This thesis examines the history of the cultural heritage site of Eketorp, a prehistoric ring-fort, on the island of Öland, Sweden. The archaeological excavations at Eketorp, which began in 1964, lasted for a decade and soon turned into one of the largest archaeological research projects in Sweden. The scale and the implementation of the excavations, as an interdisciplinary and international research project, fostered a whole generation of archaeologists and resulted in numerous research publications. After the excavations the archaeological site was transformed into a full-scale archaeological reconstruction by the Swedish National Heritage Board. Since the mid-1980s the site has been a popular tourist attraction and open-air museum. The history of the site itself connects to several academic fields, including archaeology, history of archaeology, cultural heritage and museum studies. Through Ludwig Fleck’s concept thought collective and Donna Haraway’s situated knowledge, which are used as analytical tools, the aim of this thesis is to explore how these different fields interacted throughout the history of Eketorp. Further, the analytical tools are used to highlight how these interactions have generated notions of time, space, and gender. The study takes an interdisciplinary approach with the history of Eketorp analysed in three analytical chapters, each of them with different chronological and empirical focus. First, Eketorp is explored as a contemporary museum space through ethnographic fieldwork. Second, archive material is used to analyse how the archaeological excavation and the following archaeological reconstruction were conducted during the 1960s and onwards. Third, scientific texts are used to analyse how interpretations of Eketorp as a prehistoric site has changed. The concluding chapter integrates the results of the three chapters in order to critically examine how notions of time, space and gender interconnect between these fields. Illustrated by a wide chronological and interdisciplinary approach, the central argument of the thesis is thus that the Eketorp thought collective and thought style, intimately connected to hierarchies in academic practice, were created, performed, and maintained through several scientific and heritage institutions.

Traditional histories of Canadian education pursue an east/west perspective, with progress accompanying settlement westward from Ontario. This history of Saskatchewan education posits, instead, a north-south perspective, embracing the US cultural routes for the province’s educational development from 1905 until 1937. I emphasize the transplantation of US Midwestern and Plains culture to the province of Saskatchewan through cultural transfer of agrarian movements, political forms of revolt, and through adopting shared meanings of democracy and the relationship of the West relative to the East. Physiographic similarities between Saskatchewan and the American Plains fostered similar moralistic political cultures and largely identical solutions to identical problems. This larger cultural transfer facilitated developments in Saskatchewan K-12 education that paralleled movements in the US milieu through appropriating into the province’s system of schooling American teachers into classrooms, American school textbooks, teacher training textbooks written in the US, and through the pursuit of American graduate training by Saskatchewan Normal School instructors. This resulted in the articulation in the US and Saskatchewan of a “rural school problem,” consolidation as its only solution, and the transplantation of a language of school reform identified by Herbert Kliebard as “social efficiency.” The invitation issued by the government of Saskatchewan in 1917 to an American expert on rural schooling, Harold Foght, to survey the province’s system of schooling and make recommendations for its reform, marked a high point in American influence in the province of Saskatchewan’s system of schooling. In higher education the province’s sole university, the University of Saskatchewan, mirrored even more closely American Midwestern and Plains models. Essentially, the U of S was a transplanted version of the University of Wisconsin. Under the guidance of the University’s first President, Walter C. Murray, the “Wisconsin idea” permeated the practice and meaning of his University. His persistent pursuit of Carnegie Foundation financial support throughout his tenure meant Murray had to pattern his university after its American antecedents. Though Murray largely failed to gain substantial financial support for the U of S, the result was a university identical to many American land grant and public universities.

This paper discusses the emergence of vaudeville in California’s Inland Empire region of San Bernardino and Riverside counties. It will consider the social changes underway in late nineteenth-century America and their impact on attitudes towards popular entertainment. This paper will draw on Lawrence Levine’s observations of cultural hierarchies that emerged during the late nineteenth century and shaped American understandings of culture. Entertainment of the nineteenth century will be examined for the ways it was unable to match urban trends, and contrasted with vaudeville’s appeal to a diverse urban populace. The cities of San Bernardino, Redlands and Riverside were home to a number of opera houses and theaters to serve rapidly growing communities, and a review of the performances offered in these communities and at these venues will demonstrate these shifts in popular entertainment.

In recent years, historians have displayed a growing interest in the cultural development of certain well-defined regions. Often a river valley inspired such a study, for example, R.E. Banta’s The Ohio, Thomas Clark’s The Kentucky and Harriette Arnow’s Seedtime on the Cumberland. These and many other river histories dealt less with the river itself than with its tendency to define and alter an area’s culture This thesis, dealing with the culture of Green River’s steamboat era, is less about the steamboat or Green River than it is about their effect on river people. It searches the area’s homes, schools, business establishments, churches, military and recreational activities from 1828 to 1931. This century is viewed through the records of four generations who know the steamboat intimately. It examines birth and death in Green River country and the sung that were sung in between.

