Female Learning in Early Modern Europe: Advocates and Institutions
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Schooling for girls begins in the early modern West as intellectuals make the case that women possess the same human characteristics as men; that they are capable of rational thought; and that they can and should be educated. Religious and civil officials, founders of schools, teaching orders, school masters and mistresses accept the new characterization of women, finding girls to be worthy of education and apt pupils. They create day and boarding schools for girls across Europe, announcing them as ideal training grounds for literacy, academic training, domestic skills, and quite importantly, religious and moral training. The founding of the first schools for girls follows after more than a century of discussion of women's worth, carried on in a querelle des femmes, a “debate about women,” that raised questions about the nature and capacity of women, commonly characterized as the “weaker sex.”
Safe Distance: U.S. Slavery, Latin America, and American Culture, 1826-1861
Year of Dissertation:
2011
This dissertation argues that in the thirty-five years before the Civil War, people in the United States used discourse about Latin America as a way to discuss slavery in the U.S. Through outright comparisons or implicit metaphors, they employed the Latin American context to say what was literally unspeakable when talking about slavery at home. Politicians stifled by Congress's gag rule, Northerners wary of offending their Southern neighbors, even proslavery partisans who countenanced no whisper of criticism of their own peculiar institution, all analyzed slavery south of the border without fear of censure.
Quadrivial Pursuits: Case Studies in the Conceptual Foundation of the Mathematical Arts in the Late Middle Ages
Year of Dissertation:
2012
The quadrivium, the four mathematical disciplines of the Middle Ages, described the structure of the medieval cosmos, both macrocosm and microcosm. Arithmetic and music were the mathematics of Platonic counting numbers. Geometry and astronomy were the mathematics of continuous magnitude. All four disciplines worked in concert to describe a cohesive and harmonious universe, which in the late Middle Ages incorporated everything from Aristotelian elemental theory to astrology. This dissertation describes the early philosophical formulation of these disciplines from Pythagorean and Platonic roots and the foundation of the quadrivium itself in the mathematical writings of Boethius in the early sixth century. This dissertation then examines the mathematical philosophy of three late medieval authors who were proficient in the quadrivial arts: Nicole Oresme (ca. 1320-1382), Prosdocimo de' Beldomandi (ca. 1375-1428), and Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472). All three demonstrate that the Boethian quadrivial philosophy continued to be relevant in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, but all three studies point to a significant fault line in the metaphysical structure of the quadrivium itself - the distinction between discrete and continuous, the quadrivial distinction between arithmetic and geometry.
Dangerous Grounds: The American GI Coffeehouse Movement, 1967-1972
Year of Dissertation:
2013
The 1960s witnessed an unprecedented level of antiwar organization in the United States, as a movement to end the war in Vietnam grew to include millions of Americans who participated in a wide range of protest activities. Beginning in 1967, antiwar activists opened GI coffeehouses in the cities and towns outside U.S. military bases, designed to serve as off-base refuges for the growing number of active-duty soldiers resisting the war. This dissertation examines three representative coffeehouses (the UFO coffeehouse in Columbia, South Carolina; the Oleo Strut coffeehouse in Killeen, Texas; and the Shelter Half coffeehouse in Tacoma, Washington) as nodal points of culture and politics that provide a fresh perspective on the complex relationship between the civilian antiwar movement and U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam era. The coffeehouse story reveals soldiers and activists working together, planning antiwar actions, printing underground newspapers and, more often than not, defending the coffeehouses themselves from unsympathetic citizens and concerned military authorities. Using radical publications, Congressional testimony, private letters, organizational records, military and government archives, and oral histories from key participants, this study analyzes a unique and thinly researched component of the antiwar movement and situates it within the larger history of late twentieth century American politics.
