The years between the two world wars, which just preceded the emergence of the neo-Darwinian "new synthesis," were intellectually difficult ones for paleoanthropology in America. Patterns of thought deeply ingrained in biology and anthropology pushed writers on hominid evolution into interpretive "blind alleys." Most prominent among the patterns was what Ernst Mayr has called "typological thinking," which often mixed with a tendency to project "scientific" racism back into the hominid past. A "splitting" habit in taxonomy combined with these and with belief in "orthogenetic" change to make polyphyletism the norm. Hesitance to accept as human ancestors any Pleistocene forms exhibiting "primitive" characters led to phylogenies which put the known fossils on side-branches. Anatomically modern humans were thus left "ancestorless" by most writers, though nearly all continued to use existing fossils in their evolutionary scenarios by designating them as "structural ancestors." Research conducted in Europe before 1914 on the Neanderthal skeleton and on the interperetation of endocranial casts, along with the Piltdown fraud, did much to establish these phylogenies and scenarios. In tandem with these general themes came the ascendancy of several specific hypotheses that eventually clashed with accumulating evidence. That the brain had led the way in hominid evolution, that Neanderthals and other "low-brows" could be ruled out as ancestors, and that modern Homo sapiens had appeared early in the Pleistocene, became even harder to maintain. The close evolutionary bond between humans and great apes theorized in England by Sir Arthur Keith and elaborated in America by William King Gregory remained vigorous, however, despite challenge. The present study examines these issues through an analysis of the five Americans whose writings on hominid evolution were most extensive and varied--Henry Fairfield Osborn, George Grant MacCurdy, Ales Hrdlicka, Earnest A. Hooton and William K. Gregory. The writings of each are analyzed separately, so that both general themes and responses to the changing state of the discipline can be traced. This approach reveals that shared patterns of thought did not prevent considerable diversity on nearly every main issue, a fact which rendered the field fertile for rapid growth later.

The Rev. John Brown's story makes a useful addition to the history of American public address. As a mainstream Colonial evangelical Calvinist who was deeply influenced by the Great Awakening, he held a Presbyterian ministry of forty-two years in the Valley of Virginia (1753-1795). He operated schools, helped establish two presbyteries and a synod, and raised a remarkable family. Brown never published, but his surviving "Memorandum Book," contains approximately sixteen of his sermons, most of them in the somewhat illegible, abbreviated notes typical of Colonial ministers. Painstaking scrutiny of the notes reveals the first four sermons in the book to consist of two occasional pieces (a fast sermon and a fragmentary lecture sermon) and two standard Sunday calls to salvation. Each piece follows a typical pattern of explication and application of scripture and generally avoids mention of immediate circumstances. The style is plain, but some features of Donne-like eloquence appear. Conclusions drawn from Brown's biography and the presentation of four of his sermons include the finding of his having been subject to the fallacy of "historicism," the claiming to understand God's will in events. Evidence of Brown's warmth and wit, however, serves to counter stereotypes of dour Calvinists. He seems, moreover, to have reflected Scotch-Irish assimilation in America; the Southern traditions identified by Richard Weaver; the unifying nature of Colonial Calvinism; the Presbyterian stumbling block of ministerial education; and the American frontiersman's various strengths and weaknesses. His limitations in leadership appear to have been his greatest liability. Brown's was a career rich in historical, rhetorical, and spiritual implications. Studying it reaps the rewards of understanding that Harry S. Stout notes only the unpublished, non-esoteric texts of Colonial ministers can provide.

The thesis of this dissertation is that the political dimension of Martin Heidegger's philosophical work has been widely misinterpreted in the United States, and that this misinterpretation has been caused by censorship, historical and political ignorance, and poor scholarship. This study reveals the extent to which Heidegger engaged in politically motivated editing of his work after the war, and shows how such edited German editions were used as a basis for many English translations of his work. It also shows that Heidegger suppressed the publication of some politically sensitive texts while he was alive, and that archival materials in different parts of Germany have been manipulated so as to protect Heidegger from critical scrutiny. Such practices have also been employed by (or in the service of) other philosophers who worked in Germany at the time; the manipulation of post-war editions of philosophical texts written in Germany between 1933-1945 seems to be a widespread phenomenon. To improve the US reader's understanding of the historical context of Heidegger's political thought, this study also relates Heidegger's professional and political actions to those of all of the other 213 professors of philosophy who taught at a German university between 1933 and 1945. Heidegger's political arguments are compared to those of the other philosophers who, as university Rectors, were in similar positions of political responsibility as Heidegger. The presentation of this new information allows the US reader to understand better the development of philosophy in Germany, and reveals the uniqueness of Heidegger's philosophical commitment to a particular version of National Socialist ideology. Finally, this study identifies the main sources of interpretive error in the US reception of Heidegger's political thought, and shows how philosophers can avoid such mistakes in the future.

