied to the iconography of suburban landscape, such as the iconic house shape or a recognizable brand icon. The advent of the internet accelerated this condition by providing additional conduits of capital-based icons to emerge from and merge with the suburbs. The work focuses on creating parallels between the American suburban landscape, the suburban home, digital infrastructure, and the emerging structures which merge with the internet. The thesis asserts that the suburban project dominates the entirety of the landscape and is the governing force building an incipient landscape. The written part of the thesis discusses how our modern identity, influenced by both physical and digital worlds, has evolved from suburban roots, while the visual commentary uses architectural drawings to reveal four modalities which frame our environment and shape our lives and interactions.

This ethnographic study is situated at the confluence of the enduring scholarly discourse on Blackretention or loss of their African culture and identity resulting from their enslavement and slavery.Thus, this thesis identifies and explores the manifestations of Africanisms among BlackAmericans regarding their cultural resilience, retention, and adaptation. With the case study ofOyotunji in South Carolina, an African (Yoruba) village in America, this thesis underscores howBlack people reclaimed their identity by invoking, appropriating and preserving their Africancultural traditions and values through the agency of spiritualism and the adoption and venerationof the Yoruba gods. Besides, Oyotunji was a product of Black cultural protests and the search forauthentic identity and nationalism in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. The study issignificant in highlighting Oyotunji’s place in fostering the connection and genuine immersion ofAfrican Americans to their African ancestral roots while navigating the complexities of identityrediscovery in the Americas

In the wake of the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments, the United States found itself presented with a critical task: the reconstruction of the nation. Taking place from 1865 to 1877, Reconstruction constituted nothing less than a radical remaking of the nation. As historians have noted, however, the post-Reconstruction Era was marked by a massive reactionary wave against the gains of the non-white populations in the United States. The same period saw the proliferation of the life sciences (medicine, public health, and biology) as meaningful institutions in the United States and the emergence of scientific projects dedicated to the exploration of “difference”, such as race science and eugenics. While historians of Reconstruction and historians of science have noted the connections between the projects of race science and eugenics and the justification of reactionary white supremacist movements, few have attempted to explicitly connect the two movements. In this dissertation, I attempt such a connection, by exploring how one major frontier in the remaking of the nation—the understanding of the category of “national citizen”—increasingly depended on the language of the life sciences. I term this the “biologization of citizenship”, which refers to the processes through which the everyday understandings of citizenship prevalent in multiple dimensions of American life increasingly relied on ideas of biological difference, genealogy, and blood to establish a basis for determining access to rights and for establishing the ideological foundation of who “counted” as American. I explore the transforming understanding of the category of citizen via an exploration of American culture—focusing on different spaces of American culture and tracing the articulation of senses of self and community prevalent in them. Ultimately, I argue that the life sciences proved critical to the making of a national culture of citizenship in the United States, and that this deep entanglement has continually haunted the animations for freedom and equity that have unfolded in the wake of the Civil War. In doing so, it integrates the history of reconstruction more thoroughly with the history of eugenics and offers a new methodology for analyzing the presence of science in everyday life.

This dissertation investigates the rise of a set of sensory technologies that transformed rituals of bodily care in modern American culture. It spotlights four specific sensory features that have become iconic and intuitive experiences of modern personal care: the scent of synthetic musk, the smooth white bar of soap, heaping handfuls of fluffy foam, and the vigorous blast of aerosol spray. As these four case studies show, these sensory experiences were not inherent to or necessary for the strict function of cleaning; rather, their value was defined by another equally important function: crafting the feeling of cleanliness. At the turn of the 20th century, consumer goods manufacturers began to research and manipulate these sensory technologies, and they would soon discover that selling sensory perception—an uplifting aroma, a refreshing mist—was a powerful engine of profit. In these early decades, industrialists and consumers alike celebrated the ever-finer manipulations of smell, color, and touch that flooded shops and promised an unprecedented degree of control over the human body. And yet, the very same technologies provoked fears of over-manipulation, over-modernization, and over-civilization of the human animal. Indeed, in the years after WWII, the chemicals that enabled such pleasing sensations were found to be environmental pollutants, and public outcry led to regulatory pressure and outright bans. Consumers struggled to reckon with such small, humble, and pleasurable products that carried alarming consequences for human and environmental health. This dissertation, too, grapples with the enormous historical significance of such seemingly ordinary and simple technologies. By recovering their surprising trajectories through colonial plantations, warzones, chemical labs, and psychological consulting rooms, I explore the technological and cultural meanings of these “small” rituals of care that contain vast histories, shaped by the forces of Western imperialism, industrial chemistry, mass manufacturing, gender politics, and the rise of a mass consumer culture that idealized new physical sensations as hallmarks of modern selfhood and the good life.

The Ed School reforms that academics advocate for vary wildly, but they begin from a remarkably similar set of assumptions about what these institutions are and how they came to be. A closer examination of this work suggests that one potential reason for these similarities is that regardless of disciplinary approach, scholars largely rely on historical studies that only sought to identify common themes, a limitation that their respective authors repeatedly expressed. Yet, the central findings of these texts have largely gone unexamined, leading scholars to continue to assume that Ed Schools faced the same set of pressures, that their shared circumstances led them to act in the same way during important inflection points in their history, and that because they could not appease all their stakeholders at once, they chose to focus on rising higher in academia’s pecking order. Underlying all of these assumptions is an even more fundamental belief about Ed School reform: that the complex web of forces that constrain these institutions binds them so completely that meaningful change is not possible in the current paradigm, and so Ed Schools need to change dramatically if they want to escape the unenviable position they have been in for over a century. This dissertation draws on the history of three elite Ed Schools, the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (PennGSE), and Teachers College at Columbia (TC) to show that the foundational assumptions of these debates need to be reevaluated. Outside of milestone anniversary celebrations, Ed Schools rarely consider their own histories, and so these relatively young professional schools have even shorter institutional memories. As a result, when decision makers in Ed Schools try to contextualize the problems they seek to solve, they instead turn to their peers and the existing scholarship about Ed Schools for guidance, and so they begin with a belief that they face insurmountable obstacles. This dissertation shows that a closer look at an Ed School’s institutional history often tells a different story, and that the relationships these institutions had with their stakeholders also created incentives to pursue other forms of prestige and influence, and so they were less homogenous than the existing scholarship suggests. I show that in addition to seeking prestige via the production of “basic” research, faculty at elite Ed Schools also sought status in ways that carry a reputational cost in academia, including through the training of practitioners, helping school districts apply research to practice, influencing the development of regional institutions and education policy, and gaining primacy over less prestigious vocational fields by offering programs outside of K-12 education.

Despite serving as the capital of a prototypical Rustbelt state during a period of economichardship and decline of other once prosperous neighboring Rustbelt cities, Columbus'shistory is rather separate from those of its peers. The strife experienced by the city duringthe 1960s and 1970s arose not from the collapse of its industrial districts, a dwindlingwhite ethnic population, or the dilapidation of its infrastructure, but quite the opposite.Columbus’s history is one of a city and an education system unable and unwilling toadapt with the changing racial and economic make-up of a rapidly developing urbancenter. In turn, the city of Columbus and its Board of Education engineered andperpetuated the isolation and impoverishment of black residents to various ghettos acrossthe city to contain and constrict the ever-growing black population that threatened todisrupt the status quo. Deprived by decades of neglect and injustice, Columbus’s blackcommunity sought to tear down the racial barriers constructed through neighborhoodgerrymandering and attendance zones, economic, social, and political isolation, andunequal access to educational resources and facilities that had denied their children aquality education. This responsibility ultimately fell to civil rights activists, parents,students, and educators who struggled for decades against indecisive administrators,intransigent board members and trustees, recalcitrant white parents, and over one hundred years of purposeful separation of the city’s black and white communities through a system of de-facto racial segregation. Despite their struggle and the aid of local and national civil rights organizations, social scientists, and the Supreme Court of the United States, the progress achieved during the 1960s and 1970s was largely overshadowed by the betrayal of their efforts in 1996.

