African Americans living in the small community of Parting Ways, near Plymouth, Massachusetts, realized their newly achieved independence through the construction of homeplace using the material culture of respectability and socioeconomic integration into the community. I expand upon a previous study of this community, which identified evidence that the former slaves retained African cultural traditions, to analyze material evidence of consumption and subsistence. This study reveals that African Americans living at Parting Ways crafted identities that emphasized independence, refinement, and respectability despite living in a society that stereotyped African Americans as dependent members incapable of full social participation. The archaeological data come from five seasons of excavation, 1975-1978 and 1989, on the properties of two African-American families who lived at Parting Ways. I situate the artifacts together with deed, probate, court, town, and census records to construct a detailed historical context in which to interpret the material practice of daily life, identity creation, and community formation. Paternalism and dependence, features of slavery in New England, continued after emancipation and were seen at Parting Ways through the actions of town leaders who permitted the families to build houses on public lands and also assumed legal and financial guardianship of the families. Within their homes, however, the families participated in the material culture of respectability through the rituals of tea drinking, refined dining, formal clothing, and the use of orthodox medicines. The records reveal that they also participated actively in the town's economic life by exchanging their manual labor for agriculture products like cattle heads and feet. Through their household goods, their customs, and their labor, these families embodied respectability, integrated themselves into the community, and constructed a homeplace--a place of refuge, family building, and identity formation. At Parting Ways, African-Americans worked to negate the implications of their continued dependence on town leaders by developing individual personas that espoused the values of independence, freedom, refinement, and family unity - and in so doing defined their own participation in Plymouth, and American, society.

From the 1891 establishment of the Trustees of Public Reservations, a private statewide landscape preservation organization, to America’s 1941 entry into World War II, a citizen-led effort to safeguard and improve Massachusetts’s woodlands resulted in the establishment of a multiple use state forest and park system that combined timber production and outdoor recreation in order to restore, protect, and connect people to the Commonwealth’s forests. This interdisciplinary dissertation argues that conservationists, public officials, and foresters strove to revitalize Massachusetts’s natural landscape, rural economy, and cultural identity by promoting scientific forestry, founding publicly-owned and -managed timber reserves, and providing outdoor recreational opportunities. The state expanded these public forests’ number, size, and function during the early twentieth century in response to shifting cultural, economic, and political forces. By analyzing how changing institutional priorities, professional practices, and cultural attitudes shaped the landscapes of Massachusetts’s state forests and parks, this dissertation provides a new perspective on state level forest conservation in the early-twentieth-century United States. Chapter One examines the private organizations and public institutions that experimented with different methods of forest protection, in particular the Massachusetts Forestry Association’s campaign to promote forestry and encourage the legislature to appoint a state forester. Chapter Two closely appraises how the state foresters’ efforts to educate the public, control fires and pests, promote reforestation, and establish state forests were intertwined with anxieties over Massachusetts’s dominant Yankee cultural identity in the face of immigration, urbanization, and industrialization. The third chapter recounts how the reorganized Department of Conservation began to weave recreational features into an enlarged state forest system in response to shifting cultural attitudes and new pressures during the 1920s. Chapter Four demonstrates how the 1930s arrival of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal employment relief program, accelerated the ongoing shift to a multiple use land management system as landscape architects coordinated a massive improvement of recreational facilities, some of which reinscribed distorted cultural narratives into the landscape. When World War II halted progress, Massachusetts’s roughly 175,000-acre network of state forests and parks constituted a sophisticated multiple use public land system of national significance that met a diverse society’s needs.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Boston University

