Sidney D. Gamble (1890-1968) was a social scientist, religious reformer, photographer and Christian humanist who devoted his life to the study of Chinese urban and rural society. Gamble made four sojourns to China between 1908 and 1932. He served as research secretary for the Beijing YMCA and the Mass Education Movement at Dingxian. As a volunteer member of Princeton-in-Peking, he conducted major social-economic surveys of urban and rural north China, helped establish community service programs in Beijing, and pioneered in the teaching of sociology and social work in China. During his tenure, Gamble also used his camera to build up a visual archive of 5,000 black-and-white photographs which successfully captured the images of China during those critical years in its history. Through Gamble's life and work, the dissertation looks into the institutional history of the Princeton University center in China from 1906 to 1949, during which time its chief work was first to organize and operate the YMCA and then to run the Princeton School of Public Affairs at Yenching University. This study also seeks to analyze how Princeton-in-Peking, under the influence of both the Social Gospelers and institutional economists at home and the forces of reform and revolution in late Qing and early Republican China, shifted the focus of its efforts first to community service and social work and later to higher education in the social sciences. For the first time in the history of Christianity in China, Association work in Beijing demonstrated to the officialdom and the upper classes of the new Republic, that Christianity and the Chinese culture might not be incompatible. The motto of the May Fourth Movement, "To save China through science and democracy," and the missionary ideal of "Saving China through Christianity" for a time seemed to be united under the common goal of social uplift and reconstruction for the new Republic. In a very significant way, Sidney D. Gamble and Princeton-in-Peking reflected the rich intellectual and cultural interactions between the West and China in general and the United States and China in particular.

Historical investigation of film audiences and conditions of reception is an underdeveloped area of inquiry, limited by models of spectatorship and mass culture that construct audiences in passive and abstract terms. Current research addressing this problem remains restricted to the years prior to normalization of vertical integration during the mid 1920s, when studio control over exhibition is seen to flatten the contexts of reception and cultural differences between audiences. This dissertation picks up the history of audiences and contexts of reception where current research leaves off by analyzing moviegoing in Springfield, Massachusetts for the period 1926-1932. Starting from the material, social, and discursive contexts within which meanings for moviegoing were constituted, this dissertation locates the historical analysis of film audiences within the framework of cultural studies, which conceptualizes the audience as a nonreductive feature of cultural production. Focusing on the 1926-1932 period, the study recognizes the political economic impact studio integration had on the moviegoing experience throughout America, and assesses the degree to which moviegoing became standardized on the local level. This assessment is made by examining every theater operating in Springfield between 1926 and 1932. Correlating seat capacity with ownership patterns, the study concretely measures the changing proportion of studio dominance over local exhibition. Through an analysis of primary documents and oral histories, the study reconstructs the cultural appeals of each theater, the social geography of the neighborhoods surrounding each theater, and the discourses through which each theater's audiences were constituted and the experience of moviegoing made meaningful. The results indicate significant differences in the social meanings of moviegoing as practiced at different exhibition sites, and suggest the continuing cultural and ideological significance of class and ethnic distinctions in marking out the terrain of exhibition, patterns of attendance, and modes of moviegoing during the early era of vertical integration.