From the late 1860s to 1918, the U.S. Army Ordnance Department experienced a rapid transformation of small arms technology that impacted the adoption and production of new weapons. The shift in small arms technology revolutionized the type of small arms within the U.S. Army. Still, it exposed problems faced by the Ordnance Department regarding the quantity and quality of firearms. The small arms of the U.S. Army incorporated many new technologies that increased an individual’s firepower in the field and changed the conflicts involving the U.S. Although incorporating some of the most advanced technologies, the U.S. Army consistently was underequipped for the wars that it participated in during this time. This thesis argues that through this rapid transformation of small arms, the U.S. Army Ordnance Department adopted some of the most advanced technologies but inadequately produced the necessary number of small arms for the U.S. Army, impacting the wars in which the U.S. fought. Through combat, especially in the Spanish-American War and First World War, the Ordnance Department expanded its adoption of new technologies and accusations of small arms.

This thesis examines the cultural and religious contexts behind the production of the Girona Apocalypse [Museu de la Catedral de Girona, Num. Inv. 7(11)], a tenth-century copy of Beatus of Liébana’s eighth-century Commentary on the Apocalypse. It delves into the ways in which medieval society, guided by the gendered perceptions of the Latin Church, played a pivotal role in categorizing women within a binary framework: either as pure or immoral. The focus is on the portrayal of femininity in the Apocalypse of St. John, where the contrasting figures of the Great Harlot and the Woman Clothed with the Sun are juxtaposed, and how this imagery and symbolism are transformed into feminine archetypes in the Girona manuscript, resulting in a pictorial conflict and shedding light on the nuanced dynamics of gender in medieval Iberia. The Girona Apocalypse was created at the dual monastery at San Salvador de Tábara, and apparently was illuminated by a woman, Ende. Her contribution provides a subtle layer to the understanding of womanhood in medieval Iberia, highlighting the importance of the role she played in a society where women received limited validation and recognition. The Girona Beatus not only offers a unique perspective on the conception of womanhood in the Middle Ages, but also provides valuable insights into how a woman artisan painter navigated her identity within the constraints of a malecentric Christian narrative.

Do extreme religious groups develop in a vacuum due to the leaders desire for power and the followers' ignorance? Or are there larger forces at play? The United States in the 1970s saw a rise in extreme religious groups characterized by charismatic leaders and catastrophe. Much of the American public believed these groups were formed because of their leader’s desire for money and power. However leaders were often motivated by other forces, and followers were typically well educated and middle class, with no obvious reason to join these communities. If this is the case, what other explanation is there for the formation of extreme religious groups? In the case of the 1970s, this was due to the larger pressures of the “Me Decade.” The me decade was characterized by poor domestic conditions in the US, resulting from inflation, stagnation, fuel shortages and government scandal. As the quality of life for average Americans deteriorated, they lost faith in their government to solve these problems, and turned to other solutions. Oftentimes these were attempts at self improvement, hoping for personal improvement if the problems of society couldn’t be solved. In other cases, new religious communities were formed, providing spiritual solutions as an alternative to political ones. An example of one such religious group was the Rajneesh, a spiritual community founded in central Oregon known for their 1984 bioterrorism attack. The “Me Decade,” as well as its impact on the Rajneesh can be seen through a number of sources, including the Rajneesh’s newspaper, other local newspapers, and essays by writers of the time on the phenomenon of the me decade. In this way, extreme religious groups in the 1970s were not formed by the leader’s desire for money and power, but due to larger political and cultural pressures, particularly in the case of the Rajneesh.

This dissertation offers a new look at the Age of Jackson to better understand theinfluences that women and gender roles had on American politics during the 1820s and1830s. It offers a counternarrative to a historiography that has focused predominately onWhig Womanhood, which developed in opposition to Andrew Jackson’s presidency.Instead, it looks at the women who were passionate supporters of Jackson to see whatdrew the “common woman” to the complicated figure who was once heralded as being achampion of the “common man.” Additionally, this research looks at how conforming tonormative gender roles was a useful political tool. Jackson’s reputation as a martial figureoften came coupled with the idea that he was a protector of women, and his supportersresponded to this narrative. At the same time, Jackson’s opponents argued that he wasdangerous to women, while also denigrating the womanhood of female figures close tohim. This dissertation thus argues that women were integral to the electoral strategies ofthe Democrats as well as the Whigs during the Jacksonian period, which, therefore,cannot be fully understood without far greater attention to the neglected Jacksonwomen.

In 1964, white members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Cleveland began politically organizing poor white and Black citizens around bread-and-butter issues. Within two years, SDS women made Northeast Ohio the site of SDS’s most effective interracial antipoverty campaign. This dissertation argues that the Cleveland Community Project succeeded because SDS women interpreted participatory democracy in a way that allowed them to see poor white and Black single mothers’ daily struggles as sites of political and collective action. SDS women were firmly committed to the idea that those who lived under public policies should have significant influence over their crafting and implementation. A natural extension of that belief was SDS women’s recognition that their role was to empower, not lead, impoverished women in a movement for economic justice.The history of SDS women in Cleveland illustrates that the welfare rights movement had multi-racial dimensions that previous scholarship has overlooked. As SDS women forged an interracial movement of the poor with white and Black welfare recipients, they formed the grassroots origins of Cleveland’s welfare rights movement. Many of the impoverished women who collaborated with SDS founded the National Welfare Rights Organization. Recognizing white SDS women’s intellectual contributions to participatory democracy sheds light on why interracial cooperation persisted in Cleveland at a time when multi-racial coalitions in other cities crumbled under the weight of racism.

When thinking of the War of 1812, many people may think about Fort McHenry and the Star-Spangled Banner. They may also think about the only time when the American capitol was burned. Or they think about Andrew Jackson and his triumphant victory at New Orleans. Other than these, most Americans do not think about the War of 1812. In fact, the war is all but forgotten in most American minds. Despite this, this early American conflict is still worth looking at. Not because it was a success, but because it brought up much needed changes to American policies. Some of these needed changes were concentrated on reforming the military, particularly the army. What started out as a group of “amateurs at arms” was eventually molded into a more professional fighting force. The War of 1812 was the period where the United States Army began a change in policies that guided it towards standing professionalization.

Despite facing severe pressure from their secular surroundings, Soviet evangelical youth displayed resilience and creativity throughout the Soviet era, becoming key figures in the preservation and growth of the Russian Baptist church. Up until now, western scholars have largely ignored this story or treated it peripherally. This research seeks to address this gap by examining the experiences and impact of Soviet evangelical youth. Throughout the Soviet period, the content of the evangelical youth experience remained essentially unchanged, focusing on fellowship, service, and Bible teaching through preaching, singing, and poetry readings. The period from 1908 – 1929 became a foundational one for future evangelical youth, establishing both the themes of evangelical youth activity and state policy towards this activity. During World War II and the post-war period, evangelical youth navigated the challenges of pacifism, legal restrictions on youth baptism, and the 1961 split of the evangelical union. Engaging in the turmoil and opportunities of this period, many young believers joined the emerging underground evangelical movement, laying the foundations for youth engagement in the movement through samizdat. From 1970 – 1991, this underground movement became a primary force in the evangelism and religious education of youth, allowing evangelical youth to engage with Soviet society on an individual, local, and regional scale. The experiences of these youth laid the foundations for the post-Soviet evangelical church, shedding important light on the opportunities and challenges facing the Russian evangelical church today.

Pearl Buck, Henry Luce, Edgar Snow, and Richard Nixon have profoundly influenced Sino-American relations throughout the 20th century. Their impact on American perceptions, attitudes, and foreign policy has played a pivotal role in shaping the current state of relations between the United States government and the People’s Republic of China. Pivotal historical events such as WWI & WWII, the Sino-Japanese War, China’s Civil War, and the Soviet-Sino conflict—among other events—have also significantly influenced the dynamics of Sino-American relations. Despite their importance, there is a notable absence of studies that comprehensively explore the collective impact of these individuals and events. Understanding this complex yet vital relationship requires a holistic examination that integrates their contributions and historical contexts.

