Nurses Challenging Subordination: Gender, Class and Religion in Britain's Crimean War
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Beginning in October, 1854, middle-class female volunteers, paid nurses, and members of Anglican and Roman Catholic women's religious orders left Britain and Ireland to work as military nurses in the Crimean War. Florence Nightingale has received thorough scholarly and popular analysis, but the rest of the contingent is understudied. The Crimean War was the first conflict in which British women worked as military nurses. I analyze their work through the perspectives of gender, class and religion, using nurses' correspondence, journals, contemporary letters, news articles and documents. I argue that military nursing provided women with a unique opportunity which they seized to widen their "sphere." This service allowed them to contravene the usual strictures on genteel female behavior and work against anti-Catholic bias.
Eduardo Chibás: The Incorrigible Man of Cuban Politics
Year of Dissertation:
2009
There is ample evidence to suggest that Eduardo Chibás (1907-1951), despite never having been president, was of primary importance to Cuba's political system in the years 1940-1952. As a congressman, senator and presidential candidate who was also the island's most popular radio commentator, Chibás was afforded an excellent opportunity to alter government policy and shape public opinion. Specifically, Chibás denounced what he saw as the vices and inadequacies of Cuba's fledgling democracy, especially corruption in public office. By all accounts, Chibás was a man of unquestioned probity. Unlike his political rivals, who gained financially from their elected positions, Chibás' economic position declined - leading him to sell the family residence, built by his father, to pay for his 1948 presidential campaign.
Jewish at the Front: The Experience of Jewish Officers in the German Army in World War I
Year of Dissertation:
2010
The story I seek to tell argues for full Jewish integration in the army, acceptance of a particular Jewish identity but an amalgamation of that identity to being German. After the initial introductory chapter that explores historiographical and methodological questions, Chapter Two examines the experience of religion at the front. Jewish holidays offered an opportunity for Jewish soldiers to seek solace in their religion and comraderie with their fellow Jews. The Christian holidays posed a challenge in how to celebrate with their Christian comrades. Jewish soldiers were able to "read" the Christian symbolism of sacrifice as it was used at the front, although with careful distance. In Chapter Three I discuss the encounter of German Jewish soldiers with Eastern European Jews on the eastern front. Jewish soldiers responded to the Eastern Jews positively, negatively, or indifferently, but always with distance. The encounter often intensified their own Jewish identity, and yet the Eastern Jew remained as "Other," even if an ethnic "grandparent." In the final chapter, I discuss experiences of antisemitism--excluding the Judenzaehlung--and integration. Narrative anecdotal eveidence is mixed with quantitative evidence culled from the cemeteries, published sources and archival material in order to clarfiy the extent of Jewish integration in the German army. I find that Jewish soldiers found integration and that antisemitism was not a significant factor in their war experience. Theirs was a war where they found themselves as Jews, men, soldiers and Germans, fighting for a future that might have been.
Transnational Mechanics: Automobility in Mexico, 1895-1950
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation examines the rise of a particular way of moving through space in the form of motorized travel, and its political, cultural, and economic implications in Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century. It begins by tracing the origins of automobile use during the later years of the Porfirian era (1876-1911), followed by its curious expansion in the midst of armed revolution, world war, and a period of rapid innovation in the US automotive industry during the 1910s. When the country slowly broke free from the grip of national upheaval at the onset of the 1920s, post-revolutionary state builders, foreign and domestic business interests, and consumers joined forces in order to solve a challenging crisis in communications that had been brought about by the destruction and growing inefficiency of the nation's expansive but unevenly distributed railway system and network of urban tramways. Over the quarter century between the end of the Mexican Revolution and conclusion of the Second World War, as roads expanded from cities through the combined and at times competing actions of public and private interests, and automobiles flowed over the border from the United States, Mexican citizens became increasingly dependent on cars, buses, trucks, and gasoline for everything from getting around and between urban areas and maintaining the food supply of cities to leisure tourism. By mid-century, and through the forces of consumer preference, technological innovation, the pursuit of profit by automotive industry interests, and the promotion of motoring by a government intent on hastening the modernization of Mexican citizens and the domestic economy, the character of space and mobility had been fundamentally altered. More than half of the country's passengers and as much cargo as that hauled on the railway were being shuttled around the nation in motorized machines, while foreign and domestic automobile tourism had become a major industry. During the following decades, the Mexican state would seek to consolidate this transformation by aiding in the establishment of an expansive national automobile industry, continuing the costly construction of roads, and subsidizing gasoline for the Mexican consumer.
