Significance and integrity are key concepts for archaeology, and how they are judged is determined by an archaeologist’s perceptions of disturbance. This thesis explicitly considers these concepts and how they relate to evolutionary theory and National Register eligibility. A site with known disturbance was chosen to determine whether it could be judged significant assuming that there was no disturbance. Controlled surface collection, magnetometer survey, excavation and landowner interview data were used to determine whether what made the site significant had been lost due to disturbance. The results indicate that the co-mingling of occupations in the plow zone normally would have prevented the site from being determined eligible. However, because of the clusters of Gulf Formational-period diagnostics and intact Early Archaic midden, the site was determined significant. If future work were to be performed, occupation-based work focusing on the artifact clusters and the Archaic midden is recommended.

Between 1935 and 1941, fascist Italy built an empire in East Africa at a speed and intensity never before seen in the world. Making Fascist Empire Work examines how Italy was able to undertake and organize this intensive, totalizing colonization. Analyzing four colonizing enterprises – an extensive mining concession in Wallega, the Bank of Italy in Addis Ababa, itinerant truckers, and settler farmers in Shoa – reveals that Italian entrepreneurs were essential to the colonization project. They provided the know-how, labor, and financing needed to carry out the regime’s ambitious plans. Moreover, these profit- and adventure-seeking entrepreneurs adapted their enterprises to the local environmental, economic, and political circumstances. They negotiated with local Ethiopian elites and Italian authorities. They also organized their own racial hierarchies of labor in their workplaces and homes. Often, Italian entrepreneurs contravened the fascist regime’s racial apartheid in order to keep costs low and profits high. Yet, the fascist regime knew that self-interested entrepreneurs and market forces alone could not rapidly build its totalitarian empire. Thus, each case study reveals how the fascist regime created specialized parastatal entities and deployed corporatist instruments to control industries, spur development, and strictly separate Italians and Ethiopians. The net result, I argue, was what I call “fascist settler colonialism,” meaning violent empire-building, made possible by the occupation, yet dependent on unleashing private enterprise that, in turn, had to be disciplined by the corporatist state. Over the short term of the empire’s life, the fascist regime was thereby able to supercharge imperial development. Making Fascist Empire Work makes three interventions in the fields of Italian and imperial history. First, its comparative approach reveals how practices creating racial and class boundaries strategically varied across the diverse empire in relation to an industry’s labor demands and the existing socio-political structures of the Ethiopian empire. It is the first study to do so. Second, it refutes the existing scholarship’s assertion that private enterprises were insignificant to the colonization. Instead, Making Fascist Empire Work demonstrates that Italian entrepreneurs actively participated in the imperial project and were central to its success. Moreover, it provides a new account of how fascist corporatism was enacted and contested in Italian East Africa. Its third intervention speaks to imperial history more broadly. Italian East Africa demonstrated that an organized corporatist economy could undertake rapid, intense, and extensive colonial development. It challenged and inspired other imperial powers to reconsider how they approached economic development in their colonies. Ultimately, Making Fascist Empire Work raises new questions about the significance and influence of Italian corporative colonialism on other empires in the interwar and postwar years.

There is a growing phenomenon in a sector of the United States population where senior citizens and disabled persons that are deemed as homebound are becoming increasingly dependent on their caregivers and as a result, they are experiencing an evolving disconnection from their occupational identity. The problem being considered is that as older adults become homebound, they begin to receive support services for assistance with self-care and home management. From this, the experience of the homebound consumer reducing engagement in necessary tasks in the home causes a decline in functional abilities which then reduces engagement in portions of the functional tasks that they may still possess the skills to participate in safely. To address this issue, research has explored how function and restorative based training for caregivers can improve quality of life, health, and function, as well as reduce health care costs. The Home Able program is a caregiver training program designed to promote occupational engagement for persons living in the community in private residences. This program has been developed as an evidence-based health promotion program designed to increase physical and mental health of persons that are homebound. The format of the program will include individual and group format training for state funded caregivers on the positive health impact of occupational engagement. Then, homebound consumers who are participants in the Home Able program will receive a series of six weekly in-home sessions focusing on identification of barriers that are impeding participation in meaningful functional activities in the home and education on compensatory strategies that can be implemented for the homebound consumer to achieve participation in meaningful occupations. A research project has also been developed to coincide with program implementation to determine how participation in the Home Able Program will impact fear of falling, depression and self-perceived quality of life. The design of the study with compare the homebound consumer’s fear of falling, depression and self-perceived quality of life using standardized measurement tools prior to program participation, and after completion of the Home Able program. The results of this research project will help substantiate the positive health impact on functional mobility, mental health and enrollment in the Home Able program to help foster buy-in from local and national stakeholders.

