Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2003. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 64-09, Section: A, page: 3449. Adviser: Walter Johnson.

Evidence for everyday resistance by Japanese American internees can be identified at the Manzanar War Relocation Center, California through an archaeological analysis of refuse deposits left by the internees. The center landfill contains ceramic tablewares in traditional Japanese forms such as rice and tea bowls, Japanese "dishes," and tiny and sake cups, indicating that internees maintained traditional Japanese foodways despite assimilation pressure from the War Relocation Authority and European American society. The cultural context of Japanese American internment and resistance is reconstructed using ethnographic, oral history, documentary, and archaeological data. This analysis of resistance at Manzanar suggests limitations of existing models of resistance and acculturation in historical archaeology and methods for exploring strategies of cultural persistence as resistance.

Widespread rehabilitation of historic residential properties in Tucson, Arizona offers numerous benefits to the community. The Secretary of the Interior's Standards for the Treatment of Historic Property provides the best practical guidelines for the rehabilitation of historic landscapes, currently. However, interpreting national guidelines for use on local projects is necessary before widespread application can occur. Accordingly, the first section of this work addresses means by which the national standards might be applied to landscape rehabilitation of residential properties in Tucson, including mid to small-scale residences and historic houses of more recent construction. Because these homes often lack traditional sources of documentation, expanding research options within the design process is often necessary. The second part of this work utilizes suggested research options, including academic and non-academic sources, to synthesize information regarding local historic residential landscape practices useful in interpretive and design processes of historic landscape rehabilitation projects.

This dissertation uses the writings of sailors, traders, and diplomats, American missionaries, and Hawaiian chiefs, as well as anthropological theories and ethnographic insights about Hawaiian culture to examine the cultural milieu created by western sojourners in Hawaii, contestation over the interrelated issues of morality, sexuality, religion, economics, and politics that occurred with the arrival of American evangelists, and the ways in which Hawaiian chiefs and commoners negotiated a delicate and calculated path between the embattled imperialist forces in their islands. This study places Hawaiian experiences within the broader outlines of American social, religious, and expansionist history. It offers a distinctly new interpretation of imperial relations in Hawaii, one that others may choose to build upon. In the past two decades, scholars of postmodernism and subaltern studies have devised new approaches to examining western imperialism in Africa, India, and China. However, only a handful of scholarly works have focused on western imperialism in Hawaii. Following trends in colonial scholarship and anthropological theory, particularly the work of Marshall Sahlins, this study uses an ethnographic approach to explain how Hawaiians viewed the religious, social, political, and cultural changes that resulted from the presence of foreigners in their kingdom and their responses to the challenges of imperialism. As such, this dissertation is highly interdisciplinary and draws upon the secondary literature in anthropology, missiology, colonialism, and Native American history. The issue of Hawaiian sovereignty has received national attention in recent years. Most scholars date the loss of Hawaiian independence to the moment in 1893 when U.S. Marines helped dethrone Queen Lili'uokalani. In reality, the forces that led to the annexation of the islands to the United States began with Captain James Cook's 1778 arrival in Hawaii. By focusing on the complex relations between two polarized groups of foreigners---American missionaries and western traders, sailors, and diplomats---and Hawaiian chiefs and commoners, this study reveals how the combined effects of western economic, religious, cultural, and political imperialism, cultural disintegration, native factionalism, and chiefly miscalculation created the context for the loss of Hawaiian political and economic control after 1839, much earlier than previously asserted in the literature.

