No description available.

This thesis offers the first in-depth analysis of the network of Puerto Rican community activism in the Lower East Side from 1964 to 2001. The community of Loisaida organized itself to fight against postwar urban deindustrialization, housing disinvestment, and gentrification, which threatened to displace an entire generation of Puerto Ricans who migrated to this New York neighborhood and tried to make it their home. Using an amalgam of unprocessed organizational archives, oral histories, ephemera, and neighborhood publications, this project recreates the history of community action in Loisaida. Focusing on key institutions and community groups that mobilized residents and built a lasting activist network, this thesis demonstrates how community groups pioneered a methodology for more sustainable community activism. These activists turned Loisaida into their laboratory, constantly experimenting with and adapting new strategies to put up a solid defense against absentee landlords, greedy developers, opportunist politicians, and an era of increased policing of urban space. The interplay of community activism, urban politics, and Puerto Rican history in Loisaida provides three crucial insights: (1) the need for grassroots organizations to adapt their activism to the changing needs of the community, (2) the creativity of urban communities to transform and design their immediate environment, and (3) the key strategies that enable activists to develop campaigns to their full potential. By uncovering these insights, this thesis raises new and challenging questions about the nature of sustained neighborhood activism at a major transitional phase in United States urban history: the shift from 1960s antipoverty programs to 1980s neoliberal policies. It shows the ingenuity and strength of activists who confronted this shift in the socio-political urban landscape by devising strategies to continue serving the residents of Loisaida. In 2017, the same community leaders who mobilized residents in the early 1960s are still marching on City Hall to demand the return of their former headquarters.

From c1035, when Worlingworth was given to the Abbey of St. Edmund, the documentary evidence is both abundant and varied in nature. A map of 1605-6 makes possible, inter alia, a reconstruction of the village plan c1355 or earlier. The court-rolls 1301-13 were 'coded' for use with a computer. Before the Conquest, Worlingworth owed food-rents to the Abbey. The ending of these payments by c1200 brought fundamental economic and topographical changes to the village, notably an expansion in the number of "Free" and "Mollond" tenancies. Both the population and the commercial life of the area generally were growing rapidly from the early 13th century onwards. That the Famines of 1315-17 brought significant change to the village is not convincing. But the Revolt at Bury St. Edmunds of 1327 and the belated introduction at Worlingworth of demesne sheep-farming from 1333-4 both appear to have altered the direction of the village's development. To examine the relationship between the archaeological and the documentary evidence, an excavation of a medieval tenement was organised and a documentary profile prepared of its tenants. Studies on subjects outside the broad narrative of the village's history were undertaken, including "Fauna and Flora", "Medieval Buildings and their Contents", "The Medieval Clergy" and "Medieval Women". Such chapters introduce the local evidence for such topics as money-lending, patterns of crime, household furnishings and educational opportunities. Worlingworth suffered badly during the First Pestilence in 1349 with mortality as high as 40%. The population c1400 was half that in 1348. On present evidence, the involvement of the villagers in the Insurrection of 1381 was minimal. In common with many other Suffolk manors, the end of high demesne farming came remarkably quickly, in 1390.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Erskine Theological Seminary, 2000. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-91).

When exploring the histories of male slaves in the antebellum South, there remains a tendency for them to feature as a singular entity; the failures and successes of male slaves are often discussed as all encompassing and identical. However, in defining male slaves as a monolithic entity seeking to affirm manhood in the face of oppression and attempted emasculation by white society, there is a danger that we remain wedded to a “white/black” dichotomy that neglects the complexity of interactions among enslaved people and issues of intersectionality. It is vital that we do not ignore the plurality of gender as a social and cultural construct and the manner in which enslaved people conceptualised and created gender identities from a variety of different attributes and ideals. Scholars have increasingly made it clear that socially becoming “male” or “female” was not biological destiny in the antebellum South, but there remains comparatively less attention to the multiplicity of masculinities among enslaved men. Yet enslaved men were not a homogenous body and nor was there a single understanding of what being a man meant in slave communities. Multiple understandings of, and a variety of ideals, were invoked as evidence of “manhood” by contemporaries, white and black, that went beyond any simplistic, singular, or naturalised model. Enslaved people formulated and articulated multiple models of masculinity, drawing upon a variety of different and potentially conflicting contemporary ideals to create masculine identities and a sense of selfhood. Furthermore, this sense of a gendered self could come through comparison with, and refusal of other “masculine” behaviours in their communities: enslaved men could rank themselves as men in direct comparison to others in their communities.

In early July, 1835, rumours of a slave insurrection swept central Mississippi. Deviant white men, with bad characters and dishonourable motives, were—or so the residents of the small towns along the Big Black River in Madison County believed—plotting to incite the slaves to rebellion so that during the resulting panic they could rob the banks and plunder the cities. These rumours were entirely unfounded, but within a few weeks, groups of white citizens calling themselves ‘committees of safety’ had examined and tortured an unknown number of men (both white and black) whom they thought to be involved in the conspiracy, and by the end of July about a dozen white men and around twenty or thirty slaves had been put to death in Mississippi. As a moment during which white men not only articulated their notion of what it meant to be a ‘man,’ but also demonstrated and violently enforced it, the insurrection scare is an opening, a window, into the lives of men in the antebellum South. Through this window, we can see how Southern white men conceived of their identity as white men and constructed a notion of manhood—one of honour—to which all white men, regardless of class, could aspire. While Northerners emphasised restraint, and inner feelings of honour, Southern manhood was defined almost entirely by public display. Honour had to be performed. Further, because all white men could attempt to give a performance of honour, there existed in the South a sense of equality amongst all white men—a herrenvolk democracy—despite the vast differences in wealth and status that existed. African Americans, on the other hand, could make no claims to honour in the eyes of white men because to have honour was to have power.

The project is an inter-disciplinary intervention into a field that may be largely called New York Studies or, more explicitly, the uses of urban, human and cultural geography for a cultural-materialist history of New York between the fiscal crisis years of the mid-1970s through to the Market Crash of October 1987. My concern is to offer a critique of urban regime transformation in New York, the kind of private-public coalitions taking shape in response to the advent and consolidation of the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) industries and their socio-spatial implications, through the lenses of cultural production. I am interested in the ways in which representation - the literary, the cinematic (more sparsely and tangentially), the documented and the archival in an analytically productive conjunction - encodes and arbitrates the changes in the production of urban space in New York City. Thus, the project underlines the heightened significance of literary economies for understanding the experiential structures of urban transformation in 1970s and 1980s New York. Driven by the belief that written culture, just like visual art, may prefigure and telescope urban change, a handful of New York writers dared to tread (both literally and symbolically) where the sociologist, the urban geographer or the documenter does so by professional default, and thus engaged head-on with the hard city of socio-economic networks. This kind of ‘urbanisation of [literary] consciousness’ calls for refreshed modes of enquiry, proposed in Chapter 1, at which point fetishist and aestheticist constructions of the city in the postmodernist key become inadequate, insufficient and politically ineffectual interpretative strategies. The following three-fold case study analysis of counterculture and the underground economy, of homesteading and ‘low rent’ fiction, of the finance industry, publishing and ‘financial writing’ may offer radical opportunities for revisiting both the space of representation and the represented space of urban decline and growth through a geocultural reading for the unevenness of urban space.

No description available.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Erskine Theological Seminary, 2000. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-91).

Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1992. / Title from title page screen, viewed February 3, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Douglas Hesse (chair), Ronald J. Fortune, Ray Lewis White, Steven E. Kagle. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 383-402) and abstract. Also available in print.