Every semester across the United States, countless students join Greek letter organizations. While some may recognize the Greek letters, many Americans do not know the racial divide within the Greek life system, and the difference of purpose those organizations hold. This study focuses on eight historically Black fraternities and sororities and more specifically, their chapters at the University of New Orleans, a university that throughout its history has had a predominantly White student body, and often fostered an environment overtly and subtly hostile to African-American students. Using oral histories, university yearbooks, and university newspapers this study demonstrates how Black fraternities and sororities at UNO promoted and supported the academic success of African-American students by emphasizing community service work, communal bonds, and connections to campus activities. These organizations provided emotional and academic support for African-American students and actively resisted the racial divisiveness present on their university campus.

This study fills a critical gap in research on the immediate postwar history of Japanese American community culture in Los Angeles and South Bay. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute research and literature of the immediate postwar period between the late 1940s resettlement period and the 1960s. During the early to mid-1940s, Americans witnessed World War II and the unlawful incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans. In the 1960s, the Sansei (third generation) started to reshape the character and cultural expressions of Japanese American communities, including their development of the Yellow Power Movement in the context of the Black and Brown Power Movements in California. The period between these bookends, however, requires further research and academic study, and it is to the literature of the immediate postwar period that this thesis contributes. Furthermore, this thesis contributes to the nearly absent literature of Japanese American community redevelopment in the transboundary Los Angeles/South Bay area. It is in this area that we find the largest and fastest growing postwar Japanese American population in the country. This community built lasting networks and relationships through the revival of cultural celebrations like Obon and Nisei Week, sport and recreation – namely baseball and bowling, and ethnic resources in the form of food and ethnic markets. These relationships laid the foundations for later social activism and the redefining of the Japanese American community. Far from a period of silence or inactivity, Japanese Americans actively shaped and reshaped their communities in ways that refused to allow the wartime incarceration experience, so fresh in their minds, to define them.

The Castillo de San Marcos is the oldest stone fortification on the North American mainland, a unique site that integrates Florida’s Spanish colonial past with American Indian narratives. A complete history of this fortification from its origins to its management under the National Park Service has not yet been written. During the Spanish colonial era, the Indian mission system complemented the defensive work of the fort until imperial skirmishes led to the demise of the Florida Indian. During the nineteenth century, Indian prisoners put a new American Empire on display while the fort transformed into a tourist destination. The Castillo became an American site, and eventually a National Monument, where visitors lionized Spanish explorers and often overlooked other players in fort history. This thesis looks at the threads of Spanish and Indian history at the fort and how they have or have not been interpreted into the twenty-first century.

A dissertação (\"Em Flagrante - leitura de fotografias de rua do cotidiano da cidade de São Paulo nas duas primeiras décadas do século XX\" tem por fio condutor a história cultural ao lidar com a representação fotográfica. O objetivo da pesquisa realizada e o de apresentar dois pontos de vista diferenciados do comportamento do homem urbano na cidade de São Paulo antiga. Essas visões cunham o memento da modernidade da fotografia, gerada pelo flagrante ou instantâneo, que e um dos impulsos para o surgimento da cultura de massa estruturada no universo dos textos visuais. O enfoque central parte da leitura de dois olhares contrastantes de uma mesma cidade: a fotografia aplicada nas revistas A Vida Moderna e A Cigarra e o trabalho autoral do fotógrafo italiano Vincenzo Pastore. As interpretações imagéticas permitem uma reflexão sobre a questão da formação cultural da identidade brasileira no primeiro quarto do século XX. / The dissertation (Snapshots- street photographs of everyday So Paulo, during the first two decades of the twentieth century\", takes cultural history as a conducting wire, while dealing with photographic representation. The objective of the study is to present two distinct points of view of the urban man on the São Paulo streets of old. These images enhance the moment of modern photography, brought about by the snapshot, as being one of the drives for the emergence of visually based mass culture. The main focus arises in observing two contrasting photographic documentation of the same city: those of the photographs employed in the magazines A Vida Moderna (Modern Life) and A Cigarra (The Cricket) and those of the Italian photographic artist Vincenzo Pastore. The interpretations of the pictures allow for an analysis of the roots of Brazil\'s cultural identity in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