Predominantly darker than his other works, Cape Cod depicts Henry David Thoreau's interpretation of life as a struggle for survival and a search for salvation in a stark New England setting. Representing Thoreau's greatest test of the goodness of God and nature, the book illustrates the centrality of the subject of death to Thoreau's philosophy of life. Contending that Thoreau's journey to the Cape originated from an intensely personal transcendental impulse connected with his brother's death, this study provides the first in-depth examination of Thoreau's use of the five senses in Cape Cod to reveal both the eccentricities inherent in his relationship with nature and his method of resolving his fears of mortality. Some of the sense impressions in Cape Cod--particularly those that center around human death and those that involve tactile sensations--suggest that Thoreau sometimes tried to master his fears by subconsciously altering painful historical facts or by avoiding the type of sensual contact that aggravated the repressed guilt he suffered from his brother's death. Despite his personal idiosyncrasies, however, Thoreau persisted in his search for truth, and the written record of his journey in Cape Cod documents how his dedication to the transcendental process enabled him to surmount his inner turmoil and reconfirm his intuitive faith. In following this process to spiritual renewal, Thoreau begins with subjective impressions of nature and advances to knowledge of objective realities before ultimately reaching symbolic and universal truth. By analyzing nature's lessons as they evolve from Thoreau's use of his senses, this dissertation shows that Cape Cod, rather than invalidating Thoreau's faith, actually expands his transcendental perspective and so rightfully stands beside Walden as one of the fundamental cornerstones of his canon. In addition, the study proffers new support for previous psychoanalytical interpretations of Thoreau and his writings, reveals heretofore unrecognized historical inaccuracies in his account of the shipwreck that frames the book's opening, and provides the first detailed consideration of the linguistic implications of Cape Cod.

No description available.

This dissertation examines the philosophical contributions of transatlantic peace reform discourse to American literature (1790-1865). My title is drawn from a dialogue between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle in which Emerson comments that, although his pacifist anarchist friends in the New England Non- Resistance Society are “fanatics of a dream,” they also contribute the only original American political philosophy. Taking up Emerson's invitation, I consider what it would mean to treat the peace reform movement as philosophical in the sense that it both engaged Enlightenment philosophy and produced its own philosophical ideas. Questions about ontology, determinism, and Idealism are inseparable from peace reformers’ debates. While my research includes peace society archives, journals and tracts, and a broad range of literary texts and genres, my primary emphasis is on novels that constitute distinctive efforts at nonviolent social transformation. I have selected texts that not only refer to peace reform, peace principles, or peace societies, but do so in a philosophically complex and dialogic way, demonstrating a metafictive awareness of how fiction might function as social intervention. My aim is to describe the unique intellectual challenges faced by advocates of peace principles and to broaden scholarly narratives of transatlantic peace reform’s early history and the diverse voices and texts it involved. My dissertation includes American Indian writers like George Copway, formerly enslaved authors such as William Wells Brown, and work by white writers like William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. I emphasize philosophical problems and theoretical legacies that remain with us today, drawing on critics of violence and power like Gayatri Spivak, Donna Haraway, and Theodor Adorno, as well as recent scholarship that aims to re-theorize violence and the politics of its hermeneutics. Understanding the diverse transatlantic contexts and theoretical complexity of peace reform can both offer new insights into literary texts and also unsettle national narratives that minimize the significance of nineteenth-century pacifist thought.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Meteorology, 1979. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 121-122. / by Hsien Wang Ou. / Ph.D.

No description available.