This thesis explores the potential impact of a World’s Fair on urban mobility in Los Angeles County by 2022. A brief historical account of World’s Fairs, and their impact on technological innovations in transportation will be given in conjunction with the development of transportation in Los Angeles. These accounts will help to contextualize an analysis of current plans to provide Los Angeles with transportation solutions, in light of the oversaturated automobile landscape in place today. Specifically, my research has revealed that the further development of light-speed rail systems paired alongside a mass adoption of autonomous vehicles would both alleviate contemporary transportation issues across Los Angeles County and accommodate the audience of international spectators that future mega-events may attract. Particular attention is paid to the Los Angeles World’s Fair for its ability to galvanize the resources and support that these transportation innovations require. I therefore conclude that the Los Angeles World Fair should direct its focus principally in support of these aforementioned technologies, as opposed to other less feasible transportations solutions such as the Hyperloop.

This study attempts to compose an account of television history in Kuwait, one that focuses on its integration into society and is told from the audience's perspective and experience. This study represents a cultural alternative to the overwhelmingly national, institutional, and biographical focus that accompanies television history works in Kuwait and the Arab world. The narrative is gathered and generated through the individual oral stories of 25 Kuwaitis over the age of 50, who generally represent the six geographical districts of Kuwait. Through their oral stories, the narrators examine the different areas in which television has integrated itself into society from 1957 to 1990. These include television’s succession to cinema, television’s novelty, television’s familiarization into society, television’s domestication, television’s interaction with modernity, and television’s content. The oral stories of the narrators regarding each area reveal a wide range of microscopic topics about living in early Kuwait and television’s integration with it, including the people’s initial “miraculous” conception of the device, television’s relation with Kuwaiti urban growth, and the early economical gap of television ownership in Kuwait. Besides the general exploration, discussing the research areas indicates a somewhat linear narrative of television’s integration into culture, where television was preceded by the cinema technology that had semiotically paved the way for the device, before an abrupt novelty period in which television was settling in an ever-changing Kuwait, followed by a familiarity period in which the device had lost its gimmicky association, interrelated with all the other sociocultural factors of society, and spatially corresponded with both the extinct and the surviving components of the Kuwaiti house. Kuwaiti television had also corresponded with the social, economical, and urban alterations of Kuwaiti modernity, with its content nostalgically reflecting different stages of Kuwaiti cultural life. In the end, an overarching theme could be found in the “foreshortening” of television’s integration journey into Kuwaiti culture, with the narrators using television to express their yearning to the values of yesteryear. Future studies suggest more focus on contextuality, qualitative data, and interdisciplinarity in television history.

Ten painted Cajamarca-style ceramic spoons form the foundation for an investigation of the way that these seemingly utilitarian objects were bestowed with economic and symbolic value both within and outside of the borders of the Cajamarca region, located in the north highlands of present-day Peru. Since the ceramic spoons have been recovered from sites associated with large and powerful societies and states, such as the Moche of the north coast and the Wari of the central highlands, an analysis of the form, style and imagery present on these spoons reveals how these objects transcended cultural boundaries. To assess and evaluate the cultural traits shared by the Cajamarca and neighboring polities, George Kubler’s concept of form-classes, which groups together objects with similar primary traits regardless of chronology, is utilized. The application of the concept of form-classes is significant because of the lack of written language in the region and the dearth of archaeological investigations in the Cajamarca area. Consequently, the form and style of the object is considered as the primary point of analysis and can be compared and contrasted with the form and style of spoons from other pre-Hispanic cultures, including the Wari, Huarpa and Chimu. Perceived as small, utilitarian items, ceramic spoons were actually elite goods traded or carried across thousands of miles for the purpose of establishing new, and reaffirming existing, ideological connections in a period of intense exchange and economic growth.

The thesis analyzes a historical development of James Bond films in a background of the Cold War between years 1962-1989. A fictional character James Bond is a cultural phenomenon, which became an absolute world-wide symbol from the point of popular culture since the sixties in 20 century. The main part of the thesis focuses on movies with agent 007 and describes the ideological base, which we can investigate. Secondarily, Bond's past is handled. Therefore, a development of the literary figure, who moved from spy novels to the screen, is analyzed in here. Further, parts of the thesis mention social background, which was greatly influenced by Bond topic in the second half of the 20th century. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

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Public space in New Orleans became increasingly segregated following the 1896 U. S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. This trend applied to sites of recreation, as nearly all public parks in the city became segregated. African Americans turned, instead, to private parks. This work examines four private parks open to African Americans in order to understand the external forces that affected these spaces, leading to their success or closure, and their significance for black city residents. While scholars have argued public space in New Orleans was segregated during Jim Crow, little attention has been paid to African American parks as alternative spaces for black New Orleanians. Whites were able to control the location of the parks and the parks’ reliance on profit to survive resulted in short spans of existence for most. However, this thesis argues that these parks were crucial sites of identity and community formation and of resistance to segregation.