<p> Influenced by the 1960's vanguard movement of <i>Tropic&aacute;lia, </i> Itamar Assump&ccedil;&atilde;o became a leader of the so-called <i> Vanguarda Paulista</i>. He offered a new critique of the establishment while taking part in an independent DIY scene. This critique took the form of a detached and ironic narrative voice, and the exploration and reimagining of Samba and Pan-Africanism through polyphony and dissonance. Assump&ccedil;&atilde;o stands out as someone who was able to generate a new synthesis of Pan-African traditions and the Brazilian Popular Song tradition. Though today there's a current generation of musicians from S&atilde;o Paulo who are influenced by Assump&ccedil;&atilde;o, he still remains largely unknown in Brazil and the rest of the world. I analyze selected pieces from his discography by looking at his lyrics and compositional procedures in order to demonstrate a vast scope of artistic thought that utilized influences from contemporary theater to Reggae.</p><p>

<p> During the early years of the 19<i>th</i> century Spanish colonies in the Americas went through dramatic political changes as new structures of governance emerged worldwide. Monarchical power throughout the world declined as representational democracy and the nation state became the new norm. This thesis focuses on two Spanish colonies and their transition to nation states, New Spain into Mexico and the R&iacute;o de la Plata into Argentina. An analysis of this transition reveals that the period was much more than just a revolutionary or Independence era, rather, it was demarcated by intense class warfare. Whereas the lower classes of the colonies vied for dramatic changes in political, social, and economic structures, elites had sought to keep intact as much as possible colonial mechanisms of power whilst separating from the Spanish monarchy. This thesis uses constitutions, decrees, laws, and personal letters written by actors from both sides to highlight the intensity of class warfare during this period.</p><p>

Over the course of the long nineteenth century, American Christianity changed dramatically, leaving lasting imprints on how families lived, worked, played, and prayed. As America’s prolific “first family,” the Adamses of Massachusetts were key interpreters of the place of religion within a rapidly changing American republic facing denominational turf wars, anti-Catholic violence, a burgeoning market economy, Civil War, shifting gender roles, and the collapse of providentialism. Constant globe-trotters who documented their cultural travels, the Adamses developed a cosmopolitan Christianity that blended discovery and criticism, faith and doubt. Claiming Puritan ancestry and the supremacy of a Unitarian covenant with God, the family was unusually forthright in exploring a subject as personal and provocative as faith. This dissertation shows how they interpreted religious ideas and rites in America over three centuries of civic service. I argue that the Adamses’ cosmopolitan encounters led them to become leading lay critics of New England religion, even as they marshaled Christian rhetoric to sustain American democracy. While scholars of American religion have relied on “fringe” groups to explain the growth and democratization of American Christianity, little has been studied of seekers like the Adamses, transnational agents of American thought and culture who sought avidly among other faiths yet chose to stay within the mainline fold. My study offers a new perspective on the political dynasty, by mapping the religious journeys of Americans who looked for God in eclectic places and then made their return, greatly changed, to the family pew.

In 1921, 1924 and 1929-1934, markets for the future delivery of wheat went through periods of extreme volatility and/or significant depression, and in all three cases there were significant and long-lasting changes to both the institutional and regulatory framework of these Chicago-dominated grain markets. There was no real change after these key reforms until 1974, while indeed much of the original regulatory and market innovation remains. The result of the severe depression of 1921 was the Futures Trading Act of 1921. In 1924-25, the so-called ‘Cutten corner’ market turmoil was followed by three key institutional innovations brought about in 1926 by US federal government coercion of the grain futures trading industry in collusion with industry leaders. The Great Depression gave birth to the 1936 Commodity Exchange Act. This Act was based on research done by the government and/or with government-mandated evidence that essentially saw the small grain gambler as needing protection from the grain futures industry, and was pushed through by a coalition of farmers’ organisations and the agency responsible for the 1922 Act’s administration. The government demanded information that was begrudgingly provided, and the studies of this data formed the basis of a political and intellectual justification of the usefulness of futures markets to the marketing of farm products that influenced the Act of 1936 and – more importantly - continues to today. My key thesis is that government worked closely with the futures industry to the extent that the agency was captured by special interests for much of the interwar period, and I claim that government intervention was responsible for the essential changes that assured the dominance of futures markets, with the Chicago Board of Trade as their hub. The lasting institutions created in the 1920s and 1930s continue to immensely influence the financial markets of today, including being incorporated into the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. My study differs from the accepted account that sees federal regulation as an irrational ‘populist’ attempt at controlling or even banning the markets, with the new institutions developed during the interwar period as the result of effective industry self-regulation in spite of state interference. The findings are based on a theory-driven reading of archives of the Chicago Board of Trade, its regulator the Grain Futures Administration, and the other key government agencies engaging with the grain trade, the USDA, the Federal Farm Board and the Federal Trade Commission. The approach here differs from the accepted accounts in that it is based mostly on my archival work, including the newly reorganised (in 2014) Chicago Board of Trade archive, rather than on public sources such as Congressional hearings and newspaper stories.