This dissertation undertakes a rigorous historical analysis to elucidate the intricate and enduring challenges surrounding the desecration of Native Hawaiian lands and culture. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, as well as employing diverse methodological approaches, this study delves deep into the multifaceted factors that have shaped this longstanding issue within the context of Hawaii's history. Beginning with an exploration of the impact of Western legal strategies on land loss and cultural commodification among Native Hawaiians, this research investigates the historical processes that led to the separation of Hawaiians from their ancestral lands. It scrutinizes the ramifications of immigration patterns, particularly the influx of Caucasian settlers from the United States and subsequent Asian migration, which further exacerbated the disconnection between Hawaiians and their traditional territories. Furthermore, this dissertation scrutinizes the implications of Hawaii's statehood and its role in attempting to regain control over these valuable resources. It delves into the complex interplay of economic, political, and social forces that contributed to the marginalization and disenfranchisement of indigenous Hawaiians, especially in light of the consolidation of power by the Big Five Oligarchy and the imposition of martial law. Moreover, this study critically examines the complicity of corporate and governmental entities, particularly those entrenched in the tourism sector, in perpetuating land exploitation and commodifying Hawaiian culture for economic gain. It illuminates the deep-seated entrenchment of Hawaii's economy in tourism, which not only deepened the detachment of Native Hawaiians from their lands but also eroded their self-sufficiency and autonomy. Additionally, this dissertation investigates pivotal historical events such as the annexation of Hawaii by the United States in 1898 and its repercussions on indigenous Hawaiian communities. It analyzes the subsequent rise of Japanese influence post-World War II and its impact on the cultural and political landscape of Hawaii. Furthermore, this study explores the resilience and resistance of Native Hawaiians through activism and cultural revitalization movements, including the Hawaiian Renaissance. It evaluates the efficacy of these movements in reclaiming and revitalizing indigenous Hawaiian identity and rights despite internal divisions and strategic differences. Through a meticulous examination of historical events, legal battles such as Rice v. Cayetano, legislative initiatives like the Akaka Bill, and collaborative efforts within coalitions like the Hawaiian Coalition of Native Claims, this dissertation contributes significantly to the scholarly understanding of Hawaiian sovereignty issues, land dispossession, cultural erosion, and the enduring quest for autonomy and justice within the broader historical discourse of Hawaii. This dissertation undertakes a rigorous historical analysis to shed light on the intricate challenges surrounding the desecration of Native Hawaiian lands and culture, with a particular focus on the notable failures of the sovereignty movement juxtaposed against the remarkable success of cultural revitalization efforts.

A topic of concern and discussion in the mental health community, and maybe a special concern from both governmental and civilian practitioners, is the subject of moral injury. Moral Injury has been widely researched over the last 10 years and is a known and discussed condition that is linked to military personnel and veterans who have experienced events while deployed or operating in adverse conditions such as combat. The following descriptive study focuses on one group from which they have been excluded or overlooked in past studies. This creates a gap in the published literature: female servicewomen and veterans. Both governmental and civilian mental health communities must further the research to close this gap. This descriptive statistical study provides a sample of 45 participants of which 21 have some level of MI and were deployed or operated in a combat environment. The results of the study: compare MI between men and women. The results reveal a possible difference between genders concerning different MIEs and the effect MI has on each gender.

Black churches played a significant role in the Long Civil Rights Movement in Nashville, Tennessee, from Reconstruction to the early 1970’s. A more detailed study of the history of the movement and the role that Black churches played needs to be done at the local level, to gain a better understanding of how the Nashville Civil Rights Movement developed logistically and ideologically. This dissertation assesses how the Black Church, as an institution of African American life in Nashville, shaped and directed civil rights activism in that city. Black churches provided the headquarters that established two of the most influential civil rights organizations in Nashville: the Nashville Christian Leadership Council (NCLC) and the Nashville Student Movement (NSM). These churches provided a home to many future notable national civil rights figures, including John Lewis, Diane Nash, James Bevel, Marion Barry, Bernard Lafayette, among others. Nashville churches provided activists nonviolent training and place of refuge during civil rights protests in Nashville, and a religious theology to combat social injustice. Because of the strong Christian tradition in the Black community in Nashville, it emerged as one of the best organized and powerful movements in the national struggle for civil rights.

On December 8, 1987, the United States and Russia signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Since then, it has been a common misconception that this solidified the end of the Cold War and the Nuclear Arms Race. To this day, nuclear installations are plaguing bordering countries within the European Union. As a result, severe transnational issues become evident as transnational crime groups grow and technological advancements of terrorist groups continue to gain ground within the nuclear power threshold. Furthermore, countries within the Asian Peninsula and the Middle East continue to demonstrate nuclear prowess via mass media attention as a sense of glorification and societal threat. Since the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, four reviews of internal and external nuclear policies including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Nuclear Posture Review have been completed by the United States. The purpose of each review is to assess nuclear threats and deploy policy initiatives to prevent adversary actions. The primary focus of this study was to establish a comprehensive qualitative analysis of the movement and illegal proliferation of nuclear material. The study highlights the dangers of the proliferation of both nuclear material and nuclear weapons by organized crime syndicates and terrorist groups and correlates their effect to important United States assets. This was completed through a comprehensive document analysis of missing nuclear material in conjunction with confiscated material found to be distributed by these groups. The results of this study provide the Department of Homeland Security resources in preventing nuclear proliferation by internal and external groups in an effort to assure the protection of United States critical infrastructure and key resources.

German nationalism in the Schleswig and Holstein duchies that predates the German Unification Wars of the Nineteenth Century continuously transformed in response to Danish encroachment, civic disputes regarding treaty legitimacy, and war. The Germans in the duchies fought to retain their ancestral homelands and, in doing so, embraced a pan-Germanic consciousness that is the foundation for early modern nationalism. This consciousness dates back hundreds of years. This case study examines the Germans of Schleswig and Holstein and their experiences with the consistent and pressing Danish encroachment. Despite the encroachment, the Germans remained connected with their culture, traditions, religion, and their respective national consciousness. This long-term struggle to maintain their identity and autonomy led to increased unity with themselves and other German states. Later, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, modern nationalism spread, causing the “Denmark to the Eider” movement, igniting the nationalist sentiments from the Germans in the duchies and starting the 1848 Schleswig-Holstein Conflict. This dissertation draws from the nationalist approach to identify and define German nationalist sentiment in the duchies from cultural, religious, and political perspectives.

The following dissertation focuses on medical education at the University of Michigan before the Civil War and the graduate application of medical school lessons to the Civil War. Medical and Civil War Medical historians have overlooked the importance of medical education. The founding of the University of Michigan Department of Medicine and its position in Michigan's medical history and intellectual history is central to understanding the importance of the medical school. Chapters on the medical school show the valuable training Michigan medical school graduates received and how it was a scientific medical education superior to other contemporary medical schools. The University of Michigan Medical School graduates used their medical training to contribute to the significant scientific changes during the Civil War, drawing directly on the superior scientific and medical training they received at the university.

Popular culture has become as engrained within American society as the proverbial grandma’s apple pie. Due to the explosion of the internet, popular culture has become easier to find and share. For the historian this has created a cornucopia of research opportunities but has also created a massive problem: popular culture often comingles fact, fiction, and myth, making it more difficult for the historian to decipher the truth. The Marquis de Lafayette has been as affected by this as any other. His character and his legacy have been misrepresented in American popular culture. There has been a distinct divide between the popular culture portrayals of Lafayette and the historical Lafayette. However, with every fictional portrayal, either in a book or on screen or on stage, that divide becomes smaller. Louis Gottschalk, the twentieth century’s leading scholar on Lafayette, would not recognize Lafayette as presented in the twenty-first century. The academic view and thinking towards Lafayette have seemed to have little impact on the popular culture representations, meanwhile, the popular culture portrayals of Lafayette have altered the public’s view and thinking towards the historical figure. An in-depth analysis of the portrayals of Lafayette in American pop culture has shown a distinct shift in the view of the historical Lafayette closer towards the Lafayette in pop culture. From a swash-buckling freedom fighter in the 1960s, to a spy master in the 1970s, to a symbol of liberty and equality around the world in the twenty-first century, Lafayette’s historical image has been redone due to the influence of popular culture. In less than a century, Lafayette went from the scared, adventure seeking boy in over his head as presented by Gottschalk, to America’s favorite fighting Frenchman as portrayed in the hit musical Hamilton.