Recent literature has emphasized the importance of changes in occupation, i.e. occupational mobility, for both personal and aggregate outcomes. In this study I examine the various causes and consequences of that important decision. I begin by developing a new, generalized, model of measurement error which can fully incorporate changes in discrete classification like occupational mobility. I then use this framework to show that occupational mobility has spuriously risen in the monthly Current Population Survey. I then study the consequences of occupational mobility using a high quality 2% sample of the German Social Security Data to study how wages change around occupation and employer transitions. The results are consistent with idiosyncratic matching at the occupation, but not the employer, level. For men, wages increase by 5.5 percent following a voluntary employer transition that does not involve an occupation transition and 10.1 percent following voluntary employer transition that does involve an occupation transition. I build a model where workers differ in their cognitive, manual, and interactive skills, which creates comparative advantage in certain occupations. I estimate this model and show that most of the wage gains for young workers following an occupational transition are due to improved matching of worker skill with occupation tasks, and not simply movements to higher paying occupations. I then use the estimated model to show that the matching of workers to their comparative advantage has worsened in Germany between 1975-2010. Finally, I examine the testable implications of models of search and models of learning to see if they are consistent with the facts I have developed about occupational mobility. I find that while search models can be consistent with a number of empirical facts they, by themselves, are not able to rationalize "back-and-forth" switching that is observed in the data.

The purpose of this study was to determine if there were any differences in stress levels for African-Americans working in technical and non-technical based occupations. In order to adequately address the differences in stress levels for African-Americans, this study examined the data from an existing study called the Jackson Heart Study. Based on the weekly stress of individuals when performing their occupations, information and data were collected from 3 questionnaires that were correlated with stress and occupations of African-Americans in Mississippi. These questionnaires were the Household Enumeration Form, Personal Data and Socioeconomic Form, and the Stress Form. The research design for this study was descriptive and correlational. The study was made-up of 4451 participants (3371 females and 1935 males). The average age of the participants was 55 for females and 54 for males. 57% of the participants in this study indicated that their occupation was not stressful. After the data were collected and analyzed, this study found that there was a significant relationship between occupation traits and stress levels for African-Americans working in Mississippi. This study also found that there was a statistical relationship between stress on the job and technical occupations, which suggests higher stress was found in technical based occupations. In addition, this study found that females had a 40% higher odds of stress while working in technical occupations and men. Also, this research study found that older people had lower odds of stress on the job than younger people. Overall, Jackson Heart Study participants who identified as working in technical occupations were more stressed than participants in non-technical occupations. Based on the results of this study, it was recommended for future studies to use a broader national population of Caucasian, Asia Americans, and African-Americans in the North, East, and West that were made up of diverse occupations and backgrounds to examine if there was any difference in stress levels. Also, it was also recommended that future studies use a more in-depth investigation of health issues of employees caused by the job.

The timing of Mississippian-period occupations in the North Central Hills physiographic region of Mississippi has been debated. Some researchers believe they occurred in conjunction with Late Woodland period occupations during the Early Mississippian period, while others assert they were later, in either the Late Mississippian or early Protohistoric periods. A program of systematic shovel testing, excavation and frequency seriation was used to delineate Mississippian-period occupations and test the cultural lineage between them and Late Woodland period occupations at nine sites on the Ackerman Unit of the Tombigbee National Forest.

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No description available.

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This dissertation examines US media representations of Dominicans during the American occupation of the Dominican Republic between 1916 and 1924. It argues that American media images of the Dominican Republic changed to accommodate US government policy. For example, when there was interest in annexing the country in the mid-1800s, those who were in favor of annexation depicted Dominicans as white in order to demonstrate that they could be integrated into the United States. In the early 1900s, however, when the United States wanted to prevent foreign powers from intervening in the Dominican Republic, US media representations of Dominicans were overwhelmingly black to show the need for American oversight of financial matters. Whether depicted as black or white, this dissertation argues that the primary lens the US media employed to represent Dominicans was that of underdevelopment. Subsumed within this imperial narrative of underdevelopment were malleable depictions of race and, by 1916, a new element of humanitarianism that operated under the assumption that the Dominican Republic was underdeveloped and thus in need of American guidance. Lastly, this dissertation examines the shift in the US media in 1920 as American sources began to critique the occupation. / History