Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution? Harlem's Public Schools, 1914-1954
Year of Dissertation:
2011
This dissertation examines how school administrators, teachers, parents, and local activists attempted to improve public schools in Central Harlem between World War I and the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. It reveals that animosity and distrust between parents, teachers, and the school administration, which peaked in New York City during the 1960s with mass boycotts and teacher strikes, had been growing for decades.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Artist and His Politics
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Advisor:
Marta Petrusewicz
Abstract
The United States National Student Association: Democracy, Activism, and the Idea of the Student, 1947-1978
Year of Dissertation:
2009
The United States National Student Association (USNSA, or simply NSA), America's dominant national union of students from 1947 to 1978, was the locus of an extraordinary variety of student organizing over the course of its 31-year history. A confederation of student governments, NSA claimed an active membership of hundreds of colleges and universities, trained and informed tens of thousands of student leaders, and served as both a resource and a foil to the other student organizations of its era.
Goals and Dreams: The Quest to Create Elite Youth Athletes in France, 1958-92
Year of Dissertation:
2009
France was one of the first countries to develop programs that integrated youth athletics with academics and medical supervision to produce elite athletes. Today the products of the French systems play for the best teams and leagues around the world. Many countries from Africa to Great Britain have implemented youth training structures based upon the French model. But it was not always this way.
More than a Box: The Economic and Social Implications of an Innovation in Freight Transport, 1956-2000
Year of Dissertation:
2009
The shipping container is an underappreciated technological innovation of the second half of the twentieth century. After decades of failed experiments with various types of containers, the modern intermodal container came into use in the United States in 1956. Its initial economic consequences were felt most strongly in New York City, where the displacement of breakbulk shipping by container shipping through an entirely new port complex in New Jersey caused substantial job loss among longshoremen and contributed to the decline of manufacturing. Containerization came into international use across the North Atlantic in 1966, and was adopted in trans-Pacific trade following its successful use to supply U.S. troops in the Vietnam War. Containerization caused large shifts in port activity, as previously obscure ports, such as Oakland, California, and Felixstowe, England, displaced traditional maritime centers that lacked the space and transport connections to function efficiently as container ports, such as San Francisco and London. Starting in the late 1970s, regulatory changes, especially in the United States, permitted motor carriers, railroads, and ship lines to offer coordinated services based on confidential contracts covering rates and terms of service, leading to reductions in shippers' costs in return for volume guarantees that permitted carriers to make more efficient use of assets. These changes improved service reliability while making freight transport a less significant factor in firms' decision-making. The ability to ship goods in a single container from origin to destination, under a contract specifying equipment availability, delivery times, and rates, dramatically lowered the cost of shipping manufactured goods internationally. Manufacturers and retailers were then able to locate facilities and make sourcing arrangements in order to minimize other costs, such as labor and taxes. Containerization was a necessary but not sufficient condition for the subsequent shift of manufacturing activity from high-wage to low-wage countries and the creation of long-distance supply chains to assure the timely delivery of goods to market. These are important aspects of the phenomenon now termed "globalization," and would not have been possible without containerization.
Learning to be modern: American Missionary Colleges in Beirut and Kyoto 1860-1920
Author:
Aleksandra Majstorac-Kobiljski
Year of Dissertation:
2010
In 1874, ABCFM, the richest and one of the most conservative evangelical organizations in North America decided to open in Japan an English-language institution of higher learning with a largely liberal arts curriculum. This was a shift away from its policies against educational work that was not based solely on the Scriptures and done in the local language. This shift and therefore the genesis of Doshisha English School (today Doshisha University) in Kyoto, was in large part the result of the successful establishment a decade earlier of the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut. In the early 1860s, a group of renegade ABCFM missionaries, under the pressure from nascent Arab and expanding Jesuit schools, challenged a long-standing policy of their missionary board policy on secular education and ask for support in establishing a college, as opposed to a seminary. Their rebellion was successful, the Boston elders relaxed their policies, and in 1866 a college opened its doors in Beirut. Its successful establishment made a Christian college an acceptable use of missionary resources and a model that soon found fertile ground in Japan.
How Water Became Public in Progressive-Era New York, 1883-1917
Year of Dissertation:
2013
Four distinctive features of this historical period prompted the City of New York to undertake water management. First, the severe drought of 1881 forced the city to expedite construction of the New Croton Aqueduct in 1883. While the city was building the new aqueduct, the urban public began to spend their leisure time at the High Bridge, which monumentalized the Old Croton Aqueduct and raised awareness of public water. Second, the cholera scare of 1892 prompted the city to protect the Croton watershed from pollution. Third, the high-profile derailment of an intricate scheme of graft, in 1899, drove city officials to begin to eliminate private water companies and to increase vigilance about municipal corruption related to water. Fourth, the consolidation of Greater New York increased city and state power and improvements in municipal finance facilitated a new public water bureaucracy, which allowed the city to build, manage, and pay for its own water system, marked by the completion of the Catskills system in 1917.
The Biological Engineers: Health Creation and Promotion in the United States, 1880-1920
Year of Dissertation:
2013
At the turn of the twentieth century the emerging field of professionals called "biological engineers" proposed individualized, prescribed physical training and health guidance based on physical examinations. They wanted to apply higher standards of health to people of all classes because they recognized that the college-educated as well as the unskilled, the immigrant as well as the native born, adults as well as children were subject to physical ailments and neurasthenia. Urbanization, the division of labor and intensive schooling contributed to these health problems for the majority of Americans of all classes.
Race and Real Estate: Interracial Conflict and Coexistence in Harlem, 1890-1920
Year of Dissertation:
2010
From 1890 to 1920, the northern Manhattan community of Harlem changed from a village dominated by white middle class merchants and professionals, with a small settlement of black residents, to a densely built urban community that was called the Black Capital of America. Although the dramatic change in Harlem is often described as one of "invasion" by black newcomers and "resistance" by white Harlem residents, details of the real estate trans-actions of the period indicate a more complex reality which challenges some elements of the "ghetto formation" model used by many historians to describe similar changes taking place in many northern cities in the first decades of the 1900s. Blacks were intent on forming a perm-anent, thriving black community in Harlem and therefore they sought to own residential, religious, and commercial property in Harlem. Many whites did resist blacks' movement into Harlem, but others facilitated this movement by assisting them to finance purchases of properties. White residents and investors in Harlem were a diverse group whose actions regarding race were influenced by length of residency, social class, ethnicity, and personal world views. Most other northern cities experienced variations of the changes experienced in New York City. On both sides of the color line class, ethnicity, politics, and economics dictated a range of strategies to either facilitate or forestall racial change in Harlem. The ownership and occupancy of real estate, long the symbol of citizenship in the United States, was a critical element in implementing and understanding these strategies.
The Color of Cancer: Disease and the Measure of Race in the United States from the 1920s to the 1990s
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation analyzes the ways in which cancer researchers in the United States understood, measured, and defined race between 1920 and the turn of the twenty-first century. Shifting interpretations of its relationship to carcinogenesis forced doctors to confront multiple definitions of race as they struggled to untangle the medical significance of various racial traits and explain epidemiologic patterns. At different times, race stood for nationality, culture, skin tone, physicality, genetics, socioeconomics, and biochemistry.