This work is an investigation into the Landgraviate of Hessen-Kassel and its most dynamic ruler: Friedrich II. This middling principality was precariously situated between several power-hungry European states and needed to innovate and capitalize on its relative strengths to survive and prosper. Hessen had a long history of renting its troop for foreign use. Friedrich expanded these efforts and reinvested profits from this soldier trade into his military and state apparatuses, which allowed this enlightened absolutist to build a financially and politically stable alternative to the nation-states which emerged in the Age of Revolutions. Using archival sources from both sides of the Atlantic, this work paints the picture of a proactive state looking towards the future. Though the Hessian army was an oppressive institution, it was at the forefront of meritocratic organization and innovative educational initiatives designed to improve its efficacy and efficiency. While this revolutionary army could not keep the Napoleonic Wars from sweeping Hessen-Kassel from the map for over seven years, it nevertheless showcases ways in which small European states could become integral players in the diplomatic games of their powerful neighbors and wield influence disproportionate to their size.

Decolonization and Southern Society explores the transformation of the American South in the fifteen years after World War II – the era of decolonization. Focusing principally on rural east central Mississippi, this study draws connections to other states like South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, and Kenya, where white settlers similarly doubled down against the era’s liberalizing trend. Settlers’ existential fear of decolonization manifested, in part, in their desire to become less dependent on labor. State assistance and fortuitously-timed technological innovations enabled settler landowners to dispense with their tenants and sharecroppers, rendering the landowners less economically vulnerable to political change, and severely limiting the reach of such change. Other reactionary tactics, including political chicanery and outright violence, made settler states tough nuts to crack. By 1960, the range of possibilities for a decolonized world had narrowed significantly. This study adds to a growing body of work exploring why the civil rights advances of the 1960s were not enough for the South’s most vulnerable residents. It also gestures toward the generative possibilities of viewing twentieth-century US history through the lens of settler colonialism.

In the early morning hours of 6 October 1973, the fourth iteration of the Arab-Israeli conflict began when Egyptian and Syrian troops crossed Israeli controlled lines in the Sinai Desert and Golan Heights respectively, in an attempt to retake territory seized by Israel in 1967. As the conflict, known as the Yom Kippur or October War, developed, and Israel’s military answer fell far short of expectations, the administration of American President Richard M. Nixon (1969-1974) struggled with a way to respond to its ally’s growing need for military resupply. Although there was not an official treaty between the two states, in the years since Israel declared independence in 1948, the nations had grown slowly closer as this small country the size of New Jersey purchased larger amounts of military equipment and systems from the United States. The Soviet Union, which had allied with Egypt and Syria in the decade prior, responded to needs on their end with a military airlift of consumable supplies into the region almost immediately after the conflict began. But the Soviet Union, unlike the United States, shared a close border with the region. As calls for aid resounded from Foggy Bottom to Capitol Hill, Nixon agreed to provide a badly needed resupply. But the fast pace of the conflict and long distances required precluded the use of naval shipments to deliver the requested heavy armaments. With civilian airlift also unavailable for a variety of reasons, on 12 October 1973, Nixon authorized the use of American military airlift to move the supplies. Because allied states on mainland Europe feared an Arab reprisal via a threatened, and soon to come, oil embargo, American bases in England and Germany were off limits to the effort. With a distance of over six-thousand miles to cover, and a reluctant partner in Portugal, the US Air Force’s Mobility Airlift Command launched Operation Nickel Grass. The following dissertation is not a play-by-play narrative of the airlift operation. While the tonnage moved across the globe at unprecedented speeds, is clearly impressive, that story has been told. Nor is this a purely foreign policy discussion. Again, that account has been told. This dissertation, instead, examines the lead-up and execution of Operation Nickel Grass from the perspective of American civil-military relations and the use of military assets to further foreign policy goals. Though this dual lens approach, this study steps through the development of American airlift capability relative to the evolution of foreign policy in the Cold War years. Despite being a symptom of major change, as the first new American military operation in the era of détente, Operation Nickel Grass is relatively unknown outside of the US Air Force mobility community. Done on an ad hoc basis, absent traditional, detailed military plans, the operation – and projection of power – could have just as easily failed as succeeded. The purpose of this dissertation is to shed light on the impact of Nickel Grass as not only an ad hoc operational success, but also contextually as a precursor to change in the way the United States used military force to project power in non-kinetic ways as a reflection of civil direction translated into military action. This study situates the operation as a central uniting factor across multiple elements – foreign policy, domestic concerns, and military change to demonstrate how the Nixon administration’s distracted use of military means to counter the Soviet Union altered the status quo toward a new unintentional truth. As an expression of non-traditional military power projection that altered perceptions and therefore reality, Nickel Grass changed the relative balance of power in the Middle East when it pulled the United States closer to Israel.

At the end of the twentieth century, southern states boasted the largest number of private schools of any region within the United States, accounting for thirty percent of the nation’s independent elementary and secondary institutions.[1] Most of the schools, and almost all found in rural communities, date back to the late 1960s and early 1970s when the federal government began to sue individual school districts to enforce desegregation orders. Commonly referred to as “segregation academies,” the schools became white havens where parents could isolate their children from the black students infiltrating their classrooms. Many couched their decision to leave public schools as a desire to protect their children’s “quality of education.” This phrase is best interpreted within the broader context of southern educational history. For over one hundred years, White Southerners showed little interest in their schools at all. Most provided only the rudimentary requirements of traditional education as students in the South consistently lagged behind their peers in other regions of the country in literacy and graduation rates. It is only after integration that “quality of education” enters the public Southern lexicon. The adoption of the phrase in conjunction with establishing private schools reveals the early creation of color-blind rhetoric segregationists could hide behind as society shifted. Though segregationist academies arose throughout the Deep South, this work focuses primarily on Georgia with supporting evidence from South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, and Texas. Oral histories, letters to southern politicians, educational reformer reports, and legal briefs delivered to the Supreme Court in response to Brown v. Board provide opportunities to examine the development of racially neutral language as well as gain insight into how community members viewed their schools. Ultimately, white southerners prioritized an education that reinforced segregationist norms and maintained the existing social structure.

This thesis follows the International Workers' Order (IWO), a fraternal organization that existed from 1930-1954 and provided low-cost quality insurance to working-class Americans. The IWO was dissolved by the state of New York after being listed as a subversive organization and charged with being a Communist front. It discusses the IWO's political advocacy and policies throughout three eras: the early 1930s, the time before and during the Second World War, and the postwar period. By examining the IWO's political advocacy, this thesis seeks to understand how valid the state's allegations of communism were, while still highlighting the organization's successes and benefits.

Dilapidated is a three-part, narratively-reported exploration of property blight, oversight and solutions in Athens County, Ohio. In southeast Ohio, there is not enough affordable housing. Simultaneously, thousands of older, neglected homes sit unoccupied. How do the two issues connect? This professional project has three goals: to explain the scale and context of vacant and dilapidated properties in Athens, Ohio, to use journalism as an accountability tool to understand the operations of the Athens County Land Bank and to explore alternative approaches to making homes adopted by community members. The project consists of a series of three longform articles, mapping, public records, interviews and data visualization that combine human interest storytelling, geographical justice frameworks and investigative journalism. The accompanying scholarly essays reviews related literature on rural distributive (in)justice, media coverage of the Appalachian region and ethical best practices for journalists.

