The power of losing control: Deconstructing Elfreth’s Alley documentary archive-based aesthetics using image-making experimentation is an interdisciplinary and multimodal media dissertation based on the experience of collecting, transforming, and validating archival information that is the foundation of history: its creation, interpretation, and recording. This research includes a manuscript or monograph, a series of lectures about the investigation, a physical multimedia exhibit of modified archival material from the Alley, and the publication of a creative journal that involves the processes and results of the exhibit in Elfreth’s Alley Museum. Observers have built most public records based on what is present and absent in the assemblage of documents, images, and found objects in particular settings. An example of these processes is the record of traditional and historical sites like Elfreth's Alley in Philadelphia, PA. This Alley is a traditional historical residential street considered a National Historic Landmark for its structures built between 1720 and 1830. This street has been home to everyday Philadelphians for three centuries, and its museum celebrates the working class of America who helped build the country through sweat and commerce. The Alley is still a thriving residential community that is home to artists and artisans, educators, entrepreneurs, and everything in between. While this research starts in this neighborhood, it explores connections that can take us across the city, the nation, and around the globe. In this dissertation, the record of the Alley life has been deconstructed to expose the understanding and perception of personal narratives that offer alternative views of collective memory and public history. The processes and results that deconstruct Elfreth’s Alley archival documentation have been used to analyze and question ideas of presence and absence of ethnic groups, the exercise of power and control, patterns of privilege assigned to race, gender and ethnicity, as well as concerns of domestic and child labor, environment, gentrification, and social networks, offering a rich description of the Alley. The methodology of this work, through its five chapters, is based on the study of analog experimental photographic processes and digital Artificial Intelligence (AI) new media creations with uncontrolled and unpredictable results, their relationship with archival studies from the Alley, and the impact of new contemporary archival creations in the construction of public history and collective memory. These mechanisms were applied to documents, archival and found materials (taken from different sources around the city and the nation) in various experimental artworks. The objects created for the exhibit and the analysis of these archives use pinhole cameras, expired paper, lumen prints and cyanolumens, panoramas with polaroids and chemigrams, stereoscopes and anaglyphs, augmented reality, and AI-algorithmic editions, as well as the existent sources and interdisciplinary collaborative work of the historians and museum professionals of the Alley. The multiple intellectual, theoretical, and creative layers involved in this work build a different record of the Alley. The artworks prepared in this study are a contemporary archival record of the interaction with the community and scholars of this historical place. This interaction, collaborative work, open access to the public, and reflections —consequences from this experimental artistic-creative process— constitute an academic record that expands the studies of historians, ethnographers, and academics, and contribute to an exhaustive analysis in the construction of public history and the collective memory of the city. / Media & Communication

Ybor City is a historical neighborhood in Tampa, Florida, and a tourist attraction known for its immigrant roots and once-thriving cigar industry. This thesis places Ybor City into the context of the burgeoning heritage tourism market, examining how cities financially reliant on tourism often sanitize their public historical narrative. I identify the main actors involved in Ybor City's marketing and preservation by investigating contemporary newspaper articles and multiple National Park Service documents, thereby uncovering the motivations and decisions that led to Ybor's cultural image of a bustling, relatively peaceful early 20th-century "Latin" community. To correlate Ybor's aestheticized public image with the official record, I review and contrast historical primary sources, academic literature, tourism advertising material, and Ybor's physical historical markers designated to its landmarks. My main argument is that embellishing local memory with overt celebratory overtones and a patriotic message not only fosters a misleading narrative, but it also sidelines traditionally marginalized racial and ethnic groups: Ybor's working-class families, as well as its Jewish, Black Cuban, and African American heritage. This thesis seeks to advance a more authentic interpretation of Ybor City history by proposing a reinvestigation into literary sources and applying both GIS and mobile technology to update the existing scholarship.