Banditry and Politics in Puebla, 1846-1848: The Contra-guerrilla of Manuel Domínguez and the Mexican-American War
Year of Dissertation:
2012
In the midst of the war between the United States and Mexico (1846--1848) a group of Mexicans from the state of Puebla began to work for the U.S. army as spies, couriers and fighters. The group operated under the leadership of Puebla's famous highwayman Manuel Domínguez, "El Chato." U.S. officials called this group the Mexican Spy Company, while contemporary Mexicans named Domínguez's band contra-guerrilla poblana. Given the collaborationist nature of the counter-guerrilla it comes as no surprise that Mexicans and Americans alike still remember Domínguez and his followers as no more than criminals and traitors, unnatural Mexicans who betrayed their homeland in its darkest hour. I argue, however, that the contra-guerrilla can be seen as an example of popular political action. Evidence suggests that, on the one had, the activity of the contra-guerrilla seems to have been anchored in a desire to exercise power. On the other, the contra-guerrilla deliberately challenged governmental authority. Overt violence perpetrated against fellow Mexicans was the way in which the contra-guerrilla made its claims public.
To Break Down the Walls: The Politics and Culture of Greenwich Village, 1955-1965
Year of Dissertation:
2010
More than simply a bohemian sanctuary during an age of conformity, Greenwich Village was a locus of resistance to the dominant political and cultural order in the 1950s. Probably the most famous neighborhood in the nation, the Village possessed abundant resources to advance fresh agendas of reformers, radicals, and artists. Community engagement in politics and the arts distinguished the lower Manhattan neighborhood. The period from 1955 to 1965 in particular witnessed an outburst of activism and creativity. This study analyzes the local institutions that nourished alternative or oppositional ideas, ways, and practices, focusing on the Village Voice, Judson Memorial Church, the Village Independent Democrats, and the Living Theatre.
A Race Against Time: Governing Femininity and Reproducing the Future in Revolutionary Iraq, 1945-63
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This dissertation rethinks the Iraqi revolution of 1958 and the post-World War II era leading up to it through the lens of gender and family reform, in particular by examining the relation between such reforms and various conceptions of temporality, both secular and Islamic. Engaging critically with Lee Edelman's notion of "reproductive futurism" as a hegemonic political imaginary of modernity, I argue that projects to cultivate modern feminine domesticities in Iraq during this era were linked to larger depoliticizing and disciplinary mechanisms that sought to stabilize the political present in the name of an ever-receding economic future. Sexual difference and the fantasy of the child as the embodiment of the nation's future development were keys to this process. Gender and family reform efforts in this period were markedly different from earlier nationalist projects to cultivate feminine domesticity in the Middle East, shifts that were related to the expansion of public schooling to the lower classes; new understandings of pedagogy, psychology, and child development and new global knowledge networks through which such understandings traveled; ruptures in conceptions of historical time and generational time; the rise of the United States as a superpower; and the dawn of the Cold War and the "age of development" after 1945. Yet the family-reform efforts I examine were not instances of a universal and linear modernization process; they were shaped by, and often direct responses to, local forces of upheaval, including rural rebellions connected to the agrarian crisis and the widespread political mobilization and radicalization of youth in the postwar era. They also ran up against local modes of life and networks of solidarity, Islamic and otherwise, that were not organized according to the child-centered, future-directed, and present-freezing logic of family reform in the age of development.
