Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

In Sex Curve, a quirky cast of characters goes to war with oxytosin, the hormone which makes a woman fall in love with the person she sleeps with. Brilliant biochemist, Marissa, puts love to the ultimate test in this biting satire.

The characters of Forlorn Days have been beaten down, be it personally or professionally. These stories are meant to present these characters as they struggle in their own indecisions and adversities. Some are more successful than others, while some come to the realization that it is nearly impossible to escape their flaws. The worlds they occupy are filled with a sense of disillusionment, whether it be soul crushing jobs, fractured relationships, or a lack of communicating with those around them. The characters that populate these stories are looking for a connection of any kind to break out of the fates that await them. In this yearning to break out of their disillusionment, they find that it’s more difficult than they thought. Life continues to go around regardless of the decisions they have made.

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Thesis advisor: William Stanwood / The purpose of the study is to look at the representations of race in the popular television genre, the crime drama. An analysis of episodes of Law & Order and NYPD Blue was utilized to discover what portrayals the show contains of ethnicity in New York City, with an emphasis on the depictions of the victim of the crime, the perpetrator, and the criminal justice personnel. Along with these variables, theoretical analysis was taken into consideration. Results showed that although whites make up the majority of the characters on the programs, blacks and Hispanics do not always portray lesser roles. Blacks portrayed various high-powered roles, such as district attorney and other law enforcement officials, as did Hispanics to a lesser extent. When blacks were portrayed, however, they were most likely shown in a negative light. In terms of other races, Native Americans and Asians were nearly nonexistent on the episodes watched. Still, there were some qualifications to this argument, indicating that this area needs further study. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2007. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Communication. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

From 1926 to 1958, the Savoy Ballroom in New York's Harlem neighborhood played a critical role in the development and showcasing of African-American popular culture. During its lifetime, the Savoy Ballroom significantly affected the concurrent development of jazz music and jazz dance, and laid important groundwork for racial integration. The Savoy Ballroom served as the home base for such jazz greats as William "Chick" Webb, Lucius Venable "Lucky" Millinder, and David "Panama" Francis, and launched the careers of John Birk "Dizzy" Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk. Beyond music, the Lindy Hop, a partnered jazz dance that emerged at the Savoy during the late 1920s, was one of the Ballroom's cultural exports; it gained an unprecedented degree of fame and recognition during the late 1930s, and is still practiced today by communities across the United States and the world. The objective of this dissertation is to examine the cultural, social, and musical contribution made by the Savoy Ballroom to the promotion of African-American culture. The first and second chapters of this dissertation address the historical and cultural context of Harlem and the Savoy proper. The third chapter examines some of the emerging traditions behind the Savoy Ballroom's status as the "World's Finest Ballroom." The fourth and fifth chapters address the chronological and technical development of music and jazz dance at the Savoy, with particular attention given to the lasting impact of such advancements as the incorporation of swing feel into jazz. The sixth chapter examines the cultural impact of the Ballroom on contemporary and modern media, particularly print, music, film, and photography. Finally, the seventh chapter examines the Savoy Ballroom's participation in New York's World's Fair exhibition in 1939, and its impact on the worldwide export of Harlem's African-American culture.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / An elementary school principal writes an historical analysis of a thirty-year period of growing immigration and changing education policy in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a city located near Boston. The history examines the years 1890-1920 and the transformation of an urban public school system, including its policies and practices regarding the education of immigrant, non-English-speaking children. Comparisons are made with immigration and the New York City public schools during the same years. A literature review of language policies and the schooling of immigrant children in New York one hundred years ago sheds light on past and present experiences of language-minority students. Attention is given to changing notions of assimilation and Americanization in U.S. society; to the teaching of English and the role of native-language maintenance in defining an ethnic-American identity; and to educational achievement and mobility rates among Russian Jewish and Southern Italian immigrants and their descendants a century ago, and among Hispanic immigrants today. Related questions include: What was the response ofthe New York City and Chelsea public schools to the task of educating immigrant children and how did this change over time? What educational options were available to the increasing immigrant populations? What attitudes and expectations did immigrants and educators have of one another in terms of public school education? How does the historical and sociological evidence confirm or deny the perception of "academic success" and "educational attainment" of immigrants in New York City and the Chelsea Public Schools at the turn of the 20th century? Earlier developments in education policy petiaining to immigration in Chelsea are compared with recent trends, including English literacy, bilingual education, teacher quality, curriculum, school facilities, class size, testing and standards, and graduation rates. The researcher used a mixed-method study of both quantitative and qualitative sources. As an extended reflection and interpretive synthesis, the paper draws from the vast literature on past and present immigration. Sources are varied, from historical accounts of immigrants, to census and school department reports, newspaper reports, statistical surveys, student essays and speeches, and several novels, memoirs, and biographies. / 2031-01-01