<p>Abstract Varying in age from ninety-nine to two-hundred-twenty years old, the surviving historic buildings on Grand Isle reflect the patterns of lifestyle and ethnic heritage on the state?s only continuously occupied barrier island and define Louisiana Coastal Vernacular. These structures, and the stories of the people who continue to occupy them, provided the primary resources for this thesis. The proposed National Register Multiple Property Listing (MPL) comprises the only documented study in the United States of historic coastal vernacular structures endangered by climate change and wetland loss. The structures also potentially hold the keys to future coastal construction methods. Research for the MPL revealed techniques developed through trial and error that allowed buildings to survive category four hurricane winds and storm surges up to sixteen feet for over a hundred years. Once formally identified as Louisiana Coastal Vernacular, these structures may hold the keys to future coastal construction methods. Potential global applications in the face of rising seas and increasingly severe annual tropical events require further investigation of surviving historic structures and their environments. Future investigation and documentation may reveal substantial applications to new construction that reduce loss of life and property during coastal storm events. Over the past thirteen years, state and federal authorities, citizens, and industries have struggled with numerous issues related to life in Louisiana?s unique coastal environment. What, how, and where to build has constituted a major theme of these discussions and yet, no comprehensive documentation of structures that have survived centuries of this environment has been conducted to ascertain how they survived and whether that information may be applied to future coastal communities. The historic buildings on Grand Isle represent a unique facet of life in Louisiana as well as containing the potential groundwork for a better way of living with coastal areas around the world.

<p> This dissertation examines how Israel's establishment affected the relationship between Black Americans and American Jews in the United States. It traces the efforts of a group of leading American Jews, in the ranks of Jewish advocacy organizations, academia, show business, and the American Jewish press, who attempted to leverage their personal, political and professional connections with various prominent Black Americans, in order to elicit Black American support for Israel after World War II. It asks in turn, how the targeted Black Americans responded to the pressure they faced from these prominent American Jews. </p><p> Relying primarily on previously unexamined archival material, this narrative of the changing relationship between Black Americans, American Jews and Israel, addresses the historical conundrum of why American Jews got involved with Black American civil rights to the extent that they did. In contrast to previous studies, this dissertation argues that American Jewish involvement in Black American civil rights constituted a practical quid pro quo. It thus contradicts past conceptions of American Jewish civil rights contributions as primarily a philanthropic undertaking. When prominent American Jews threw their support behind Black Americans, politically and professionally, in the 1950s and 1960s, they made it clear that in return they both wanted and expected Black American support for their interests, including Israel. </p><p> Prominent American Jews including American Jewish Congress's Will Maslow, leading American Rabbi and Zionist Stephen Wise, impresario Sol Hurok, and legendary performer Eddie Cantor, among many others attempted to pressure Black American civil rights leaders, like Walter White and Martin Luther King, the United Nations diplomat Ralph Bunche, and famed performers Lionel Hampton, Marian Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Josephine Baker and many more, to support Israel. In the instances when prominent Black Americans agreed to these terms, their fame, success and influence in their respective fields made them some of the most beneficial Israel supporters in the United States. More often than not, however, American Jewish efforts to leverage their relationships to demand support for Israel resulted in tensions and resentment from prominent Black Americans. This dissertation therefore, demonstrates that the late 1960s clashes between Blacks and Jews, which scholars have heretofore identified as the "death-knell of Black-Jewish relations" in the United States, actually reflected tensions that mounted, often over Israel, during the course of the two preceding decades. Ultimately, this dissertation argues, Black Americans' perspectives on Israel, between 1947 and 1970, reflected the changing nature, tone, and significance of their relationships with the American Jews, who sought to influence them.</p><p>