This dissertation evaluated the interactional dynamics of emerging social inequality and the economics of basic necessities during the early development of Lowland Maya civilization. Basic necessities, including clothing, shelter, and utilitarian tools, were all affected in some way by the changes in access to and distribution of resources, technology, and information. This study focuses on one specific relationship: that between increasing social inequality and the procurement and distribution of animal resources. This research problem is addressed using faunal remains from the site of Colha in northern Belize. The faunal assemblage (totaling 14,553 bones/bone fragments) was recovered from Preclassic Period (1,000 B.C.-A.D. 250) residential deposits. The 1,250 years represented in the assemblage cover the time when the Maya shifted from small autonomous communities to hierarchically ranked centers, many of which specialized in the production and/or exchange of goods for regional consumption. The faunal data from Colha were evaluated against the changes in social complexity documented for this period. A distinct patterning in the use of faunal resources during the Preclassic was observed. The early settlers of Colha (roughly 1,000-600 B.C.) utilized low-bush terrestrial, wetland, and aquatic species nearly equally. The prominent use of wetland and aquatic resources suggests that wetland agriculture may have been used. The five hundred years that followed saw a gradual shift toward a heavier use of wetland and aquatic resources, probably due to wetter conditions and to the biodegradation caused by land clearing and heavy faunal exploitation. In the Late Preclassic there was a marked change in faunal use, beginning approximately 100 B.C. This includes a heavier reliance on terrestrial species, an increased use of dog for food, and a greater utilization of distant habitats, such as marine and high-forest environments. These changes required modifications in the social aspects of food procurement and distribution, including exchange relationships, and not simply an intensification of past strategies. It is proposed that households could use their elevated status (and accompanying accumulation of wealth and power) to shift from a strategy of direct food procurement to one in which food could be acquired indirectly through exchange and/or tribute.

"Of the endeavors made each year to select and reprint in an anthology the best magazine stories of the preceding twelve months, Edward Joseph Harrington O'Brien's Best Short Stories, the first to be initiated, is one of the best known and most widely recognized. Many college, public, and secondary school librarians have accepted the collections as representative of the best current short story writing, and have made them a permanent part of their annual acquisitions. In this study, an attempt shall be made to determine O'Brien's purpose in establishing the anthology, the criteria followed, the procedures used in making the selections, and the critics' reactions to these criteria, procedures, and selections from 1915 to 1949. And finally, in order to determine more clearly what the reader may expect to find in a volume of Best Short Stories in terms of authors, kinds of stories, and magazines represented, an examination shall be made of these three factors in the selections of the eleven-year period, 1939-1949"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "August, 1951." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Robert G. Clapp, Professor Directing Study. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-71).

No description available.

This project explores the relationship between constitutional interpretation and acquisition and governance of territories during the nineteenth century. This project explores how Congress, the Supreme Court and the Executive branch constructed the constitution in order to justify various imperialist nation-building endeavors. In the process, this project explores questions of citizenship, race, constitutional interpretation, and nation building.