The Cycling City: Bicycles and the Transformation of Urban America
Year of Dissertation:
2011
This dissertation examines the rise and fall of urban cycling in the 1890s. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, bicycles invaded American cities. Millions of cyclists reveled in the utilitarian and recreational uses of the machine, pedaling to work, exercising their bodies, and escaping the chaos of the city. In the process, cyclists and a broad group of city reformers, politicians, and engineers redrew the blueprints of the American city. They imagined, and actually began to build, a city in which smooth asphalt stretched across the entire metropolis, specially designed bicycle paths and roads promoted and facilitated bicycle transportation, and traffic regulations accounted for the rising number of cyclists and the complications that they added to the urban network. Likewise, doctors dreamed of a cycling city defined by the improved health of its citizens; sanitarians of an environment devoid of horses, filth, and disease; women of a completely accessible city. Indeed, as a practically noiseless, non-polluting, health-inducing, liberating, and private vehicle, the bicycle offered the promise of a revitalized, healthful, clean, and moral urban environment. In short, it offered the chance to make the modern city more livable.
Rufus King and the History of Reading: The Use of Print in the Early American Republic
Year of Dissertation:
2013
This dissertation examines the reading history, book collecting, and the use of print by the early American politician and diplomat Rufus King. Over the course of his life, King collected a vast library of books, pamphlets, and maps, and deployed print as a political weapon over his forty-year public career. He read widely in history, philosophy, and law, but did not read as an intellectual trying to answer abstract questions; he read purposively in a lawyerly fashion to solve problems or construct political arguments. King was a pragmatic reader who appropriated texts for specific political intentions. Evidence of this appropriation can be found in the marginalia in his personal library, commonplace notebooks, and scrap notes in his archive. It is the argument of this dissertation that the private act of reading was often the first step in the political process and had public consequences. As a well-read Enlightenment figure who was an efficient organizer of information, it is essential to understand the management of his reading in order to grasp his Federalist politics.
Tinturae Romanorum: Social and Cultural Constructions of Color-Terms in Roman Literature
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Literary sources in poetry, prose and inscriptions offer many examples of the use of color-terms in Latin texts, which carry connotations of value, both negative and positive, based on their associations with contemporary social groups. In this study I discuss several themes dealing with color-terms and their use in Latin literature which have not been explored in previous scholarship. I examine the debate on color-terms in Aulus Gellius' Attic Nights 2.26; the Roman dye industry and Roman clothing; class distinctions in Roman society, with particular emphasis on the freedman; color-terms as applied to physiognomic principles in descriptions of people and ethnic groups; and a special category of color-terms which cover multiple colors, such as versicolor and bicolor. By exploring the use of color-terms in these cultural contexts, we may gain a deeper understanding of the Roman mind.
The Temptation of Saints in Latin Narrative: England, France, and the Low Countries, 1100-1230
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation examines a series of twelfth- and early thirteenth-century narratives in which holy men and women are tempted and tormented by what they and the shapers and readers of their life stories understood to be the devil. By analyzing the social and cultural conditions that brought about the creation of particular relationships between saints and the devil, it looks beyond the hagiographic topos of the saint defeating the "ancient enemy" in the "desert" to the particulars of the "desert" for each holy person. These episodes can reveal aspects of medieval religious life that may otherwise be ignored within the set pattern of a saint's life (conversion, temptation, victory over the devil).
In the Shade of Tocqueville
Year of Dissertation:
2011
This dissertation examines the reception of Alexis de Tocqueville by American and European intellectuals who worked and lived in America during the 1940s and 1950s. The intellectuals featured in the dissertation include David Riesman, Louis Hartz, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss. I analyze their personal correspondence and seminal scholarly works, each of which has helped promote different images of Tocqueville. Re-evaluating the Tocquevillean aspects of these influential works, such as The Lonely Crowd, The Liberal Tradition in America, Origins of Totalitarianism, and Natural Right and History, sheds new light on the authors' true understanding of Tocqueville and deep appreciation of his ideas. I also examine the use of Tocqueville by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Council Against Communist Aggression, and F.A. Hayek to understand how Tocqueville became the anti-Marx during the fifties. I argue that Tocqueville's ideas played an important role in shaping the thoughts and views of all of these intellectuals during this important period after the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War. Concerned with the flaws of a democratic society that promoted equality and liberty, they found in Tocqueville the ways to fix them, and, ultimately, hope.
Mothers Raise the Army: Women's Politics, Popular Culture, and the Great War in America, 1914-1941
Author:
Katherine Hallgren
Year of Dissertation:
2012
In April 1917, after America's declaration of war on Germany, pro-war women began to lobby Congress to pass a military draft. Presenting themselves as true mothers of the nation, these women described their sons as patriotic, naturally drawn to military service in wartime. They were attempting to combat two groups: the maternal pacifists who argued that women should oppose war, and the immigrants they feared would not enlist. Even after Congress passed conscription, the heroism of mothers of soldiers and sailors captured the imaginations of pro-war artists. Sheet music, short stories, journalism and film praised mothers willing to support their sons' enlistment.