Of all the inventions of ancient and imperial China, perhaps none is as famous or world-changing as gunpowder. The chemical mixture drastically changed the nature of warfare, albeit over the course of a thousand years. The formula began with Daoist alchemy during the Tang Dynasty, but was applied militarily in the succeeding Song Dynasty. Such an invention created new empires and changed warfare forever. This paper discusses its invention and early military uses in China then investigates how Europeans, among other peoples, were able to advance it far beyond that of the Chinese and other civilizations by the fourteenth century. The “Military Revolution” has been a popular topic of discussion among scholars for years, but a broader analysis of such a revolution requires a comparison of the military histories of China and the West. This thesis examines how and why it was the Europeans that advanced this military technology and supplanted China as the premier gunpowder superpower of the late Middle Ages. Multiple geopolitical, political, economic, and military factors and preconditions played a role in causing the increasingly widening technological gap in the following centuries. The paper also details how China’s position as the unchallenged cultural, economic, and military giant of East Asia for much of the last two thousand years even contributed to its overall decline in comparison to an ascending West. Meanwhile, existential warfare among the fledgling nation states of premodern Europe stimulated hyper intense competition in nearly every field and triggered rapid advancements in weapons technology.

Bangladesh, an independent country since 1971, has been called a country built on its refugee past (Dasgupta, 2016, pp. 161, 166, 177). In this thesis, I will examine the country’s historical refugee experiences in order to explain its response to the Rohingya crisis of 2017. My basic proposition is that the government’s readiness to welcome the large number of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar in 2017, drew upon its own experiences during the independence struggle in 1971. The independence struggle had led to an exodus of approximately 10 million people who sought refuge in neighboring India. When the government of Myanmar launched an offensive against the Rohingya minority, they inevitably turned to Bangladesh, and the Bangladesh government welcomed them and offered them sanctuary and safety. Through an in-depth examination of the Rohingya crisis, we can gain a better appreciation of the complex historical forces that have shaped Bangladesh’s response to the refugee crisis.

The idea that a customer would pay $150 for a cup of coffee seems to many people absurd, exploitative, and cringeworthy. Looking deeper the question becomes: where is a third wave café able to justify selling a cup of specialty coffee for such a high price? Also, what type of customer has the money and is willing to spend on what many would consider a luxury? There were only twenty-two cups available in the United States of this specialty grade coffee and the 100 pounds of these coffee beans had sold at auction for $2,000 per pound. It came from a single farm, single varietal in Panama. This thesis will describe the historical processes and events that led to third wave cafes producing specialty coffee in Portland, Oregon 1995-2020. The primary process that allowed this to happen is gentrification. This thesis will draw upon the works of many authors to explain the history of Oregon and Portland. It will then synthesize the theories of rent gap and stages of gentrification and show how it overlays with the history of Portland, Oregon. This thesis will also discuss the history of coffee domestication, production, and consumption from Yemen to Panama to Portland. There are strong parallels between the land use policies that allow for spaces of production to be exploited both in Portland and in coffee producing countries. This thesis will interrogate the common notion that gentrification causes displacement because former residents are displaced by newcomers. An important concept is the understanding of space and place. People do not say that they were “dis-spaced” but they were displaced. It will show how areas with early third wave cafes and then later ones within walking distances were part of the cause for increases in real estate prices relative to the walkable neighborhoods surrounding them. Former residents were priced out of their homes and neighborhoods, many forced to live in government subsided housing. Being priced out can occur because of increased rent and/or increase taxes that is then included in the rent owed. Third wave cafes and specialty coffee are just one setting among many in a food system, especially in Portland, that causes but also reinforces gentrification and displacement. This thesis finally will finally provide verification to the common belief of people that third wave cafes and specialty coffee are signs of both a gentrifying and gentrified neighborhood. It provides a historical explanation for this belief by examining the causes. It also answers how does specialty coffee define what it is and how it determines value. At the same time, it provides an explanation for why a cup of coffee is $150 and why it was available in one of the most heavily gentrified neighborhoods in Portland. Different stages of gentrification overlap with each other and therefore it is possible to say that a third wave café would have not moved into a space if it had not gentrified but also a third wave café can cause gentrification in other spaces.

Most American children are familiar with the monocled and mustachioed man who graces the front of the Monopoly box. He has become instantly recognizable as the game has been marketed by Parker Brothers and Hasbro since the mid-1930s. But the root of the character goes back even further, to the wealthy American businessmen who came to prominence during the economic revolution of the Gilded Age. These men employed trusts to manage commercial interests and companies which effectively monopolized key industries and garnered them extreme fortunes. In turn, the dynamics of Gilded Age America brought these “robber barons” into the spotlight of the growing editorial media, particularly the emerging cadre of cartoonists. These men represented both sides of the political spectrum and dedicated their professional lives to commenting on the major issues of the day. Beginning with Thomas Nast and Joseph Keppler, two of the artform’s most famous practitioners, cartooning paid particular attention to the development of trusts and monopolies. Building on the foundation laid by their forebearers, the artists publishing from the 1890s to 1910s developed the motifs that would eventually inspire the “Monopoly Man.” Their work stoked and encouraged burgeoning opposition to the trusts, which coalesced into a semi-formal anti-trust movement and inspired the rash of government prosecutions, most famously the breakup of the Standard Oil Company in 1911.

Robert F. Kennedy was his brother’s successful campaign manager, Attorney General at the height of the Civil Rights movement, a U.S. Senator, and presidential candidate in one of the most tumultuous times in American history. His celebrity was a catalyst for intense opinions about him, consequently, Kennedy was both loved and loathed. The crafting of his image through savvy media management while Robert Kennedy was alive was enhanced and magnified after his death. How did this mythology, particularly in film, flourish? This thesis examines a few examples in how the Robert Kennedy story morphed into legend -- whether it was his efforts as a champion of equality and justice within the Black community, or his guiding hand in the Cuban Missile crisis, with a focus on uncovering the historical truth, brings light to the “how.” There will also be an analysis of the number of documentaries and retrospectives beginning the night of Robert Kennedy’s death. While it’s been proved that the Kennedy family were conscious of press relations to improve their image, they were a visually attractive and dynamic family that invited media attention. The celebrity aspect of Robert Kennedy was a combination of his own fame, plus a living extension of possibilities lost with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The candid film of Robert Kennedy as Attorney General, as well as his physical adventures, travels around the world, and visits to the poor and destitute, which were all filmed mostly at the behest of his team, greatly contributed to his image and iconography. There was an enormous number of documentaries and film portrayals of Kennedy that enhanced his image. Into this mix is the human factor of losing a political leader in such a violent and tragic way that left those who were critical of Kennedy mostly silent in the aftermath. Popular biographies and the large number of films that featured Robert Kennedy either focus on his memory or portray him in dramaturgical terms which only heightened his iconic status. This paper shows how extensively film was used to augment his image, and after his assassination it was Robert Kennedy’s family, colleagues, friends, and admirers who boosted his accomplishments to mythological levels because there was no real measurement other than “what might have been.”