The early history of Arakan has been generally considered to be that of a province of eastern India, and hence its study has been neglected by both Indian and Southeast Asian historians. This dissertation seeks to examine the dynamics of the history from the beginnings of urbanization until the rise of the Burmese empire which subsequently dominated Arakanese culture. The first chapter deals with the geographical and ethnolinguistic background to the development of the earliest cities. In the second, all the inscriptions of the period, in Sanskrit, Pali and Pyu are catalogued and edited. The inscriptions issued by the kings establish a chronology for the period and illustrate the nature of the cult surrounding the institution of kingship, while copper-plate and votive inscriptions elucidate the nature of state organisation and the popular religion. Chapter Three deals with the coinage which emerged following the development of a centralised economy, and discusses the impetus for this and the role of the king on whom the prosperity of the country depended. A comparison with similar coin types in Southeast Asia is made and the catalogue includes all the coins yet discovered. The sites of the most important monuments are discussed in Chapter Four, which catalogues all the architectural and sculptural remains. A comparative analysis of the Buddhist and Hindu images and of the minor arts reveals, to a greater extent that do the inscriptions, the nature of contact with India and the rest of Southeast Asia. The conclusion deals with the political and cultural history which thus emerges, examining in detail the rationale behind the development of the concept of divine kingship in Arakan.