This thesis analyses stunts in the public life of late nineteenth-century New York, where 'stunt' developed as a slang term. Addressing stunts as a performative and discursive practice, I investigate stunts in popular newspapers, sports, politics and protest and, to a lesser extent, theatre and film. Each chapter focuses on one form of stunt: bridge jumping, extreme walking contests, a new genre of reporting called 'stunt journalism', and cycling feats. Joseph Pulitzer's popular newspaper, the World, is the primary research archive, supported by analysis of other newspapers and periodicals, vaudeville scripts, films, manuals and works of fiction. The driving question is: how did stunts in public life enact conceptions of value? I contextualise stunts in a 'crisis of value' concerning industrialisation, secularisation, recessions, the currency crisis, increased entry of women into remunerative work, immigration, and racialised anxieties about consumption and degeneration. I examine the ways in which 'stunt' connotes devaluation, suggesting a degraded form of politics, art or sport, and examine how such cultural hierarchies intersect with gender, race and class. The critical framework draws on Theatre and Performance Studies theorisations of precarity and liveness. I argue that stunts aestheticised everyday precarity and made it visible, raising ethical questions about the value of human life and death, and the increasingly interdependent nature of urban society. Stunts took entrepreneurial idealisations of risk and autoproduction to extreme, constructing identity as commodity. By aestheticising precarity and endangering lives, stunts explored a symbolic and material connection between liveness and aliveness, which provokes questions about current conceptualisations of liveness and mediatisation. I argue that while stunts were framed as exceptional, frivolous acts, they adopted the logic of increasingly major industries, such as the popular press, advertising and financial markets. Stunts became a focal point for anxiety regarding the abstract and unstable nature of value itself.

The United Nations Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards ("the New York Convention") has provided a unique legal framework for the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards and arbitration agreements. Having been adopted by 159 States at the time of this thesis, the New York Convention represents the most significant convention in the field. Having been in force almost 60 years, it is time to assess its meaning for international arbitration. This thesis first examines the contribution of the New York Convention to the development of arbitration to date and second explores whether it has a contemporary role to play. Focusing on both its contribution through its original objective and its effect on the development of a favourable attitude towards international arbitration by courts and legislators, the study demonstrates that the New York Convention has had an impact beyond that which its drafters intended. Regarding its contemporary relevance, the thesis argues that persistent issues in the enforcement of arbitral awards proves that the New York Convention has no active relevance for contributing to facilitate enforcement of arbitral awards.

Young people go to college not merely to equip themselves for competition in the workplace, but also to construct new identities and find a home in the world. This dissertation shows how, in the midst of wrenching social change, communities, too, use colleges in their struggle to reinvent and re-situate themselves in relation to other groups. As a case study of this symbolic process I focus on the City College of New York, the world's first tuition-free, publicly funded municipal college, erstwhile "Harvard of the Poor" and birthplace of affirmative action programs and "Open Admissions" in higher education. I examine five key moments between 1940 and 2000 when the college dominated the headlines and draw on journalistic accounts, memoirs, guidebooks, fiction, poetry, drama, songs, and interviews with former students and faculty to chart the institution's emergence as a cultural icon, a lightning rod, and the perennial focus of public controversy. In each instance a variety of actors from the Catholic Church to the New York Post mobilized popular perceptions in order to alternately shore up and erode support for City College and, in so doing, worked to reconfigure the larger New York public. The five episodes consist of the following: (1) In 1940 a state judge barred the philosopher Bertrand Russell from joining the faculty and a sweeping "investigation" followed that resulted in a purge of fifty allegedly Communist professors from the faculty. (2) Ten years later seven members of City College's national championship basketball team, all of them Jewish or black, were convicted of consorting with professional gamblers to fix games. (3) Then in 1969, in the midst of a mayoral primary, black and Puerto Rican students seeking greater access for members of the surrounding Harlem community seized control of City's South Campus and shut down the college for two tense weeks that were followed by a series of violent racial clashes. (4) Those events in turn ushered in the school's radical and hotly contested experiment with "Open Admissions" along with a decade of relentless media attacks, nostalgia for an imaginatively constructed golden age, and series of dramatic cuts to the college's budget and staff that occasioned the end of its century-old tradition of free tuition. (5) Finally, in 1991 one Afrocentric professor's outrageous remarks about Jews coupled with an accident at a student-sponsored fundraiser in the college gym that claimed nine young lives came---through the offices of the mass media---to stand for the anarchy and physical danger that seemed to be engulfing not only the institution but the city itself. Taken together these five moments, with their attendant tabloid scandals, ritual sacrifices, and manufactured crises, foreground the cultural dimension of City College's history and the construction---including the self-construction, even performance---of particular varieties of student and teacher, both past and present. Newspapers and their various publics were central to---indeed, constitutive of---the process by which different communities claimed disparate meanings for the institution and deployed those meanings toward their own, distinctive ends. The press provided the main stage upon which to enact bitter struggles and excommunication ceremonies and encouraged readers to use the college to reimagine themselves and their place in the changing city and nation.