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“Exhibiting Evangelicalism” is a history of evangelical historical museums in the United States. It argues that conservative Protestant Christians in the United States developed practices for preserving and interpreting the past in public and deployed those practices toward varying theological, cultural, and political ends—an approach I term “evangelical heritage.” It further contends that evangelical heritage performed important work for its purveyors. Amid the boom in church attendance and religious affiliation after World War II, conservative Protestants deployed evangelical heritage to forge what they termed “neo-evangelicalism,” a rebranding of the old-time religion for postwar society. They also engaged evangelical heritage in their crusade to “win America for Christ,” convinced that an encounter with their tradition’s proud past could entice outsiders to convert to Christian faith. These elements never fully disappeared from the function of evangelical heritage. Even so, evangelical heritage did change over time. During the national bicentennial, for instance, evangelical heritage became a means by which neo-evangelicals, internally divided over matters of faith and politics, could project a united front by mapping their proud past onto the nation’s history. Such optimism did not last long. As the national consensus about the past shattered in the 1970s and 1980s, evangelical heritage morphed yet again. By the twenty-first century it had become a vehicle for nostalgia, immersing visitors in a mythic past that offered an imagined sense of comfort and reassurance amid conservative Protestants’ perceived loss of political and social influence. Evangelical heritage did not develop and evolve in a vacuum, however. From the start, it existed within and contributed to broader patterns of historical commemoration. In the postwar era, for instance, experiments in evangelical heritage intersected and overlapped with discourses and practices among bureaucrats, business leaders, social reformers, heritage professionals, and others regarding historic preservation, urban renewal, and the political purposes of civic memory. In the 1970s, neo-evangelical museum-makers helped to invent public history’s turn toward emotion, immersion, and experience as techniques through which to build visitors’ historical knowledge. As that trend became subject to intense internecine debate among public history professionals in the 1980s and 1990s, some conservative Protestant commemorators turned away from the mainstream of public history discourse. Instead, they embraced the theme park as a means of conveying ideological authority while retaining the trappings of the traditional museum as a way of courting intellectual authority—a trend that reached its apex at the turn of the twenty-first century. / History

In 1916 the United States National Park Service (NPS) was founded to conserve the nation’s natural and cultural landscapes as well as “to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” While much historical analysis has been done by historians and the NPS on the agency’s national history, these scholars have ignored how the NPS was shaped by and contributed to an international history of national parks. Thus, this thesis addresses this historiographical gap and institutional forgetfulness by examining the agency’s Division of International Affairs (DIA). The DIA was established in 1961 by the NPS to foster international cooperation by building national parks overseas, which often advanced foreign policy containment initiatives in the developing world during the Cold War. Following the end of the Cold War, a significant decline in activity and staffing made it more difficult for the DIA to return to the pull of its influence just a decade or two earlier. In 1987 the DIA was renamed the Office of International Affairs (OIA) and has since suffered from many of its parent agency’s larger issues including a decline in staffing, funding, and a host of other issues that have compromised the NPS’s ability to meet its mission. As the NPS celebrates its centennial in 2016, I argue that examining the NPS’s history of international work challenges the agency to consider its past in new ways in the hopes that it reconfigure its mission and future to best meet the needs of its audiences in a globally connected twenty-first century world. / History

This essay examines the ways in which one Protestant faith community has, over the course of the last six decades, deployed history as a means to form identity and shape practical theologies for daily living, in response to a particular transformation of its culture. Beginning in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Brethren in Christ Church transformed from a small, separatist religious society into a growing mainstream evangelical denomination. Central to this transformation was the church's increasing investment in the larger American evangelical movement. Since the 1970s, church members have hotly debated their denomination's "evangelical turn." While some see it as an inspiring story that captures the church's missionary essence, others see it as a tale of acculturation to "worldly" society. This contestation, however, rests on a misunderstanding of the denomination's "post-turn" history. By re-narrating the church's "evangelical turn" and leveraging that narrative into a collaborative, web-based interpretive exhibit, I seek to empower the Brethren in Christ community to better understand its history. Ultimately, I conclude that throughout the last sixty years and into the present, members of the church have used and continue to use history to understand both who they are and how they should live--conclusions with significant implications for the practice of public history among faith communities. / History