Using a combination of public institutional records and private personal records, this thesis explores how a newly emerging America constructed its ideas of physical disability in the era of the War for Independence. In the colonies, physical disability never stood alone as an independent category of difference, but was anchored in discourses of poverty and morality. However, the tumultuous events that occurred during the period 177 5 to 1818 forced this developing nation to confront physical disability to an extent that had not previously been required. The result was a conceptual and legislative shift, which caused the understanding of physical disability to be fundamentally redefined and become something identifiable in its own right. To analyse how, and why, this happened, this thesis looks at the public, cultural discourse of disability through this period, and examines the legal developments and the lived experiences that were occurring alongside it. By considering how disability was used in public commentaries to allegorise the split with Britain, it highlights the complicated environment and conceptual tumult which faced disabled Revolutionary War veterans on their return. Analysis of the trajectory of disability pension legislation suggests an infant nation testing the waters with early welfare programmes, often with limited success. However, these early initiatives were the progenitors of the first. national pension program. These developments created a distinct legal construction of disability that was seemingly at odds with the negative representation of disability in the public arena and, through medical and legal classifications, created a more formal platform for the conceptualisation of disability to emerge. To complement the institutional perspective, this thesis explores the lives of 523 disabled Revolutionary War veterans, using information they gave in their applications for a disability pension. This experiential approach expounds the ways in which disability was managed, how it shaped - and was shaped by - pre-existing expectations of gender roles, and how these experiences were often determined by class. Pertinent topics include family life, work life, and the ways in which veterans understood and employed their identities as disabled pensioners. Unlike the post-Civil War period a Revolutionary War disability never became the symbol of patriotism and bravery that the empty sleeve of the Civil War amputee did. Using the experiences of disabled former Revolutionary servicemen and contrasting this with the public discourse and national memory of the war, this thesis presents the reasons why this was the case.

The purpose of this study is to examine the dynamics between professional knowledge and the power to construct social realities. The focus is on the institutions which contributed to mental hygiene as a protocol for public policies directed toward children. The social history of the child in the twentieth century is juxtaposed with shifts in the configurations of private and public institutions in a sociology of mental illness. The mental hygiene movement created one of the twentieth century's major paradigms. Mental hygiene was conceptualized as the development of a science of promoting mental health and preventing mental illness. The' working premise of the movement was that early life experiences determined adult competence and constituted the root cause of major social problems from crime and dependency to labour unrest and war. The National Committee for Mental Hygiene was established in the United States in 1909 and a second National Committee was established in Canada in 1918. Mental hygienists developed an ideology of child oriented prevention in public health, welfare and educational policies which legitimated public intervention into the private spheres of family relations and child rearing. The idea of mental hygiene was based on a medical model and as such it was part of the new psychiatry and public health movements of the Progressive Era. As a paradigm mental hygiene fostered the identification of children according to scientific standards. Mental hygiene contributed to the transformation of juvenile delinquency into a psychiatry of maladjustment in childhood. As a positivistic approach to public health, mental hygiene research elaborated criteria to determine age related stages of normal psychological and biological progress. Mental hygiene was a product of professional researchers and policy makers. The knowledge base of mental hygiene grew with the expansion of higher education in the United States especially in regard to scientific medicine. The medical model was subsequently applied to research in the behavioural and social sciences. Scientific philanthropy provided funds for research, professional education, and the distribution of knowledge. The accumulation of monetary resources by nineteenth century entrepreneurial capitalists, who applied these funds to further the growth of scientific models, were a sustaining factor in twentieth century mental hygiene. The agents of power described as part of the mental hygiene movement include: 1) the National Committees for Mental Hygiene in the United States and Canada; and, 2) general purpose foundations in Rockefeller related philanthropy and the Commonwealth Fund. By mid-century, the federal, state/provincial and local governments of the United States and Canada had assumed major aspects of the former role of the National Committees and philanthropy in mental health advocacy. The theoretical foundation of mental hygiene evolved in conjunction with the development of the scientific method as applied to preventive medicine, especially in fields related to psychiatry. Mental hygiene was a primary carrier of the medical model into applied disciplines in the social and health sciences. The professionalization of education, social welfare and psychology, as imbued with mental hygiene, translated technological change into revised concepts of public and private spheres in relationship to family and child life. The medicalization of human differences limited the potential for radical revisions in social organization. It justified unequal access to political and economic power on the basis of psychological and biological characteristics. The mental hygiene paradigm served to maintain established social configurations in the face of social change. The function of justifying inequalities was especially important in the United States but less so in Canada for reasons of the timing of nation-building, national history, character, and culture. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