Wind energy is a means of energy production without carbon emissions, facilitating regional and national energy security. While there are currently no offshore wind farms in the United States, there has been growing success in building land-based wind capacity. Within the wind industry, there is a call for a streamlined permitting process, as well as an objective evaluation of current stakeholder processes. Within city and regional planning, the stakeholder process and public participation in general have long been subject to research and discourse, as scholars and practitioners alike seek to identify and typify what exactly makes public participation robust or rigorous. In Europe, researchers have found that a stakeholder process characterized by early inclusion and local decision-making increases community acceptance of large-scale wind projects, and that a ‘soft-path’, decentralized approach to infrastructure development, as seen in Germany, leads to greater community acceptance as well, versus the ‘hard-path’, centralized approach to infrastructure development as typified in early Dutch wind development. While the public process should not supplant the formal permitting process, or detract from technical expertise, a better understanding of what type of siting and decision-making process are construed by participants as positive or negative could help to formulate stakeholder involvement more effectively in future projects. It could also help to decrease the length of permitting times by promoting consensus-building rather than inadvertently creating an adversarial decision-making climate. This thesis uses a case study methodology to compare three land-based wind farms in Massachusetts and Vermont. It also compares the wind development policies between the two states. From each site, stakeholders are identified and interviewed concerning their experiences and perspectives of the stakeholder or public process. Interviews are analyzed using a matrix composed of success criteria pulled from the fields of regional planning and public participation theory, collaborative planning, and adaptive resource management. Findings include evidence as to what degree there was a stakeholder process, and to what degree participants found it positive or negative. The research found that the characteristics and practices of ore robust or rigorous stakeholder engagement are largely lacking in New England land-based wind development. These characteristics or practices included third-party data collection and reporting; early and broad stakeholder inclusion; collaborative ground rule setting; and no third-party mediation or facilitation. Stakeholder process perspectives are easily divided by wind-energy attitudes: anti-wind stakeholders reported greater antipathy toward the process, whereas proponents of both specific projects and the technology in general reported greater favorability toward the process and outcome. Vermont and Massachusetts have distinct wind development processes and distinct mechanisms for public participation and stakeholder engagement in a renewable energy technology context. In many ways, the siting of renewable infrastructure still follows the ‘decide, announce, defend’ character of conventional infrastructure and facility siting. Wind proponents, and proponents of other renewable energy technologies and sustainability measures in general, should pause and consider how to craft meaningful, robust and rigorous stakeholder processes prior to site selection and development. This will lend legitimacy to both the process and technology, lending political and social sustainability to a technology that is well needed for social, economic and environmental well-being. Continued avoidance of early and robust stakeholder engagement may contribute to ongoing conflict and confusion regarding renewable energy siting, permitting and development. Stakeholder experiences and perspectives also demonstrated that there are many factors contributing to public and social perceptions of wind technology and specific projects, including the financial gain or reward to communities and stakeholders; the size of individual turbines; project ownership and management; and project scale. There is opportunity for enhancing the public process and allowing rigorous and robust stakeholder process in wind energy development.

Under the modern mortality pattern females die at all ages at a lower rate than males. However, this was not always the case. For much of the nineteenth century in the United States and parts of Europe it appears that females died at a higher rate with respect to at least one disease, pulmonary tuberculosis. The purpose of this research is to investigate this question in four towns of the Connecticut River Valley, Massachusetts. First, it is necessary to establish age- and sex-specific mortality rates in the four rural towns in the Connecticut River Valley during the latter half of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. Secondly, it is necessary to identify those cases in which tuberculosis was the main disease and cause of death. This research seeks to discuss and contribute to the topic of excess female mortality. The four Massachusetts towns of Greenfield, Deerfield, Shelburne, and Montague constitute my research sites. These towns are appropriate for the anthropological pursuit of historical epidemiology due first to the towns’ rural nature at a time when the majority of Americans lived in rural towns, not large urban cities where studies are often focused. Secondly, these towns are of interest because of the extensive data collection that has been conducted previously. Tuberculosis (TB) is an interesting and instructive disease to focus research on. TB has re-emerged in recent decades, and research on the disease may have applied implications and value. TB was the number one killer during the study period, and the nature of the disease is such that it is very sensitive to the social environment. The combination of a rural setting and tuberculosis may give insight into the etiology of a disease that shares a long yet uneven history with humans, and has both biological and cultural significance. Under the traditional mortality pattern females of particular age ranges have greater mortality rates than males. This research discovered that females exceeded males in mortality rates at ages ten to 19 and 30 to 39 and that TB was the root cause of greater female mortality. Interestingly, the sex-specific gap in TB mortality rates was much wider than the gap in overall mortality rates. Thus, while females were dying of one cause, evidence shows that males were dying of another, which may have offset male TB mortality rates.