This thesis seeks to determine the role of rhetoric in the American process of occupation that includes Settler Colonialism and Imperialism. I explore the connection between these two ideas using an example of each: the United States’ occupation of the tribal territory of the Shoshone peoples of North America as an example of Settler Colonialism and the United States’ occupation of the Philippines as an example of Imperialism. I examine the contributions of rhetoric to these processes of occupation and describe each process. This thesis expands upon the basic research of Walter L. Williams, who posited that the occupation of the Philippines was an expansion of the earlier “Indian Policy.” While the terminologies of “Settler Colonialism” and “Imperialism” were not used by Williams (in fact were not formed to the degree they are today at the time he published his work), modern scholars such as Paul A. Kramer and Julian Go have explored the use of these terms. I argue that all three authors describe a similar occupational process and that rhetoric from both the American government and from the press was a key part of executing each occupation. Most of my research on the connection to rhetoric comes from primary sources: newspaper articles, presidential speeches, Congressional arguments, and military briefs that describe both types of occupation. I demonstrate how using rhetoric to frame the story was one key to justifying the occupation while also describing the belief system that produced it. I depict how the rhetoric of a unified American process of occupation used internal, external, and press sources to lay out the steps to justify an occupation. First, the occupied nation is characterized as weak and incapable of managing its land, resources, and population; it is deemed in need of either reestablishment or civilization by the Americans. Next, as the occupation takes shape and the occupied peoples resist, the depiction of them changes; the centers of information paint them as bloodthirsty, almost inhuman sources of danger that need to be quelled. Finally, once resistors inside the occupied nation are incapacitated (either through death, capture, or threat of both), the initial characterization of hapless native peoples returns, and the rhetorical channels depict the benevolence of the United States to help them. As a result of my research, I outline a unified rhetorical process called American Occupation, with branching outcomes: American Settler Colonialism and American Imperialism. These differing outcomes are essentially based on (1) whether the goal of occupation was to expand the physical border of the United States by relocating the occupied peoples and settling their lands, as in Settler Colonialism, or (2) expanding the ideological border of the United States by controlling the occupied peoples and altering their lives to be more aligned with an American image, as in Imperialism. While these end goals differ, the occupational process that approaches them is unified, and the rhetoric that surrounds it is consistent.

This dissertation is the first history of the “psychology of clothes,” a diffuse but cohesive research project present within psychology since its earliest days. Theorists believed that dress offered privileged access to subjects’ interiority while at the same time—since it was visible on the surface of the body—rendering that interiority in a form amenable to scientific observation. The link between clothing and personality was delineated by researchers in the first half of the twentieth century, namely by sexologists, British psychoanalysts, and American psychologists. Sexologists built a diagnostic category, transvestism, out of the observation that certain individuals had seemingly anomalous relationships with their clothes. Psychoanalysts, meanwhile, theorized about how clothing was implicated in the formation of the self and its relationship to others, constructing concepts that allowed for further research across the mind sciences and beyond. And market researchers investigated how individuals and items interacted, using what they learned to sell goods and to extend the psychology of clothes beyond academic spaces. The spread of these ideas, however, invited critique by cultural commentators lamenting the state of society in the 1960s and 1970s. According to critics’ arguments, the narcissism of consumer culture, and of women in particular, made fashion choices shallow and not worthy of serious study. A particular point of contention for these critics was also the spread of psychoanalysis outside the clinic, and the psychology of clothes presented a convenient lightning rod for these debates. As a result, researchers were no longer able to unproblematically rely on that association for the basis of their science. In this moment of crisis, the field of costume history (and later fashion studies) arose as an acceptable means to continue thinking about dress and identity. Clothing, sitting on the boundary between self and other, also became a screen for the projection of anxieties about identity in the twentieth century. An attention to dress was considered feminine, and this relationship was strongly ambivalent—at times, a connection to clothes was praised and those (namely men) who lacked it were seen as falling short, while at other times women were faulted for investing in the self instead of in others. Some psychologists attempted to challenge this association, but it has remained durable and damning. At the same time, the psychology of clothes was premised on two terms, fashion and psychology, that were seen as only belonging to certain advantaged groups, largely white, wealthy, heterosexual men and women recognizable according to these various binaries. The theoretical foundation for transvestism and for the psychology of clothes more broadly was constructed via the marginalization of others. Those researchers who are today attempting to revive what is now called “fashion psychology” are still contending with these exclusions in their quest to legitimate their discipline. Using archival materials and a range of published primary sources, this dissertation reconstructs what was once a vast and thriving scientific research project into the relationship of the self and clothing. It also explores why this field has since been forgotten and neglected. In so doing, it also asks questions about why certain disciplines are considered “scientific” or “objective,” and how the researchers, subjects, and objects of a field dictate its standing.

Pedagogical experiments played a pivotal role in shaping architectural discourse and practice across Latin America and the Caribbean during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. “Counter-narratives of Architecture: Pedagogies, Practices, and Participation in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1970-2022” offers an architectural and cultural exploration of counter-narratives within architecture as a collective experience. It examines three pedagogical experiments in Chile, Mexico, and Puerto Rico: a Chilean school intertwining poetry and architectural thought, a Mexican school combining autogobierno and architectural writing, and a Puerto Rican collective blending co-design/build and archipelagic thinking. Through interdisciplinary analysis of objects, methods, media, and sites, the book sheds light on experiments like ludic games, travesías, poetic infrastructures, performance activism, and design-build, which have been insufficiently studied despite their valuable insights into teaching methodologies. How did these methodologies challenge traditional teaching and learning paradigms? What enduring relevance do they hold for contemporary artistic and pedagogical practices, and what is their legacy? By posing and addressing such inquiries, this research establishes links between architecture, education, and territory, synthesizing them through a concept termed the spatial imaginary. This concept encompasses not only the practical and technical aspects of architecture and art but also epistemological considerations and fundamentally altered perceptions of architectural and spatial encounters. In alignment with critical educational perspectives such as Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) and Ivan Illich's notion of deschooling (1971), this study explores counter-narratives within the postmodern landscape. These narratives manifest as curricula, poems, actions, site-specific installations, and travel narratives traversing the landscapes of America to shape transnational Latin American and Caribbean identities. Counter-narratives leverage counter-discourses' cultural resources to empower students to challenge master narratives, creating room for alternative forms of personal and organizational “emergence and becoming” (Vaara et al., 1996). According to Foucault, it is through this “local, popular knowledge that criticism performs its work” (1980). These counter-narratives, as Lyotard (1984) explains, are typically "little stories" – the narratives of individuals and groups whose knowledge and histories have been omitted or overlooked in official narratives. Therefore, counter-narratives challenge not only grand narratives but also “official” and “hegemonic” narratives. One research line focuses on decolonizing architectural education and practice by prioritizing pedagogical approaches from the ‘Global South,’ particularly the Caribbean, to cultivate emancipatory learning environments (Crespo, 2023). This initiative aims to challenge prevailing design pedagogy and practices by embracing perspectives from the Global South, grounded in theories like decolonial thinking, unlearning, ecologies of knowledge, and the pluriverse, as well as indigenous cosmovisions such as sentipensar and Pachamama, among others. Within this framework, the chapter titled con·fer: pensar la historia de la arquitectura desde El Caribe / to Think Architectural history from El Caribe delves into environmental histories and postcolonial disaster narratives through the lens of the Caribbean, highlighting the enduring impacts of colonialism and slavery on environmental landscapes. The chapter proposes the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC) as a digital humanities project, offering cross-disciplinary lecture materials for teaching about/from/with El Caribe. The architectural heritage of the Caribbean Antilles reflects the legacies of European colonization, the African diaspora, and migration patterns, revealing a complex tapestry of power dynamics, resistance, and cultural hybridity. By exploring the political, cultural, and social landscape of Puerto Rico, the chapter, presented as lectures, examines new material practices through the conceptual framework of archipelagic thinking (Glissant, 1997). Archipelagic thinking presents a counter-narrative of spatial equity, illustrating how archipelagos foster bonds of solidarity among diverse islands and societies, demonstrating how disparate entities can establish meaningful connections. Why focus on architecture’s environmental pedagogies and histories, and why Puerto Rico? By using Puerto Rico as an archipelago-experiment and island-laboratory, this approach advances interdisciplinary conversations across fields such as Architecture, Design, Urban Studies, Pedagogy, Latin American, Caribbean, and Puerto Rican Studies, Visual and Cultural Studies, History, and Theory.

