Thesis (M.A.)--University of Central Florida, 2009. / Adviser: John Sacher. Includes bibliographical references (p. 138-140).

abstract: This dissertation examines the conception, planning, creation, and management of Fort Union National Monument (FOUN) in northeastern New Mexico. Over approximately the last eighty-five years, writers, bureaucrats, boosters, and the National Park Service (NPS) have all been engaged in several different kinds of place-making at FOUN: the development of a written historical narrative about what kind of place Fort Union was (and is); the construction of a physical site; and the accompanying interpretive guidance for experiencing it. All of these place-making efforts make claims about why Fort Union is a place worthy of commemoration, its historical significance, and its relationship to local, regional, national and international contexts. The creation and evolution of Fort Union National Monument as a memorial landscape and a place for communion with an imagined past—in short, a site of memory and public history—is only the latest chapter in a long history of migration, conflict, shifting ownership, and land use at that site. I examine the evolution of a sense of place at Fort Union in two broad time periods: the twenty-five years leading up to the monument’s establishment, and the seven decades of NPS management after it was created. Taken as a case study, the story of FOUN raises a number of questions about the basic mission and meaning of NPS as a cultural institution and educational organization; how the agency conceptualizes and “talks about” Native Americans and the Indian Wars; the history and practice of public history; and how best to address sites like Fort Union that seek to historicize America’s imperial past. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2016

A discussion of how to reorganize the Warren County, Kentucky school system. Includes a description of the Warren County school system in 1957.

This thesis analyzes the editorial content of a popular regional newspaper from the Shenandoah Valley, the Spirit of Jefferson, during the height of the Civil-War Era (1848-1870). The newspaper’s editor during most of the period, Benjamin F. Beall, was a white, southern slaveholder of humble origins, who spent time serving in the Confederate military. Beall, however, had also quickly established himself as one of the preeminent Democrats in his home county of Jefferson, as well as both the Shenandoah Valley and the new state of West Virginia. Beall firmly believed in the institution of racial slavery and fought to preserve that institution. Yet, not all of Beall’s white neighbors decided that secession was an appropriate idea worth pursuing. Typical of other areas in the Upper South, these unionists existed in large numbers due to the survival of a strong, two-party political system built from an increasingly diversifying local economy. These white unionists shared a complicated relationship with local blacks, who also sought to defeat the Confederacy in order to claim freedom and citizenship rights in the United States. This paper, hence, traces the path to disunion in Jefferson County and the troubled attempts to reunify during the immediate aftermath of the war from the perspective of the largest population demographic in the county—albeit smaller than elsewhere in the South—the cultural conservatives like Beall. Beall’s words serve as some of the best surviving evidence of how most local whites felt toward the attempts to shatter slavery and how difficult it was for those whites to prevent its destruction.

The relation between memory and identity is significant, particularly if an identity-establishing entity such as a state has vanished. In the context of GDR memory, this pertains to the type of memory discourse: what is remembered, how, and by whom? What are the differences in the discourse about East German memory between the US and Germany? Based on approaches of the Aleida Assmann’s approaches to individual, collective, and cultural memory this thesis seeks to examine the notion and impact of archives in collective memory processes and to analyze the extent to which the medium of film as a concrete and abstract archival complex can represent a part of individual and collective memory. Therefore, I combine the notion of the archive – based on approaches of Benjamin and Foucault – with memory discourses, going beyond the archive’s material character. Furthermore, in my analysis I follow the media studies’ definitions of film as a material-based dualistic, communicative and semiotic system. The analysis focuses on the work of the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which is important for American utilization and circulation of DEFA films and the distribution of audiovisual images of and about the former GDR. The DEFA Film Library is the only archive and research center outside of Germany devoted to a broad spectrum of filmmaking from and related to the former GDR. The DEFA Film Library has been distributing DEFA movies and providing materials for media education since the early 1990s. In this thesis, I examine the multilayered role of the DEFA Film Library in US-East German sociocultural relationships, particularly with respect to its impact on raising awareness of East German culture, history and politics through public and academic film programming and exchange. Using the DEFA Film Library’s work as a case study, I analyze the political impact of film work amidst the challenges of preserving, circulating, and communicating the audiovisual memory of the GDR.

No description available.

[pt] O presente trabalho ao considerar as fazendas históricas do Vale do Paraíba fluminense como espaços de valor, busca identificá-las como locais que em si possuem significados, seja pela importância que tiveram na região no século XIX, seja pelo trabalho que exercem no tempo presente através da organização de visitas guiadas que produzem narrativas sobre o passado histórico das fazendas, do Vale e da escravidão. Ao longo do trabalho, o intuito foi de não apenas analisar os discursos referentes ao passado escravista organizados por guias e proprietários no tempo presente, mas também de materializar as reflexões e discussões em torno da produção de história pública e da construção de uma consciência histórica ligada à escravidão, a partir da organização de um projeto de visita guiada ao quilombo São José da Serra, em Valença/RJ, a fim de identificar o território quilombola como um espaço de luta, resistência e evidenciar o protagonismo exercido por africanos e seus descendentes escravizados nos tempos de escravidão. Portanto, busca-se investigar como a história é entendida e encenada, atualmente, pela sociedade, fora do universo acadêmico, de que maneira as visitas guiadas contribuem para a construção de um conhecimento histórico referente à escravidão e evidenciar os múltiplos campos de atuação do historiador como profissional da história pública. / [en] This work considers historic farms of Rio Paraíba Valley as value spaces, and it seeks to identify them as meaningful sites for their importance in the region in 19th century, and also for their role in organizing guided tours and producing narratives about the slavery history. The aim was also to discuss the public production of history and the construction of a historical consciousness related to slavery. Finally, the work proposes a plan of a guided tour to the quilombo São José da Serra, in Valença / RJ, a territory that was a space of struggle and resistance. The plan will highlight the role played by Africans and descendents in slavery times and today. Therefore, we seek to investigate how history is understood and performed outside the academic world, and how the guided tours contribute to the construction of a historical knowledge related to slavery, in order to explore the multiple fields of activity for the historians.

