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The intent of this historical study is to document the change from the educational program known as Industrial Arts to what is now titled Technology Education. A synthesis of prior historiographical perspectives on the evolution of industrial arts, including some new information, provides a basis for understanding the more recent history that is the primary focus of this study. The portion of this study dealing with the transition to technology education explores the individuals, events, and other factors that compelled the movement to begin and the issues surrounding the acceptance of technology as the motive for the profession. The primary program and policy goals of technology education will be examined and concerns and projections will be expressed for the future of technology education. / Ph. D.

This thesis offers a new policy history of the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal agency responsible for providing grants to artists and arts organisations in the United States. It focuses in particular on the development of conservative perspectives on federal arts funding from the 1950s to the 1980s, and hence, illuminates the broader evolution of conservative political power, especially its limits. The most familiar narrative holds that the Endowment found itself caught up in the Culture Wars of the late 1980s when Christian right groups objected to certain federal grants, particularly to Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and Robert Mapplethorpe's Self-Portrait with Whip. This thesis, however, uncovers the older origins of conservative opposition to state support for the arts, analyses conservative conceptions of art, and illuminates the limited federal role the right sought to secure in the arts in the post-war period. Numerous studies have analysed the meanings and origins of the Culture Wars, but until now, scholars had not examined conservative approaches to federal arts politics in a historical sense. Historians have generally been too interested in explaining change to the detriment of examining continuity, but this approach under-emphasises the long-term tensions that underlie seemingly sudden political eruptions. This work also offers a deep account of the conservative movement and the arts world, an area that has so far been almost completely ignored by scholars, even though a focus on marginalised players is essential to understanding the limits of conservatism. In a general sense then, this thesis evaluates the range and diversity of the conservative movement and illuminates the overall odyssey of the right in modern America. In so doing, it provides a new insight into the ways we periodise political history and also invites a broader view of how we understand politics itself.

Paul L. Rosenfeld ( 1890-1946) almost single-handedly established the music of living American composers on a solid critical foundation in the period between the two world wars. Although he built a reputation chiefly as a critic of music, he was a man ofletters who ranged across all the arts with unrivaled competence and ease. Rosenfeld's contemporaries acknowledged him as a champion of that strain of modernism which celebrated the interrelatedness of the arts. His importance for the wider culture of early twentieth-century American modernism also lay in his seriousness about the arts. Rosenfeld earned forward the American democratic and romantic belief, epitomized by Walt Whitman and Alfred Stieglitz, in the capacity of art to articulate basic values that enrich and even ennoble the human person. Such an idealistic conception of the value of art was increasingly losing favor among the American literati during the 1920s, the period when Rosenfeld enjoyed his greatest influence and prestige. During this decade of"terrible honesty," American intellectuals tended to dismiss the "ideals of men" in favor of a single-minded interest in a more bitter realism. Inasmuch as they denigrated the notion that art held any kind of privileged status as a conveyor of values, they were in effect nascent postmodemists. This study ofPaul Rosenfeld's life and work examines the achievements ofPaul Rosenfeld as a critic of the arts in their relation to the wider American culture of the interwar years, and as a purveyor of modernism against the background of the first strains of postmodemism. It will also treat at length Rosenfeld's efforts as a writer, editor, and minor philanthropist on behalf of establishing a distinctively American music, literature, and painting. This cultural nationalism, I argue, is best understood as part ofRosenfeld's modernist project. To a lesser degree this thesis also deals with the changing position of the man of letters in American life. / History / D. Litt et Phil. (History)

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Paul L. Rosenfeld ( 1890-1946) almost single-handedly established the music of living American composers on a solid critical foundation in the period between the two world wars. Although he built a reputation chiefly as a critic of music, he was a man ofletters who ranged across all the arts with unrivaled competence and ease. Rosenfeld's contemporaries acknowledged him as a champion of that strain of modernism which celebrated the interrelatedness of the arts. His importance for the wider culture of early twentieth-century American modernism also lay in his seriousness about the arts. Rosenfeld earned forward the American democratic and romantic belief, epitomized by Walt Whitman and Alfred Stieglitz, in the capacity of art to articulate basic values that enrich and even ennoble the human person. Such an idealistic conception of the value of art was increasingly losing favor among the American literati during the 1920s, the period when Rosenfeld enjoyed his greatest influence and prestige. During this decade of"terrible honesty," American intellectuals tended to dismiss the "ideals of men" in favor of a single-minded interest in a more bitter realism. Inasmuch as they denigrated the notion that art held any kind of privileged status as a conveyor of values, they were in effect nascent postmodemists. This study ofPaul Rosenfeld's life and work examines the achievements ofPaul Rosenfeld as a critic of the arts in their relation to the wider American culture of the interwar years, and as a purveyor of modernism against the background of the first strains of postmodemism. It will also treat at length Rosenfeld's efforts as a writer, editor, and minor philanthropist on behalf of establishing a distinctively American music, literature, and painting. This cultural nationalism, I argue, is best understood as part ofRosenfeld's modernist project. To a lesser degree this thesis also deals with the changing position of the man of letters in American life. / History / D. Litt et Phil. (History)