This dissertation examines Coxey’s Army of 1894 and the subsequent impact the organizers and march had on American politics. A handful of monographs have examined this march on Washington D.C. but all of them have focused specifically on the march itself, largely examining the few weeks in 1894 when the march occurred. By extending the period study to include the long life and activism of Jacob Coxey what historians can see is that although the march was an expression of anger and concern over general inequality in American society, Coxey’s Army was also protest for specific demands. These two demands were specifically a program of public works and a desire for fiat currency for the United States. By examining the life Jacob Coxey we see that both of these demands grew out of longer issues in American social politics and reflect Coxey’s background in the greenback labor movement.<br><div><br></div><div>The question over currency— whether the economy should rely on a gold, silver, or fiat standard— has largely been untouched by historians, yet reflects one of the most interesting aspects of the march, namely that it was an instance in a broader movement to drastically change the U.S. state and establish a socialistic commonwealth, or commonweal, for American society. Coxey fit into this broader project by arguing specifically that the U.S. should maintain a market-based economy but do so through a kind of socialistic currency backed by the state. By organizing various marches throughout his life, Coxey attempted to achieve this goal by direct organizing of the masses and in so doing contributed to the long history of American social reform movement’s various efforts to reshape and redefine the concept of “the people.”<br></div><div><br></div><div>This dissertation makes four major arguments. First that the concept and phenomena of American Populism is a broad based, elastic movement with no essential political character. Attempts to define Populism as either reactionary or radical miss the broader issue that Populism could take on various political flavors depending on how it positioned itself in opposition to various actors in the state, economy, and civil society. Second, Coxey’s Army shows how the first march on Washington D.C. was part of a longer legacy of direct political action, and that although this march did make a contribution to the overall political debate of the time, it was not as a communicative act that the march was most significant. Instead Coxey’s Army was significant in the way it led to a reconceptualization of “the people” and therefore reimagined what legitimate democratic action entailed. Third, the concept of the commonweal, although largely taken for granted in previous historiographies, was part of a much deeper and intellectually rich fight between various activists and thinkers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At stake in how a movement or party conceptualized something like the commonweal was what type of social, economic, and political order should be fought for and advanced by organizations of working class people. In this regard the currency question, far from being simply a side issue, was in fact central to how activists envisioned the role of the market and state in a more equitable society. Finally, this dissertation looks at the understudied career of Coxey after the march, specifically his short tenure as mayor of Massillon, Ohio. His failure as mayor raises further questions for historians to think about the promise and limitations of American Populism as both a protest movement and political force.<br></div>

Os movimentos pela emancipação na América marcaram-na sobremaneira no início do século XIX, pelas conjunturas que levaram à formação dos novos países e também pelas disputas políticas e conflitos armados. Focos de luta surgiam simultaneamente por todo o continente, propiciando a concepção de inúmeros projetos políticos que propunham caminhos diversos para os jovens países. Na América do Sul, leste e oeste experimentam as dificuldades e alimentam as esperanças de sonhar com um mundo novo, opondo-se francamente ao colonizador, seja ele espanhol ou português, enquanto constroem as bases das novas nações. Dentre os idealizadores das novas nações, estavam Francisco de Miranda, Bernardo Monteagudo e José Bonifácio, cada qual buscando, a seu modo, uma direção que levasse as suas Américas à modernidade e à liberdade. Em seus textos, são tratadas diversas questões que desafiam a constituição dos novos Estados, entre elas a delimitação de uma unidade territorial, a construção de uma identidade própria e a definição de uma forma justa de governo, indagações comuns a outros tantos pensadores da época. Por conta disso, tais pontos norteiam, a partir da comparação entre as percepções de cada um dos três autores, esta análise das aproximações e distanciamentos de suas formas de pensar, aparentemente tão diferentes entre si. Assim, acredita-se ser possível encontrar aspectos que levem a uma compreensão da circulação de ideias na América do Sul deste período, indo além do tradicional entendimento de que os processos nas porções espanhola e portuguesa foram díspares em sua essência. / Emancipation movements in America have profoundly scarred the continent in the beginning of the 19th century, for conjunctures which led to the establishment of new countries as well as political disputes and armed conflicts. Uprisings simultaneously rose all over the continent, encouraging innumerous political projects to put forward an array of paths to the newborn countries. In South America, East and West underwent difficulties and nurtured hope of dreaming of a new world, frankly opposing colonizer, Spanish or Portuguese, whilst building new nations foundations. Amid the new nations idealizers were Francisco de Miranda, Bernardo Monteagudo and José Bonifácio, each one looking, by their own means, for a direction that could lead to modernity and freedom. In their corpora, the authors examine several issues that challenge those new States shaping, among which the delimitation of a territorial unity, building self identity and establishing a fair form of government, queries that are shared amongst so many other thinkers at that time. Because of that, the aforementioned points steer, based on the comparison of the perceptions of each of the three authors, this analysis of approximations and distancing of their way of thinking, apparently quite different to each other. That way, we believe that it is possible to find some aspects which take us to a new comprehension of the circulation of ideas in that period South America, outreaching the traditional understanding which states that the political emancipation processes in Spanish and Portuguese regions were disparate in their essence.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

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