This thesis is a history of the navigation on the San Joaquin River from 1848 until 1925. The main purpose of the thesis will be to examine chronologically any and all events and factors concerned with the navigation of the river during that period of time. The first chapter will survey the geographical and historical background of the San Joaquin River. The emphasis will be placed on the river's use for navigation. Since the upper, southern third of the San Joaquin Valley does not drain into the San Joaquin River, only those areas between the Kings River on the south and the Cosumnes River on the north will be included in this study.

Introduction. This thesis aims to investigate user participation in two selected music websites, The Metal Archives (also known as Metal-Archives or MA) and Discogs, as well as gather knowledge about how their databases and web interfaces are designed. Music genres are often associated with a culture or subculture. We wanted to investigate how the subcultures of metal music fans and record collecting has made an impact in these online archives, since the users who contribute to the archives are the ones who drive the archives forward. Method. To answer our research questions we described the designs of the websites themselves, as well as conducted surveys and one interview. Our survey material comes from user responses to two separate Google Forms surveys. The interview is a qualitative semi-structured interview conducted via e-mail with a policy expert from The Metal Archives. In addition to this, we supplemented it with a summary of an earlier interview with Discogs founder Kevin Lewandowsky. Qualitative method was used for analysis of both surveys and the interviews. Results. Both websites function as participatory archives since the user contributions are voluntary. Many who contribute do so out of a “Love for the culture”. While both user communities share a love for music, Discogs also focuses on its users selling physical records. Respondents from the surveys show an altruistic motivation for participating. To them, sharing contributions with others in the community feels important. Conclusion. Regarding website design, we found that both sites employ point systems as a motivating factor to ensure further user contributions. When it comes to user participation, both sites have active communities and can be seen as examples of crowdfunding. In the case of Metal-Archives the users showed a certain affect, passionately contributing data for its own sake. While both websites function as “Community Archives”, the culture differs. Metal-Archives is more elitist in nature and subcultural while Discogs aims to catalogue music from any genre. Furthermore, the search systems differ in that Metal-Archives is centred around finding bands while Discogs uses complex hyperlinking derived from the culture of vinyl record collecting. The thesis concludes that these two study objects show an example of community and the contributions of passionate fans online, as well as how the amount of information about music can benefit future research in music.  This is a two years master’s thesis in Archival Science.

[pt] A proposta deste trabalho versará sobre buscar entender como a onda conservadora que assola o país, mais especificamente a área da Educação e o Ensino de História, acabou por influenciar o cotidiano dos professores em sala de aula e os mesmos passaram a ser considerados grandes inimigos por parte de negacionistas. Nesse sentido, as origens e embasamentos para os ataques conservadores serão demonstrados e os seus mentores explicitados, tais como Olavo de Carvalho, Leandro Narloch e suas práticas. Veremos os impactos no cotidiano do ensino de História principalmente através da atuação do Movimento Escola Sem Partido (MESP) e perceberemos, por exemplo, que a chamada doutrinação ideológica de que os professores são acusados, na verdade, possui uma direção e uma causa muito direcionada: Os professores de História e Ciências Humanas. Também será percebido as formas como o MESP se aproxima de grupos e partidos políticos com temáticas conservadoras, apropriando-se de suas pautas, para que assim possa se alavancar no cenário nacional. Para além disso, a resposta dos professores de História e as novas formas de se discutir essa Ciência, principalmente através da História Digital. Veremos como esse movimento de ocupar as mídias digitais e a disputa desse espaço com os Negacionistas começam a ser feitos pelos especialistas da área e como há a demonstração de que o ocorrido nos espaços acadêmicos não são Balbúrdias, mas sim, Ciência de alta qualidade e complexidade. Essa resposta será buscada através de um pequeno mapeamento sobre canais dos mais variados tipos, mas que prezam pela divulgação científica de linguagem acessível para os simpatizantes da área e como uma maneira de combater o obscurantismo negacionista que nos cerca. / [en] The purpose of this work is to seek to understand how the conservative wave that is plaguing the country, more specifically the area of Education and History Teaching, has ended up influencing the teachers daily lives in the classroom, and how they started to be considered great enemies by part of Negationists. In this sense, the origins and grounds for conservative attacks will be demonstrated and their mentors made explicit, such as Olavo de Carvalho, Leandro Narloch and their practices. We will see the impacts on the daily teaching of History mainly through the work of the School Without Party Movement (Movimento Escola Sem Partido - MESP) and we will see, for example, that the ideological indoctrination of which teachers are accused, in fact, has a direction and a cause specifically targeting History and Human Sciences teachers. This work will also analyse how MESP approaches groups and political parties with conservative themes and how the appropriation of its guidelines can leverage itself in the national scenario. In addition, this work will also focus on the response of History teachers and the new ways of discussing this Science, mainly through Digital History. We will see how this movement to occupy digital media and the dispute over this space with Negationists are both done by specialists in the area, concluding that a demonstration of what has happened in academic spaces is not a kerfuffle, but rather, Science of high quality and complexity. This answer will be sought through a small mapping of channels of the most varied types, which value the scientific dissemination of accessible language to supporters of the area and are a way to combat the negationist obscurantism that surrounds us.