The ideas for this thesis were conceived as a result of the author's work on a cooperative agreement between the National Park Service and the Landscape Architecture Program in the School of Renewable Natural Resources, wherein the changes that have occurred on the cultural landscapes of four prehistoric or historic sites were documented. Historic cultural landscapes, especially those associated with vernacular sites have been largely overlooked in interpretive efforts. Readings revealed that vernacular cultural landscapes may serve as a form of historic documentation. These landscapes may provide additional clues regarding the history of our country to visitors of historic sites if the information is interpreted in an interesting, sensitive, and factual manner. The Blankenship/Dos Lomitas Ranch, an early 20th century cattle ranch located within the boundaries of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, is a vernacular historic site with remnants of the associated landscape intact. This landscape may hold valuable information regarding a major westward migration of American cattle ranchers during the mid to latter 19th century that had a profound effect on the ecology and culture of the Sonoran desert in southern Arizona. As a result of readings, visits to historic sites, and interviews with professionals in the field of interpretation, recommendations are made to present the story of the vernacular landscape of this pioneer cattle ranch to visitors of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.

Through the historical analysis of a public housing project built in Greenbelt, Maryland in 1937, this dissertation investigates how federal housing policies attempted to impose middle-class gender roles and relations on members of the working-class as a central means to alleviate class tensions heightened during the Great Depression. Informed by recent developments in Women's History and the Social History of Architecture, this project examines how attempts to rehabilitate working-class families and communities necessitated removing them from cities and imposing paradigmatic gender norms. A new form of housing and town-planning became a critical means to achieve these ends. This federal housing project in Greenbelt has long been celebrated as the first successful example of federal support for progressive urban planning. The planners of Greenbelt drew from existing progressive ideologies that understood decentralized communities, or suburbs, as the answer to the decay and squalor of urban centers. Viewing Greenbelt solely in terms of its progressive legacy is limiting, however, unless that legacy is investigated using class, race, and gender analysis. With the planning, design, and administration of the new community in Greenbelt, New Deal planners envisioned a new form of architecture, town-planning and administration that would provide a social and physical environment conducive to the formation of viable, stable, working-class families. These planners assumed that if working-class residents adopted the gender relations that were normative in the middle-class, long term problems of poverty and social disorder would disappear. The built environment of Greenbelt, contemporary photographs, and federal administrative records provide significant evidence to study the relationship between "class rehabilitation" and gender norms. This project offers a new approach to understanding the New Deal housing policies and the construction of a domestic ideal.

This dissertation examines recent (post-1980) conservatives' views of the 1960s era and its legacies by analyzing the discourse of right-wing scholars, journalists, politicians, pundits, grassroots activists, and mass-media entertainment. The chapters are organized around conservatives' perceptions of emblematic 1960s individuals and movements and their legacies: John F. Kennedy and his presidential administration; Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement; the Warren Court; the Great Society; the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement; and the New Left and the counterculture. While analyzing conservatives' views about these sixties' figures and movements, this dissertation advances several general arguments. First, most conservatives shared a rough consensus about what symbolized "the 1960s era" and its legacies. Second, they remained obsessed with the decade and its continued influence. Third, they viewed themselves as a countermovement to the sixties movement, focusing their agenda on reversing trends associated with the decade. Fourth, they disseminated a negative caricature of the era and its effects to justify their own agenda. Fifth, conservatives criticized emblematic 1960s movements and their legacies. For example, they denounced the Warren Court and the Great Society for using federal power to bolster "big government" and to inculcate "permissive" values; they condemned antiwar protestors and New Leftists for preaching "anti-Americanism"; and they charged the counterculture with promoting immoral behavior. However, this dissertation also argues that, ironically, the recent right emulated the 1960s left. For example, many neoconservatives appropriated the legacies of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Moreover, the recent right, like the sixties left, espoused rigid ideology, passionate conviction, and inflammatory rhetoric. Conservatives also copied sixties leftists' tactics. For example, pro-life activists used King's civil-disobedience strategy; conservative judges, like the Warren Court, made activist rulings; Republicans followed Great Society Democrats by employing federal power to implement their agenda; many conservatives sounded like Vietnam "peaceniks" when opposing President Clinton's use of military force; and some conservatives embraced trends associated with the "hippie" counterculture, including sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, drugs, rock music, and feminism. In sum, post-1980 conservatives' obsession with, and emulation of, the 1960s revealed that they remained "stuck in the sixties."

