This dissertation explores the role of sheet music in the evolving racial ideologies of mid-nineteenth-century America. My claim is that minstrelsy in the home presents parallel but distinct development of the themes and assumptions commonly associated with the blackface tradition. My primary interest is in exploring early print versions of a popular minstrel tunes to consider how adjustments in the design and content mark minstrelsy's transition from rowdy dance hall spectacle to refined home entertainment. Read against literary works and first-hand accounts of nineteenth-century home life, the cover illustrations, lyrics, and musical notation of minstrel sheet music reveal how misrepresentations of black identity were positioned at complex intersections of popular culture, national identity, public and private space, and consumerism. I offer an analysis of lyrics, melodies, and musical arrangements to show the evolution of 1840s minstrel sheet music—a progression that exposes a developing reciprocal relationship between the refined aesthetics of the parlor and the playful antics of blackface performance. Most notably, I demonstrate how the logic Eric Lott employs in exposing blackface performance as a medium driven by white male sexuality and racial desire finds a gendered parallel in the images of minstrel sheet music covers designed for white middle-class women. Ultimately, I suggest that in an era when family dynamics were changing, when class lines were being redrawn, when print material not only reflected social standards but also dictated them, Americans were relearning family roles and relationships even as they were consuming race parodies offered on the covers and in the lyrics of popular minstrel songs. In this age of class uncertainty, minstrel sheet music provided not only entertainment that was supposedly “rich in dark fun” but also offered black caricatures that assured white Americans of their own place within the shifting boundaries of domestic propriety.

By 1992, due to the Fifth Centennial of the Conquest, an increase in the publication of historic novels were taking place. As a consequence this editorial phenomenon caused the incorporation of new voices to a new tradition of genre already broaden established in Spanish America own to a long tradition of writers. Just at that moment Doña Inés contra el olvido, written by the Venezuelan writer Ana Teresa Torres, came up as an alternative version of telling the history from a woman perspective. Doña Inés, the responsible voice of the story, struck up a monologue in order to recount the Venezuelan history asking to absent speakers already dead. As a main topic the novel explains the dispute on the Curiepe lands, so it poses the conflicts to get the power between two groups or castes to gain the territory control along the three centuries. This research has three specific aims: to put this novel into context within the wide tradition of this particular subgenre, the historical novel; in second place to introduce it in the renovation fulfilled by master pieces of female authorship; and as a last commitment, to describe and analyze the construction of the natioñs account. In fact, Curiepe is turned into a metaphorical territory to ascertain the power in dispute. Here the authoritarian discourse is questioned as well as the significance the minority resistance groups has had when they confront the power ones. Though Doña Inés lets see it is possible to imagine the future when the past is imagined, the final historical pact between these two groups turned irony because it reflects a society which emerges as a result of an established violence from the power. At the same time, in this act of give in and reconcile, the historical sense is lost in the minority group struggle, led by a free slave. That is the reason why the novel also shows a pessimistic view of the history because this conflict persists as a narrative continuity in the Continent history.

Family violence, particularly the battering and abuse by men of women and children, has taken on different meanings over time in various cultures. This study looked at how therapeutic teams in Chile, working to intervene in cycles of violence, understand and define family violence in the 1990's. Using a qualitative and collaborative methodology, this research analyzed family violence discourses by looking at practitioners' personal, professional, and political ideas about physical and sexual abuse within the home. First, the literature about family violence in Chile was reviewed, as well as the political and legal issues that affect clinicians working in this area. Then, four interdisciplinary teams were interviewed with a reflecting team format. Three major themes emerged in the interviews with the teams. One theme was how family violence is defined including individualistic, societal, gender-sensitive, and systemic explanations, and the problems confronted in this task. Family violence was primarily defined as a political problem that is experienced as a private matter mostly by women and children. A second theme was the recursive relation that exists among the teams' interventions to care for their clients and the teams' evolving definitions of their clients. A third theme was the process by which the personal lives of the practitioners are affected by stories of family violence and trauma. Clients' experiences often reminded practitioners of their own vulnerability and potential for vicarious traumatization. The conclusion integrates these findings and outlines implications for research, training, and policy including: the potential of the reflecting team technique as a research tool, the need to include clients in further collaborative research and for gender based participatory research, the development of a curriculum to train practitioners that includes the exploration of personal experiences of family violence and how to confront vicarious traumatization, and the further development of a sound legal framework to confront family violence.