Glory and Infamy: Making the Memory of Duke Alessandro de' Medici in Renaissance Florence
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Duke Alessandro de' Medici (1512-1537, r. 1531-1537) was the victim of a previously unknown and far-reaching conspiracy to condemn him in posthumous histories and erase him from the archives of Florence. This cultural manipulation cast Duke Alessandro for the past 500 years as a tyrant, murderer, and rapist of nuns. The case study of how later dukes, historians, and archivists defamed Alessandro de' Medici illustrates the ways people made and destroyed memory in sixteenth-century Florence. The first chapter outlines the negative statements made about Duke Alessandro in the major histories that discuss his reign. The second chapter explores the political affiliations of the contemporary authors who wrote the histories used in the first chapter. I show that the historians' opposition to Alessandro's rule during his lifetime influenced what they eventually wrote about the Duke in their histories--a fact overlooked by scholars, who tend to almost wholly rely on the histories. The third chapter outlines the neglected concept and practice of damnatio memoriae, or condemnation of memory, in the Renaissance. Using poems, paintings, and rumors, I demonstrate how unknown Florentines secretly marginalized the memory of Duke Alessandro using objects intended to commemorate him. The fourth chapter explores how Alessandro's successor, Duke Cosimo I de' Medici (1519-1574, r. 1537-1574), feuded with Alessandro during his life, and constructed the Florentine archives in such a way that Alessandro's reign is excluded from both the Medici family archives and Medici ducal archives. No corpus of archival documents exists that could correct the slander spread by the official historians. Anonymous citizens, politically-active historians, and later Medici Grand Dukes effectively obliterated all good memory of Duke Alessandro de' Medici within 100 years of his assassination.
Revolutionary Debt: Attitudes of French Political Elites toward the Domestic Creditors of the State, 1787-1794
Year of Dissertation:
2013
This dissertation examines the public debate surrounding the French national debt and the domestic creditors of the state during, and just prior to, the French Revolution. Focusing on stances expressed by a sample of the cahiers de doléances and by political leaders, it demonstrates how the debt and the creditors were among the chief concerns of revolutionaries from moderates to Jacobin radicals. Through a differential analysis of the cahiers, it shows that despite their often considerable differences on other matters, concerning the debt many - but not all - of the clergy, nobility and Third Estate were of a similarly protective opinion. I analyze the differences within, as well as between, the three orders relating to this issue. In part, the aim is to illuminate not only the role of the royal/national debt in this debate, but also that of its owners, the state creditors, as a crucial constituency embedded within most social groups of the Old Regime. Furthermore, underscoring both progressive and conservative stances among the privileged orders, the work contributes to historiography which examines their role in the Revolution. Finally, the work interprets the debt as a modern property type; the state creditors, as eighteenth-century capitalists; and it explicates their role in overthrowing the Old Regime in its entirety.
Internationalists! The Radical Party Challenges the Italian Left, 1963-1995
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Robert David Johnson
Marco Pannella and Emma Bonino's Italian Radical Party was a small but influential liberal, non-Marxist political movement committed to upholding individual liberties at home and abroad. During the Cold War, the Radicals held that militarism produced authoritarian welfare states and was at the basis of domestic and global injustice. Antimilitarist pacifism and civil disobedience underpinned their battles for citizen rights, including ones in support of conscientious objection or the legalization of divorce and abortion. Such stances signaled a challenge to Communist and Socialist control over the politics of the left, due to the tendency of both Marxist parties to seek accords with political Catholicism. Radicals rejected Italy's traditional coalition politics and sought to liberalize and simultaneously unify the left against the ruling Christian Democracy. They contrasted their libertarianism and issue-based politics with what they claimed was the tired statism and collectivism of the old left. In the seventies, Radicals interpreted the crisis of Keynesian economics as confirmation that the welfare state could no longer address human needs. They adopted aspects of neoliberalism that dovetailed with their longstanding hostility to welfare all'italiana. After the Cold War, Radicals endorsed military interventions conducted to uphold international law; ethnocide in Africa and Europe motivated a qualification of earlier Radical espousals of nonviolent resistance, revealing a form of juridical pacifism. In their garb as both domestic political group and transnational non-governmental organization, they contributed to the establishment of the International Criminal Court at The Hague instated to try war criminals. Over several decades, Radicals participated in a transformation of global political culture associated with the antiauthoritarian and anti-governmental revolts of the sixties, seventies and eighties. Their antipolitics pitted individuals, self-managed communities, and markets against a declaredly immoral state. Straddling the left-right divide, the Italian Radicals personified both new left and neoliberal dimensions of the antistatist surge of the last third of the twentieth century. Their exaltation of individual rights and negative freedom and their downgrading of economic rights and positive liberty partook in a historical process which has produced freer yet less equal societies.