The First World War has never completely disappeared from the British collective memory since the end of the conflict, but it has especially gained in importance again in the late 1980s and 1990s, both in academia and beyond. The last two decades of the last century indeed saw an explosion in historical writing about the First World War, but also in popular representations. There now exist in Great Britain two main distinct perceptions of the First World War, and their coexistence is seen by some military and political historians in terms of a war of representations that opposes two “Western Fronts”, that of literature and popular culture against that of history. While the latter strives to discover and transmit the “truth” about the past, the former are said to perpetuate what has been called the “myth” of the Great War, understood as an emotionally driven and “false” version of the war. This doctoral dissertation examines fourteen British novels and short stories that were published during the late-twentieth-century “war books boom,” and primarily aims at examining these severe claims of “mythicality,” “ahistoricity,” and lack of creative imagination. It seeks to establish in what forms, to what purposes, and with what effects the First World War has returned in contemporary British fiction. The first part investigates the allegations laid against contemporary WWI fiction by military historians. Chapter 1 first defines the multifaceted term “myth” and looks at the special place it holds in human thought as a foundational story of origins; it also explains how the historical event of the First World War has become part of the British national mythology. Chapter 2 describes the four main elements of the mythical scenario of the Great War (viz. horror, death, futility, and incompetent generalship). It examines how they have shaped the works under scrutiny; it also shows how these writers have attempted to reach beyond the language and imagery handed down by the war poets by telling the “unspoken stories” of the war and rewriting women and the working class back into the postmodern memory of the conflict. Chapter 3 looks at the intertextual dialogue that contemporary WWI writers establish with their poetic forefathers. The second and third parts focus on the recourse to, and conceptualization of, “memory” in contemporary re-imaginings of the First World War. Part Two looks at “shell shock” as the legacy of the war: memory is usually problematized as trauma, as an overwhelming, violent event that has been found impossible to deal with and that therefore lingers, unresolved, in individual and collective memory. Chapter 4 contextualizes the rise of shell shock as a fundamental element in the myth of the war and provides a theoretical framework to the close reading of five novels (i.e. Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy and Another World, as well as Robert Edric’s In Desolate Heaven) that follows in Chapters 5 and 6. These two chapters show how the five selected trauma narratives engage with the contemporary fears of the revenant quality of the past and the possibility of a contagious, transgenerational transmission of trauma. They also raise questions concerning the politics of memory, the adequacy of historical narrative, and the ethics of historical representation. Part Three investigates the questions of remembrance and the duty of memory, which are problematized in all the works under scrutiny. Most contemporary WWI narratives have placed the war in the wider perspective of the century, demonstrating their awareness of their posthistorical situation. Chapter 7 examines the fear that the past is in danger and should be rescued from the work of time and history. Chapter 8 shows how this rescue of the past takes the form of a detective investigation, a metaphor of memory which brings to the fore the agency of memory as process and the inherent textuality of the past, and thus questions the possibility of ever knowing the war. Chapter 9 looks at “sites of memory,” the (textual) traces of the past that make this investigation (im)possible. / La Première guerre mondiale n’a jamais complètement disparu de la mémoire collective britannique, mais elle a à nouveau gagné en importance à la fin des années 80 et pendant les années 90, dans et au-delà du monde universitaire. Les deux dernières décennies du siècle dernier ont en effet été marquées par un foisonnement d’écrits historiques et de représentations populaires sur la Première guerre mondiale. Il existe à présent en Grande Bretagne deux visions de la guerre, et leur co-existence est perçue par certains historiens militaires et politiques en termes de guerre de représentations qui opposerait deux « Fronts de l’Ouest », à savoir le front de la littérature et de la culture populaire d’une part, et celui de l’histoire d’autre part. Alors que les partisans de l’histoire tentent de découvrir et transmettre la « vérité » sur le conflit, les autres perpétuent ce qu’on appelle le « mythe » de la Grande Guerre, c’est-à-dire une version erronée et émotive des événements. Cette dissertation doctorale examine quatorze des romans et nouvelles britanniques publiés pendant le « war books boom » de la fin du vingtième siècle et examine ces sévères reproches d’ahistoricité et manque d’imagination créative. Nous cherchons à établir sous quelles formes, dans quels buts et avec quels effets la Première guerre mondiale est revenue dans la fiction britannique contemporaine. La première partie examine les sévères critiques tenues par les historiens militaires à l’encontre de la « WWI fiction » contemporaine. Le premier chapitre définit le terme « mythe » et la place spéciale qu’il occupe dans la pensée humaine en tant qu’histoire fondatrice ; il explique également comment l’événement historique de la Première guerre mondiale est entré dans la mythologie nationale britannique. Le deuxième chapitre décrit les quatre éléments fondamentaux du scénario mythique de la Grande Guerre (c’est-à-dire l’horreur, la mort, l’absurdité, et l’incompétence des généraux). Il montre comment ces derniers ont modelé les œuvres de notre corpus et comment les auteurs contemporains ont tenté de se distancier du langage et des images transmis par les poètes des tranchées en racontant les récits de guerre restés inexprimés et réinscrivant les femmes et la classe ouvrière dans la mémoire postmoderne du conflit. Le troisième chapitre examine le dialogue intertextuel que les auteurs contemporains établissent avec les écrivains des tranchées, leurs « ancêtres poétiques ». Les deuxième et troisième parties se focalisent sur le concept de mémoire dans les réécritures contemporaines de la Première guerre mondiale. La deuxième partie examine le phénomène de « shell shock » en tant qu’héritage de guerre : la mémoire est en général problématisée comme trauma, comme un événement impossible à intégrer et qui subsiste et persiste comme un poids dans la mémoire individuelle et collective. Le quatrième chapitre explique comment le shell shock est devenu un élément central du mythe de la guerre et fournit un cadre théorique aux exercices de « close reading » qui suivent dans les chapitres cinq et six. Ces deux chapitres montrent comment cinq romans appartenant au genre de la « trauma fiction » (i.e. la trilogie Regeneration et Another World de Pat Barker, ainsi que In Desolate Heaven de Robert Edric) se confrontent à la peur contemporaine d’un possible retour du passé comme revenant et d’une transmission par contagion du trauma. Ces chapitres posent également les questions de la politique de la mémoire, de la pertinence de la narration historique, et de l’éthique de la représentation historique. La troisième partie se penche sur les notions de commémoration et devoir de mémoire, problématisées dans toutes les œuvres du corpus. La plupart des romans contemporains de la Grande Guerre replacent le conflit dans une perspective plus large, celle de tout un siècle, reconnaissant ainsi leur position posthistorique. Le septième chapitre examine la crainte d’un passé mis en danger par l’oubli, les effets du temps et le travail de l’histoire. Le huitième chapitre montre que le sauvetage du passé prend souvent la forme d’une enquête, une métaphore qui met en évidence la double nature de la mémoire comme contenu et process ainsi que la textualité du passé, et remet donc en question la possibilité même de connaître le passé. Le neuvième et dernier chapitre examine les lieux de mémoire, les traces (textuelles) du passé qui rendent cette enquête (im)possible.

Dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle, selon sa logique centralisatrice, la politique louis-quatorzienne à légard des protestants vise à les réunir au catholicisme, en usant de mesures discriminatoires et de violence dès le début des années 1680. LÉdit de Nantes est révoqué en 1685 et tout exercice de la religion protestante est interdit dans le Royaume. La plupart des huguenots abjurent tandis quune partie dentre eux se lance sur les chemins de lexil, malgré linterdiction qui en est faite. Cette diaspora crée ce que les historiens ont appelé le Refuge. Le contexte religieux troublé de la fin du XVIIe siècle et lexpérience de lexil comptent pour une grande part dans lexploitation dun imaginaire comme refuge. Il ne sagit pas ici du Refuge dans sa dimension concrète, mais dun refuge intellectuel, dun refuge virtuel, véritable échappatoire à une réalité difficile. La thèse soutient en effet que les utopies et les prophéties écrites par des réfugiés huguenots offrent évasion et compensations aux auteurs en construisant un monde imaginaire posé comme irréalisable dans le monde réel. Pour établir la pertinence et la justesse de cette thèse, létude se propose de démontrer les trois points suivants. Il sagit dabord de prouver lintérêt de réunir au sein dune seule et même recherche deux types de sources qui peuvent apparaître, au premier abord, très éloignés lun de lautre. Il faut ensuite justifier la pertinence de la réinsertion de ces écrits dans un contexte protestant français. Le travail vise enfin à convaincre de lintérêt de la démarche historique pour traiter de textes mettant en place un univers fictionnel. Si lassociation dutopies et de prophéties peut être justifiée dun point de vue théorique, cest surtout linsertion de ces deux types de sources dans le cadre méthodologique dune étude sur limaginaire qui donne toute sa cohérence au corpus. De part et dautre, il y a en effet mise en place dun imaginaire qui se construit comme refuge en réaction, notamment, à un contexte de référence commun et à une expérience de vie marquée par lexil et par la marginalité. La réunion de ces deux genres littéraires, qui constitue lune des originalités de létude, savère très enrichissante. Elle permet dune part de faire émerger des représentations semblables, parfois de mieux les comprendre et de leur donner un sens nouveau. Lintérêt de la comparaison consiste dautre part dans la mise en évidence des spécificités de chaque genre. Létude de la réception des textes et de lhistoriographie qui leur a été consacrée, principalement dans les cinquante dernières années, révèle le peu dintérêt accordé à une réinsertion de ces utopies et prophéties dans lhistoire du protestantisme français et plus particulièrement du Refuge. Or une lecture attentive des sources montre quelles portent lempreinte du calvinisme et prouve quelles sont profondément ancrées dans un contexte religieux troublé, marqué par la Révocation et ses conséquences. La démarche, consistant à donner sens aux imaginaires utopique et prophétique en tenant compte de cette situation historique et cherchant à y voir une réponse originale des auteurs est donc tout à fait pertinente. Limaginaire présente, pour lhistorien, un intérêt dans son rapport au réel. Il sen inspire, le reflète assez fidèlement sur certains points, sen détache fortement sur dautres. Cette relation au réel permet de déterminer le regard porté par les auteurs sur le monde qui les entoure et la façon dont ils sy perçoivent. Elle démontre aussi que les imaginaires utopique et prophétique ne sont pas transposables dans la réalité. Une frontière infranchissable, marquée par un décalage spatial et chronologique, les sépare en effet du monde réel. Par contre, face au contexte troublé et difficile, limaginaire représente clairement une voie dévasion, tout en constituant souvent un moyen de redéfinir son rôle dans la société et dy trouver une raison dexister.