This dissertation investigates how racial science and racialized construction of motherhood informed the evolving classification, diagnosis, and treatment of maternal mental illnesses (i.e., mental disorders associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period) in the United States from 1890 to 1970. Since the nineteenth century, maternal mental illnesses have offered both a defense and explanation for women who have transgressed the boundaries of ideal motherhood – whether by exhibiting emotional or mental instability, neglecting themselves, children, or home, or engaging in violence or self-harm. Yet, despite their designation as a race-neutral, gender and sex- based diagnostic category, this dissertation argues that evolving medical understandings of maternal mental illnesses have centered and privileged an imagined white female sufferer and, ultimately, reinforced the pathologization of non-white and low-income mothers, particularly Black women. Recognizing that concepts of motherhood, insanity, and deviance are deeply embedded in larger racial discourses, this dissertation asks how medical constructions of maternal mental illness have been both informed by and (re)produced the American sociocultural ideal of a mother who is white, middle-class, and domestic. In doing so, it illustrates how racialized diagnostic and therapeutic practices associated with maternal mental illness protected hegemonic constructions of white womanhood by reinforcing the conflation between “whiteness” and “good mothering” and “blackness” and “pathological mothering.” Consequently, this dissertation introduces the concept of “diagnostic privilege”: the idea that bestowing (or withholding) certain diagnoses can humanize or dehumanize patients along racialized constructions that privilege and reinforce whiteness. This dissertation adopts a long durée approach and examines four case studies in which medical understandings of maternal mental illness were intertwined with broader racial and gender politics and debates regarding the demographic trajectory of the United States. Drawing upon published and archival materials, the chapters explore the history of race and maternal mental illness by examining a criminal trial that centered on the permissibility of the insanity defense, a eugenic sterilization law and compulsory sterilization, a government-funded research study that considered how the psychological experience of pregnancy impacted children’s development, and an initiative aimed at reducing poverty by controlling fertility. In doing so, this dissertation sheds light on developing discourses of maternal deviance, maternal mental illness, race, reproduction, and psychiatry across the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Further, by foregrounding the relationship between maternal mental illness, racial science, and motherhood, this dissertation illuminates how historical constructs of maternal mental illness continue to pose barriers for non- white and low-income mothers – especially Black women – within medical, legal, and social systems today.

Nordicism—the belief in a Nordic or Aryan “master race”—emerged in nineteenth century anthropology as a form of scientific racism. As this ideology spread, a romanticized pseudohistorical version of Northern Europe flourished—most noticeably during Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. It continues to exist in the minds of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, the alt-right, and white nationalists today, with hate crimes and racial prejudice headlining the news in the United States daily. Understanding the patterns many extremists show on social media and internet forums is crucial—especially in the context of historical movements and ideas. This historiographical and phenomenological study presents a holistic view of the history and evolution of Nordicism and Norse pseudohistory and their modern use by white nationalists in the twenty-first century United States. It covers a variety of sources that speak on white nationalism, scientific racism, eugenics, and the fantastical concept of “Northernness.” Collecting data from self-identified white nationalists and white supremacists on social media and internet forums, as well as incidents of racially motivated hate crimes, can help answer the question of how modern white nationalists use debunked science and history to promote their ideology. Results of the research showed a clear connection to Nordicism and Norse pseudohistory while also admitting a lack of direct racist content in many examples. This thesis aims to help identify those who would commit racially biased crimes, as well as fight disinformation.

For almost two centuries, the Black Sea port of Odessa was an important center of merchant seafaring. Straddling the periods of the Russian Empire and the USSR, this part of Southern Ukraine was intricately linked to its merchant fleet as the hub of grain shipments, cruise industries, as well as an extension of the Russo-Soviet political power. By the 1980s, one of the largest merchant fleets in the world, the so-called Black Sea Shipping Company (BSC) reached its zenith. BSC directly employed tens and indirectly hundreds of thousands of employees. The port city was home to several naval academic intuitions graduating thousands of students. Hundreds of vessels supported Soviet military needs, grain and oil shipping, and even a cruise shipping industry from France to Singapore. Yet, within a few years of the breakdown of the Soviet Union, the BSC ceased to exist as a going concern. The enormous ships were sold, forfeited as collateral for loans, or scrapped for metal due to lack of maintenance. Tens of thousands of sailors began working for foreign firms or lost their jobs. The assets that just a few years ago were estimated to be worth billions of dollars vanished. This thesis attempts to narrate the disappearance of the BSC and explain the causes for the sudden downfall. This narrative could be viewed as a case study for a large number of industrial cataclysms in the post-Soviet space. The thesis can also be used to better understand the de-industrialization of modern Ukraine and, more narrowly, the loss by the country of its seagoing status. The thesis argues that the sudden pipeline disruptions of the early 1990s brought about structural crisis. No time, resources or will existed at the time to resolve it. The realization by the political and industry elites that the crisis was not resolvable accelerated the downfall due to opportunistic corruption in an attempt to monetize existing assets.

This thesis examines the complexities of Aztec religion throughout the Aztec Empire (1350 – 1521 AD) to evaluate potential monotheistic tendencies. This thesis uses Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl’s theory on Tloque Nahuaque and Miguel León-Portilla’s theory on Ometéotl to examine the potentiality of Mesoamerican monotheism in the Aztec religion. Currently, most Mesoamerican scholars describe Aztec religion as polytheistic due to arguing that the Aztecs believed in various deities that oversee different aspects of life, i.e., Tlaloc governing rain and water or Huitzilopochtli being the Aztec patron god of warfare and the sun. Also, it is often recognized that many historical sources view Aztec religion from a primarily European lens; two prominent examples include Bernal del Diaz Castillo’s The Real History of the Conquest of Mexico or Bernardino de Sahagún’s General History of the Things of New Spain. Yet, what happens if we analyze monotheism from a Mesoamerican point of view? This thesis aims to investigate Alva Ixtlilxóchitl’s theory of Tloque Nahuaque and León-Portilla’s theory on Ometéotl as possible forms of Aztec monotheism by identifying their forms of monotheism and then combine both theories for a broader understanding of monotheistic phenomena on a global scale through a Mesoamerican perspective.

Since the 1960s, punitive crime laws with bipartisan support have increased the presence of law enforcement in American society while diverting ever more tax dollars to the benefit of police organizations. At the same time, domestic policing has begun to resemble foreign counterinsurgency efforts more and more. While researchers have deftly outlined the political machinations that led to the rise of the American carceral state, few of them have identified the political effect of that development. The aim of my thesis is to explore the potential effects of these changes on politics and public opinion. To better understand those effects, I attempted to situate my project outside of the political context that led to the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1968 and the beginning of the carceral period by focusing on California, the epicenter of police professionalization. By analyzing the 1966 gubernatorial election, I argue that police professionalizers standardized tactics during the 1960s that were explicitly designed to manipulate public opinion by leveraging media sources and political influence. Further, implicit racial and political biases were codified in standard procedures by basing policing strategy on empirical data produced by police departments who engaged in racially and politically motivated behavior without compunction. By analyzing government documents, campaign materials, media sources, and internal documents from the University of California Berkeley, I show that both local law enforcement in California and federal law enforcement agencies in the FBI used tactics prescribed by police professionalization efforts to manipulate the opinions of elected officials and the public, particularly regarding crime and the student protests at the University of California Berkeley. They used events such as those student protests and the Watts Rebellion to craft a narrative that suggested that permissive liberalism created a permission structure around crime that threatened to send American society into anarchy and chaos. Police interlocutors used this narrative to aid the campaign of Ronald Reagan both directly and indirectly and helped bring about his victory in 1966.

This thesis challenges the prevailing view that New England rural outwork was merely a supplemental form of income—particularly within male-led families—during the early nineteenth century, namely by examining how the straw bonnet industry effected change in the household economy, resulting in a degree of women’s financial and social independence overlooked by traditional historiography. These dynamics arose during the early national period because of the sustainable, at times comfortable, standard of living provided by the domestic manufacturing of straw braids and bonnets. Consequently, this thesis reframes the historical understanding of New England outwork by reconsidering its causal relationship to documented increases in women’s power, both within the private and public spheres. In analyzing the straw bonnet industry’s market, legal, and financial structures, the separate spheres are shown to be more malleable and synergistic than developed in traditional historiography. These structural elements intensified women’s purchasing power, provided unmediated access to the cash economy and market revolution, and created methods of violating coverture—including purchasing and owning real property. Straw bonnets were also used to transform the social identity and economic status of women, thereby threatening to democratize the economic hierarchy of the church’s seating order. In summary, this thesis ultimately explores how New England straw textile outwork, and its role in the market revolution, intersects significant changes to economic, social, and women’s history in relation to early nineteenth-century domestic life and the public sphere.