In 1904, a wealthy black lawyer described Boston as “the paradise of the Negro”. With the state legislature having enacted and reinforced civil rights laws several times after the Civil War, African Americans in Massachusetts (over a third of whom lived in Boston in 1900) could enjoy the same political, civil, and social rights as whites by the turn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the economic conditions of most black Bay Staters did not change much. They were confined as ever to menial jobs, and, unlike European immigrants, had little possibility for upward mobility. As one black porter in Boston said, blacks “are given…the work that white folks don't want”. Owing to the civil rights acts, they could “go most anywhere with the white man…and spend [their] dollar”, but they could not “go anywhere with the white man and earn it”. This study attempts to elucidate how African-American leaders in post-bellum Boston defined racial “equality”. It examines class-consciousness of black “elites” and points out their tendency to distance themselves from the masses. Having sincere faith in the doctrine of equal opportunity and laissez-faire, “elite” black Bostonians believed that the “fittest”, regardless of color, should survive in the world of competition. And in the process of uplifting themselves and identifying with the white elite and its values, these college-educated, light-skinned “aristocrats of color” came to view the lower classes of their own race as different and inferior. Proud of acquiring their present status by themselves, they only advocated equality before the law and did almost nothing else but urge the masses to work hard enough to uplift themselves just like they had done, dismissing those who could not as either idle or without ambition. The dissertation concludes that although intended as a weapon against racism color-blind meritocracy advocated by the black “elites” turned into an ideology for the status-quo. By demanding equal opportunity alone in an overtly discriminatory society, “elite” leaders not only failed to ease but in fact unwittingly fostered the ever-increasing oppression against African Americans in Boston after the Civil War.

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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Two boarding schools existed in the state of Indiana to educate Native American children between the ages of six and eighteen. Both schools received a government contract to teach native students which provided the institutions with money for each student they enrolled. St. Joseph’s Indian Normal School in Rensselaer operated from 1888 to 1896. White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute in Wabash educated Native American children as part of a government contract from 1882 until 1895. These two schools were not the only institutions to educate Native American students in Indiana. However, they are the only boarding schools referenced in the literature on native tribes in Indiana and the only institutions I have found referenced which participated in a government contract to educate native children. This thesis will study both institutions during the period of their government contracts from 1882 until 1896.

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Despite a long history of participation in sports, women have yet to gain equal access to this male-dominated realm. The national sports culture continues to regard them as marginal, if not invisible. For more than a century, women athletes have struggled against a subordinate status based on rigid definitions of female sexuality, an emphasis on white middle-class standards of beauty, and restrictive cultural expectations of motherhood. This dissertation, however, reveals a vital story of feminist women who have consistently stretched the boundaries of gender and have actively carved out their own identities as women, athletes, and mothers while playing an integral role in the development of sports. Drawing on oral history, archival materials, and a wide range of other sources, I provide a comparative analysis of women's experiences playing basketball and Roller Derby. These two sports have included women from their outset and at different times both challenged society's restrictions on women's femininity, sexuality, and physical abilities. One of my major objectives is to explore and explain the tension between women's representation and agency, between cultural constructs and women's lives, between images of women and their individual identities. Both women and men struggle for self-definition in the world they inhabit, and they often surmount formidable obstacles on the path to change not only themselves but also the ideals against which they measure themselves. In a culture that champions individualism, women "sweat" their identities because they want to be themselves, yet realize that self-definition is still shaped by a powerful set of cultural ideals and pressures about what it means to be male or female, man or woman, boy or girl. While these women sporting pioneers pushed their way into the public limelight, they worked to prove that athleticism could in fact be a part of the female identity, even while that identity was continually in flux. But until American society is ready to accept women as viable athletes, realize that athleticism can be a feminine and masculine quality, and allow women to play multiple roles, women will continue to sweat their femininity.

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The sixteenth-century port of Nombre de Dios in Panama played a crucial role in the colonization of America. From 1519 to 1597, Nombre de Dios was the Atlantic port connecting Spain with the southern Pacific colonies in America. Even though its importance to Spain's New World colonial settlement has been widely recognized, there has never been systematic historical or archaeological research undertaken to document this colonial town and describe its establishment and subsequent development and abandonment.;This study employs a comparative approach to early Spanish urban settlement in Latin America, and combines archaeological and archival data to explain the unique history of Nombre de Dios. Archaeological examination and documentary analysis has revealed the town's physical layout, its location and geographical features, and the settlement's place within the region's trade network. Findings relating to Nombre de Dios are compared to evidence from Cartagena and Veracruz, two of Spain's other sixteenth-century ports-of-call, providing important information regarding the factors responsible for the slow development of Nombre de Dios, and its abandonment before the end of the century.

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