This dissertation assesses a Los Angeles-based feminist educational alternative called Califia Community in the context of a cultural war between Second Wave feminists and members of the New Right. Analysis of oral histories with thirty-two participants (narrators) is supported by archival sources and narrators' personal files to historicize U.S. divisions over cultural mores and to shed light on the diversity and tactics among Second Wave feminists. In contrast to foundational scholarship, a reevaluation of National Organization for Women sources in association with California participants' actions and writings clarifies that the lesbian-straight split continued to divide the movement well into the 1980s and that the role of eastern leadership in feminism has been overstated. Califia Community demonstrates that lesbian feminists engaged in a complex attempt to combat multiple oppressions and to address the whole person in relation to society. Califia's diversity of attendees and education on sexism, homophobia, racism, and class bias reveals that a grassroots group could sustain heterogeneity but that identity-based politics exacerbated problems.

This dissertation explicates the rhetoric of liberty and slavery in the novels of Robert Montgomery Bird (1805-54). Bird, now largely forgotten and ignored, was prolific, popular, and at the center of Philadelphia culture and national politics from the 1830s until his death. His work represents a particularly clear intersection of political ideology and fiction at a time of cultural growth and conflict. Like many of his contemporaries, Bird saw his fiction as fulfilling a patriotic mission as he attempted to define and defend the nation's history, emergent identity, and contemporary political agenda. It is this mission, evident in his countless meditations on rights and rebellion, freedom and slavery, captivity and bondage, that I explore. Despite repeated scenes of unjust captivity, Bird's eloquent celebrations of liberty, ultimately work to deny the freedoms they evoke, rationalizing instead the conquest of indigenous populations, slavery, and national expansion. This analysis of Bird's rhetoric of freedom is grounded in an exploration of the natural law tradition. I trace the evolution of this philosophy from 17th-century England to its conservative manifestations in antebellum America. Within this context, Bird's conservative reworking of terms such as "freedom," "slavery" and "rights" is neither new nor unusual, but constitutes merely one episode in the ongoing adaptation of such terms in natural law. Natural law emerges as an exceedingly pliable theory, capable of serving both radical and conservative agendas, rebellion and the maintenance of the status quo, the defense and the denial of rights. In addition to natural law, my discussion of Bird's eight novels explores literary traditions from the historical romance to the captivity narrative to the satire, and historical contexts from the Spanish conquest of Mexico to 18th-century American frontier struggles to Southern slavery. I also place Bird's fiction into the context of contemporary political discourses, including proslavery and abolitionist ideologies, the discussion of Indian removals, and debates over national expansion. Finally, I substantiate my conclusions with original research from the University of Pennsylvania's archives of Bird's manuscripts, notebooks, letters, and political journalism.

Prior research on congressional elections is decidedly candidate centered. While candidates are important to the electoral process, the individual is but one of a number of factors in congressional elections. In this research I expand the debate on congressional elections to include how political parties survive across time in congressional districts. To do this I model party turnover from 1972 to 1996 using a number of district level attributes. This includes whether an incumbent candidate is seeking reelection, competitiveness of the district in the previous election, length of time a district has supported the incumbent party, district context (and district context change) and region of the country. The probability of a quality challenger emerging in a congressional district is also estimated given the aforementioned district level attributes. Presence of a quality challenger is then added to the district level model and the probability of party turnover is estimated. To estimate the effects of district level attributes on party turnover, an event history analysis with a logit specification is used. This allows for the inclusion of duration dependence given a binomial dependent variable. The implications for this research are numerous, including the effects of party turnover on representation and redistributive benefits for a congressional district. A second implication focuses on how political context affects the survival of political parties in congressional districts given the redistricting process. Finally, the possible effects of district level attributes and party turnover on party mobilization and voter turnout are discussed.