The 1980s is a formative decade in American history. America sought to reestablish itself as a global power and to reassert the dominant ideology of white, patriarchal capitalism. Likewise, media producers in the 1980s sought to reassert the dominance of the white, male, muscled body in filmic representations. The identity politics of the 1980s and the depictions of the white, muscled body once prominent in the 1980s have been the site of conservative nostalgia for a young, male-dominated, cult audience that is a subset of a larger cultural trend known as retro film culture. This thesis provides historical context behind the populist 1980s B-action films from Cannon Group, Inc that celebrate violent masculinity in filmic representations with white, male action heroes. Equally important is the revival of VHS collecting and how this 1980s-inspired subculture reinforces white, patriarchal capitalism through the cult films they valorize and their capitalistic trading practices despite their claims of oppositionality against mainstream taste and Hollywood films. Lastly, this thesis reveals how a new cycle of contemporary films primarily produced outside of Hollywood reasserts and celebrates the dominance of the white, male, muscled body in filmic representations despite a postmodern and hyperconscious exterior. Overall, I argue how these areas of nostalgia are distinct, yet not unrelated, because they reassert white, patriarchal capitalism through the revival of conservative nostalgia for the 1980s.

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Hauntology Man, a 48-minute documentary, follows former UNT Professor, Dr. Shaun Treat, as he leads a walking ghost tour of downtown Denton, Texas. As the expedition moves from storefront to storefront, each stop elicits a new tale. But, as Dr. Treat points out, the uncertainties of history are the real ghosts. That is, rather than simply presenting a "haunted history" of Denton, it's more accurate to say this movie's center resides at the precipice of a "haunting history." Not all ghost stories need spectres. Sometimes not knowing is ghost enough.

Le mandat de Theodore Roosevelt à la Maison Blanche (1901-1909) fut marqué par de nombreux efforts dans la conservation des ressources naturelles. C’était une thématique doublement importante pour Roosevelt, car non seulement voyait-il les effets négatifs de l’industrialisation sur l’avenir des ressources, mais la nature constituait une de ses passions depuis son enfance. Ainsi, il désirait continuer à développer un mouvement conservationniste qui existait depuis les années 1870. Ultimement, son objectif fut de consolider toutes les ressources naturelles sous l’autorité du gouvernement fédéral, grâce à de nombreuses politiques de développement des forêts, des terres agricoles, des cours d’eau, des pâtures et des terres minérales. Ce mémoire présente les nombreux angles à partir desquels s’est développée la conservation rooseveltienne, en plus d’examiner le rôle d’individus importants dans la communauté de conservation à l’époque de Roosevelt. De prime abord, les efforts déployés par le 26e Président sont généralement associés aux retombées économiques des ressources ou à leur utilisation concrète et ce, avec raison. Toutefois, nous nous sommes interrogés sur d’autres enjeux de la conservation. Theodore Roosevelt était très attaché à son idée d’une nation typiquement américaine et à ce qu’il considérait comme les valeurs essentielles des États-Unis. Ainsi, nous nous sommes penchés sur le lien qui pouvait exister entre cet idéal de la nation et les efforts pour la conservation des ressources. Cette étude montre donc que, avec son projet de conservation, Roosevelt fut en mesure de rester fidèle à certains des idéaux qui, pour lui, étaient essentiels au bon fonctionnement de la société américaine / Theodore Roosevelt's term in the White House (1901-1909) was marked by many efforts in the conservation of natural resources. This was a doubly important theme for Roosevelt, because not only did he see the negative effects of industrialization on the future of resources, but nature had been one of his passions since his childhood. Thus, he wanted to continue to father a conservationist movement that had existed since the 1870s. Ultimately, his objective was to consolidate all natural resources under the authority of the federal government, through numerous policies for the development of forests, agricultural lands, rivers, pastures, ranges and mineral lands. This thesis presents the many perspectives from which conservation developed under Roosevelt, as well as the role of important individuals in the conservation community during the Roosevelt era. Although conservation is generally associated with the economic benefits of natural resources and their actual uses, we explore what other issues conservation could address. Theodore Roosevelt was very attached to his idea of a typically American nation and to what he saw as the essential values of the United States. Thus, we examine the link that might have existed between this ideal of the nation and the efforts to protect natural resources. Our study shows that, by putting his conservation project into practice, Roosevelt was able to remain true to some of the ideals he believed were essential to the proper functioning of American society.

During the modern era, the urbanization of water has been facilitated by various privileged discourses, which valorize major engineering interventions for the sake of continued urban growth. This research examines discourse surrounding the 2-th Century proposal and construction of a reservoir near the then-tiny farming community of Grapevine, Texas, for the benefit of urban interests. I argue that urban interests produced Grapevine space as nothing more than a container for city water, by rendering meaningless any conception of space that was not directly articulated with urban economic networks. Modern discourse collapsed Denton Creek space from a watershed and landscape into a dimensionless node in the urban space of flows. In return, rural inhabitants were encouraged to progress and to modernize their own spaces: to become urban. Whereas urban discourse entails an implicit spatial imaginary of networks, I deploy the conceptual framework of settler colonialism to show that a core-periphery relationship remains relevant, and is not reducible to a network spatial ontology.

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