Syfte med den här avhandlingen är att empiriskt kartlägga framväxten och utvecklingen av varietéunderhållningen i Stockholm 1870-1920, för att kunna förstå både förhållandet till dess transnationella förebilder, ekonomiska dynamik, kulturella dragningskraft, samt förklara hur genren kom att uppfattas i den offentliga debatten. Med teorier hämtade från Antonio Gramsci och Pierre Bourdieu diskuteras varietéerna som ett uttryck för det sena 1800-talets samhällsförändringar och marknadskapitalistiska dynamik, som bl.a. synliggjordes i nya urbana livsstilar och mönster. Resultatet av dessa undersökningar visar hur den tyska, brittiska, amerikanska och franska varietéunderhållningen influerade den svenska motsvarigheten. Samtidigt var faktorer som de nationella och lokala ekonomiska, politiska och sociala förhållandena avgörande i skapandet av de specifika uttrycksformer varietéunderhållning fick i Stockholm. Avhandlingen visar också hur varietésalongernas sociala praktiker, genom en medveten disciplineringssträvan från såväl entreprenörer som politiker, kom att genomgå en förändringsprocess där den sociala samvaron minskade till förmån för en allt starkare fokus på föreställningarnas innehåll. Genom sina samhällsutmanande drag kom varietéunderhållningen även att fungera som plattform varifrån viktiga värden och normer förhandlades och medierades. Detta bidrog till att underhållningsformen blev en måltavla för sedlighets- och nykterhetsrörelsen. Moulin Rouge på svenska är, genom att sätta fokus på hur entreprenörer, artister, skribenter, musikkompositörer och kritiker tänkte och agerade i den framväxande offentliga urbaniteten, ett viktigt bidrag i förståelsen av hur den tidiga svenska massproducerade populärkulturen tog form i slutet av 1800-talet. / The purpose of this dissertation is to chart and analyze the growth and development of variety entertainment in Stockholm 1870-1920 in order to reach an understanding of its transnational models, economic dynamics, and cultural attraction, as well as to explain how this genre was understood in the public debate. With the help of theories derived from Antonio Gramsci and Pierre Bourdieu variety entertainment is discussed as an expression of the social changes and the dynamics of market capitalism that became visible in new urban life styles and patterns at the end of the 19th century. The results of this investigation show how German, British, American and French variety entertainment influenced their Swedish counterparts. At the same time factors such as national and local economics and existing political and social conditions were determinants in the creation of the specific forms of expression that variety entertainment assumed in Stockholm. The dissertation also shows how social practice in the variety halls went through a process of change due to a conscious attempt on the part of both the entrepreneurs and politicians to discipline behaviour. In this process social interaction declined and a sharper focus came to be placed on the content of the performances. Because many of its characteristics challenged social values, variety entertainment came to function as a platform for the mediation of important norms and values. This was a contributing factor in making this form of entertainment a target for the temperance and morality movements. By focussing on how the entrepreneurs, actors, writers, composers and critics thought and acted in the growing public urbanity, Moulin Rouge in Swedish makes an important contribution to understanding how early mass produced Swedish culture took shape in the end of the 19th century.

Industrial society has changed thoroughly during the last half a century. In many Western cities and towns, new patterns of production and consumption entailed that centrally located industrial areas became redundant. The once lively workplace and urban core became silent and abandoned, gradually falling into decay. In recent decades, the former industrial built environment was reinterpreted and reused as apartments, offices, heritage sites, stages for artistic installations and destinations for cultural tourism. Companies and former workers, heritage and planning professionals, as well as artists and urban explorers, were some of the actors involved in the process. The overall aim of the study is to contribute to an understanding of this transformation, and hence it addresses questions about what happened to the industrial places that lost their original function and significance. How were they understood and used? Who engaged in their future? What were the visions and what was achieved? Three former industrial areas are examined from a historic perspective and with a critical hermeneutic approach: Koppardalen in Avesta, Sweden, the Ironbridge Gorge Museum in Britain, and Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord in the Ruhr district of Germany. Included in the results that challenge previous research, the study claims that the key figures were often newcomers to the place, and white-collar professionals, rather than former workers asserting a historic perspective from below on the basis of a crisis experience. In general, the study shows how the redundant industrial place became an arena for visions of the future in a local community, and, furthermore, how it was being turned into a commodity in a complex gentrification process. The place was given new value by being regarded as an expression of the overall phenomenon of reused industrial buildings, and, simultaneously, as a unique and authentic entity. In the conversion of the physical environment, the industrial past became relatively harmless to many people, because the dark and difficult aspects were defused in different ways. Instead, the industrial place was understood in terms of adventure, beauty and spectacle, which included rust from the past as well as hope for the future. / QC 20100910

This thesis discusses the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the United States as a lens through which to view the transnational nature of American exceptionalism. It concludes with an articulation of the necessity of incorporating this relational nature of United States identity development into high school coursework, and advocates for teaching about the Haitian Revolution as an effective means through which to do this.