This social historiography tells the story of the origin of the Newborns' and Mothers' Health Protection Act of 1996. In the 1980s when the federal government reduced allocations to states' Medicaid programs as a cost saving measure, hospitals, initiated early discharge of patients to save costs. Given four million births annually, childbirth is the most frequent reason for hospitalization in the United States. Hospitals discharged Medicaid insured mothers and newborns very early at twenty-four hours for a normal birth and seventy-two hours for a cesarean. Other insurers adopted similar managed care strategies in the early 1990s. By 1995, unionized nurses from New Jersey, bolstered by a national outcry against early maternal discharge, and individual states legislative actions, met with staff in Senator Bradley's (Democrat, NJ) Washington, DC office to request a federal law that would extend hospital length of stays for maternity patients. The result was the creation of the Newborns' and Mothers' Health Protection Act of 1996 (Newborn's Act). Insurers must now reimburse hospitals a minimum length of maternity stay of forty-eight hours for a normal birth and ninety-six hours for a cesarean birth. This historical investigation found that a revival occurred in professional nursing organizations' voice in health care policy. The American Nurses Association, the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners, and the Association of Women's Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nursing, not only testified at the congressional hearing for the Newborn's bill, but also helped craft the bill that became law. One nursing specialty, Public Health Nursing, at one time a cornerstone for autonomous nursing practice, was omitted from the NMHPA policymaking. As a nursing section of the American Public Health Association, it is now considering options to become more visible in health care policy development. Second, this study suggests that the federal government may have attempted price-fixing when it recommended in 1982, and again in 1983, that other insurers also limit reimbursements to hospitals to contain costs. In one last finding, congressional lawmakers omitted costly Medicaid insured mothers from the NMHPA law, but regulations formulated in 1999 captured this vulnerable group of mothers and newborns.

This dissertation investigates the development of radio news broadcasting in the years between the First and Second World Wars. Historians have long acknowledged that radio's coverage of the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe marked the beginning of modern broadcast journalism. Too little attention has been paid to why the news broadcasts Americans listened to in ever greater numbers as war approached took the shape they did. This study attempts to place broadcast journalism in context by examining the evolution of radio news and information programs as one part of the rapid development of a new industry and its evolving regulatory framework. Radio broadcasting emerged following the First World War. The potential of the new technology quickly became obvious, and both producers and consumers turned to the government to bring stability and order to the new industry. Private broadcasters were licensed to use the people's air in exchange for their pledge to serve an ill-defined "public interest" standard. The "American System of Broadcasting" which developed between the wars was the result of this bargain. A new kind of journalism was created for the new medium. Responding to various commercial, regulatory, professional and bureaucratic imperatives, the industry sought to protect itself by repeatedly proclaiming its commitment to fairness, balance, accuracy and impartiality. Yet the immediacy and emotional intimacy of radio as well as the many crises of the period made "objectivity" an elusive goal. Broadcast journalists, industry executives, elected officials and the public constantly debated the meaning of the word and sought to insure that the broadcasts they produced or heard were compatible with their diverse visions of society. By examining the development of broadcast journalism within the context of both the radio industry and the times, this dissertation studies the growth of a profession, an industry and the conflict among competing public and private interests for control of a new technology and, more importantly, the flow of information in a liberal, capitalist society. The conflict was part of the broader debate over the proper role of government and corporations in modern society which took place during the interwar years.

Anthropologists studying sociocultural evolution are interested in the processes that contributed to social ranking in egalitarian societies. Individual agents must overcome the inertia of communalism to extend their authority into various domains of social life by controlling resources, people, and places essential for social reproduction. Native North Americans maintained relatively equal access to resources through reciprocity. Under some conditions, however, agents undermined reciprocity to establish privileged positions of status. I develop a political-economic model to explore how social inequality is created and perpetuated through labor mobilization and resource monopoly from archaeological remains in central Arkansas. The model explicitly articulates social negotiation and hierarchy formation with strategies and tactics of surplus extraction and its resistance to explicate how the material world is implicated in experimental social forms. I analyze the changing form, function, and distribution of settlements and artifacts associated with the establishment and abandonment of the Toltec Mounds site--the paramount center of Plum Bayou culture in the Arkansas River Lowland. Longitudinal trends in settlement patterns, mound construction, exchange relations, and the organization of technology are compared with expectations derived from the model to interpret the archaeological record. There is meaningful spatial-temporal variation in the distribution of people and objects which reflects fluctuations in social organization within and between regions. This interpretation contrasts with that of a gradual, linear trajectory of growth and development. Furthermore, changing population integration relates to political and economic processes that operate over large spatial arenas that transcend ecological, stylistic, and social boundaries. Mounting empirical evidence suggests that social ranking harbored contradictions between generosity and accumulation which allowed individuals the opportunity to resist surplus extraction. The result is a cyclical pattern of social integration and disintegration associated with diachronic shifts in central places suggesting that the processes that contributed to incipient social ranking were tenuous and politically unstable in central Arkansas. Ranking does not represent a reorganization of egalitarianism within all realms of life, nor do elite strategies to mobilize labor and monopolize surplus operate as a totality. Institutions of egalitarianism seem to lie immediately beneath the veneer of power and authority in rank societies.