The Valley of the Fallen, built within the mountains of the valley of Cuelgamuros, in Madrid, Spain, represents both the monumentality and decadence of dictator Francisco Franco’s thirty-six-year regime in Spain. Newly renamed to Valle de Cuelgamuros, the Valley of the Fallen parallels Spain’s politicized collective historical memory through an exhibition of highly curated sculptures and statues throughout the complex, including the world’s largest cross. Following Francisco Franco’s death in 1975, newly democratic Spain initiated the Pacto de Olvido (Pact of Forgetting), an informal agreement between both political sides to “forget” Franco’s legacy of repression and the acts of atrocity committed under the regime. As a result, Spain’s political parties enacted the 1977 Amnesty Law that exonerated those who committed political crimes or violence during the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. The Amnesty Law was envisioned as a way to overcome divisions of the past, but the historical amnesia caused problems of its own for Spain. The Valley of the Fallen is still a reminder of Francisco Franco’s forced historical narrative. There he was entombed for forty-four years (until his exhumation in 2019), and over thirty thousand Republicans and Nationals remain buried there. In the year 2000, the “grandchildren” of Francoism began to seek answers and search for the bodies of their loved ones killed and buried throughout Spain in unmarked mass graves. Spain’s response was a series of memory laws to reconcile its forgotten past. While the Historical Memory Law (2007) and the Democratic Memory Law (2022) officially condemned and delegitimized Franco’s regime, these laws came with flaws and did little for transitional justice. Condemnation of Franco’s regime resulted in additional erasure of the past with the removal of any symbol or statue in exaltation of Franco. This thesis examines the physical space of the Valley of the Fallen, studies the controversy over political amnesia and reconciliation of Spain’s past, considers the strengths and weaknesses of the Law of Historical Memory (2007) and the Law of Democratic Memory (2022), and interrogates the current removal of Francoist symbols in order to demonstrate the problems of Spain’s desire to reconcile a past of collective amnesia, as a result of culturally embedded silencing, with a current erasure of a past without any pedagogical element.

In 2021-2022, once routine school board meetings erupted into intense showdowns because of the presence of what many believed to be Critical Race Theory within the school curriculum, Comprehensive Sex Education, disagreement over gender identity, and the nature of parents’ rights. There were shouting matches and accusations that schools, board members, and parents were racists, hated America and members of the LGBTQ community, were trafficking in communism, and were harming children. Commenters made fiery pledges to remove board members, and board members received hate mail including death threats. This research project interrogates parents’, guardians’, and concerned community members’ publicly expressed beliefs and anxieties about Critical Race Theory (CRT), gender identity, and Comprehensive Sex Education (CSE), at 10 geographically diverse K-12 public school board meetings in the U.S. available online in 2021-2022. It considers what their comments at the board meetings reveal about their understanding of the world, of America, American identity, and of their own values, hopes, and fears. The methodology used in the project is anthropological. There is close textual analysis to better ascertain the content, context, and meanings of the discourse formations and cultural codes. These are the primary sources analyzed: comments at the school board meetings, written and televised speeches, personal letters, newspapers, op-eds, slogans, protest signs, campaign commercials, websites, and social media. In addition, historical and archival research trace the genealogy of these discourse formations within American culture among the secular and white evangelical Religious Right.The anti-CRT commenters and those who hold to traditional gender ideologies want to maintain a particular culture, an ordering of the world, including ideology and theology that is rooted in hierarchy, exclusion, and particular gender norms heavily influenced by the Southern way of life. Anti-CRT and opponents of LGBTQ inclusivity at the public-school board meetings end up reproducing white supremacy and discrimination against the LGBTQ community because of their actions, perhaps despite their intentions. This research shows how the intense backlash against the teaching of CRT and Comprehensive Sex Education and gender inclusivity in public schools is linked to unspoken assumptions about religion, race, history, gender, and American identity.

This dissertation explores the role of democracy promotion in US foreign intervention with a particular focus on the weaponization of media and civil society by two important US democracy promotion institutions, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and US Agency for International Development (USAID). Focusing on these two institutions and building on scholarship that takes a critical Gramscian Marxist perspective on US democracy promotion, this study brings media imperialism and deep political scholarship into the conversation. Delimiting the study to focus on US activities, I trace historical patterns of intellectual warfare and exceptional states of violence and lawlessness pursued by the US government in case studies of foreign intervention in which democracy promotion has played an important part since 1983. I survey the evolution of elite US Cold War conceptions of managed democracy as well as transformations of covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) media and civil society operations into institutionalized, pseudo-overt US democracy promotion that became a foundational pretext and method for US interventionism post-Cold War.Case studies include the Contra War in 1980s Nicaragua, Operation Cyclone in 1980s Afghanistan, the 2000 overthrow of Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milošević, the 2002 military coup against Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, the 2004 coup against Haitian president Bertrand Aristide, and the 2014 Euromaidan Coup against Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. I dedicate the penultimate chapter to US-led intervention in the Syrian Civil War that began in 2011, demonstrating how USAID provided instrumental monetary, media, and civil society support to primarily sectarian, theocratic, Salafi rebels against the Ba’athist government. Throughout the dissertation, I argue that the NED and USAID represent important engines of intellectual warfare in US foreign intervention, mobilizing communications and organizational resources to reinforce elite hegemonic narratives and facilitate neoliberal and neoconservative US foreign policy across the globe.

From Shojo Manga to Ancient Myth” explores how the ancient text of the Kojiki (712) is reappropriated as a shojo manga (girls’ comics), focusing on Satonaka Machiko’s 2013 adaptation of the Kojiki. Using an approach embedded in visual and gender studies, this thesis seeks to interpret how Satonaka’s adaptation engages with the Kojiki’s cultural history as Japan’s oldest extant written text. It also determines how this intervention adheres to or deviates from feminist praxis, nationalist praxis, or an overlap of the two through Farris’s conceptual framework of femonationalism. As a manga project, first and foremost, the project remains entrenched in close reading of Satonaka’s Kojiki as it evaluates how the work reappropriates and disrupts the Kojiki’s history and gendered tropes. Such is accomplished through amplifying Satonaka’s voice within her craft in an effort to view how she situates her own intervention with the source text. This analysis uncovers dualistic representations of the Kojiki’s female characters in addition to an intervention neither divorced nor immune from femonationalist inclinations. At the same time, Satonaka disrupts anglocentric views of what is considered “historical” and challenges preconceived notions of who “gets” to do history, conveying this message to young female audiences who may not otherwise be inspired by ancient history in a national or educational context. These overlapping interventions are nuanced and intertwined, but are crucial to unpacking how ancient texts and their cultural histories are rearticulated through contemporary Japanese popular culture.

My thesis explores the historical question: “Is there any freedom from death?” through three figures within the Western metaphysical tradition: Thucydides (460-400 BCE), Augustine (354-430 CE), and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616). In so doing, my thesis suggests the following: for Thucydides, freedom from death arose through the immortality of empire; for Augustine, through the immortality of God’s grace; and for Cervantes, through the immortality of narratives/attitudes of immortality. Moreover, I nest my claim within an exploratory narrative. Which is to say that, lifting a page from Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), I have attempted to break away from the near total dominance of Historie—that is, the “conventional” or “standard” way of thinking about the past that seeks to make direct connections and show continuity between primary sources—to create a form of Geschichte: an exploratory way of thinking about the past that attempts to actively explore primary sources without intentionally making direct connections. In this light, my exploratory narrative stands as a historical recalling of the Greek concept of ἱστορία (historia): I seek to create an attitude of active engagement toward the writings of Thucydides, Augustine, and Cervantes. Hence my main intervention to the study of death: to offer an alive piece of writing that attempts to think, question, and challenge both my primary sources and my own narrative creation.