A devotion to an open and progressive interpretation of human rights and the law secured Judge Ronald N. Davies’ legacy as an unintended, yet influential activist for advancing civil rights and of the twentieth century. His views helped change the definition and meaning of judicial activism in the modern vernacular and transform it into a new notion of judicial progressivism. A biography of Davies crystallizes the meaning of the racial and civil relations across an evolving American landscape. A study of his life alters the way in which scholars and the public perceive and understand the role of the Northern Plain in shaping lasting changes in America’s progressive movements through an interdisciplinary approach of history and law. When Davies of Fargo, North Dakota, rose to the bench of the United States District Court, he ceased any formal political party affiliation and became a Constitutionalist. With an egalitarian approach to the law, he oversaw numerous court proceedings and handed down rulings with measured consideration for any case that appeared on his docket. As his federal appointment came to include cases involving the desegregation of public schools, civil lawsuits against large-scale corporations, and the Alcatraz Indian Occupation, Davies’ sphere of influence exceeded regional and Civil Rights Era boundaries and characterized him as national figure in new facets of legal precedent. His rulings challenged traditional ethics as dictated by society’s majority-consent in the law and cast him as a seminal figure that embodied the meaning and influence of the northern plains within the law and advancing civil rights and social justice in the United States. His efforts to uphold a more inclusive and equal legal standard set into motion renewed consideration of the ways in which an individual’s actions within a broader institution can stimulate a modern national consensus despite entrenched historical precedent. Therefore, Davies’ life and career reflect a historical sensibility of the role, application, and influence of law-based code of ethics. His decisions, though not intended as overt civil activism, instilled lasting social, cultural, and political change in twentieth-century civil rights.

This dissertation deploys queer theory and temporality to investigate the ways in which American authors were writing about identity at the turn of the twentieth century. I provide a more expansive use of queer theory, and argue that queerness moves beyond sexual and gender identity to have intersectional implications. This is articulated in the phrase "queer textual libido" which connects queer theory with affect and temporal theories. Queerness reveals itself on both narrative and rhetorical levels, and can be used productively to show the complex navigation between individual and national identity formation.

This dissertation explores the relationship between foreign oil capital, transnational infrastructures, and power in the Middle East through an examination of the history of the trans-border pipeline system that exported Iraq’s oil to Europe via the Mediterranean. Built in 1935 by the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), an international oil consortium jointly owned by a group of Western oil companies, the Iraq-Mediterranean pipelines ran from northern Iraq to two points on the Mediterranean coast, crossing the borders of five states. The Iraq-Mediterranean pipelines were the product of large capital investment and were constructed during a period of European imperial rule. They could not be easily moved or diverted once built. This dissertation asks, in what ways did trans-border flows of oil shape and were shaped by processes of decolonization and the emergence of independent nation states? Existing studies of Middle East oil development rarely consider the fact that oil infrastructures extended beyond the territorial boundaries of the nation-state, focusing instead on the effects of oil revenues on the political economy of oil-producing states. Rather than reading oil as a stand-in for something else, such as revenues, geopolitics, or modernity, this dissertation examines the material structures and technical organization of the oil industry itself. Drawing on extensive research in oil company archives, government archives and published materials in English, Arabic, and French, this dissertation argues that the Iraq-Mediterranean pipelines shaped temporally and spatially uneven and overlapping forms of corporate and state power during successive phases of planning, construction, and operation from the late 1920s to the early 1970s.

This project analyzes drug use in Mexico City between 1960 and 1980, the decades when the Mexican state began criminalizing common drugs like marijuana, and prosecuting the consumers of legal drugs such as toxic inhalants. In order to explain this contradiction, this dissertation assesses more than 3,000 Juvenile Court records, police files, health department and hospital documents, journal articles, drug legislation, and personal anecdotes. It argues that consumption and prosecution trends largely corresponded to socioeconomic class. Furthermore, these class-based consumption trends affected Mexican drug policies. According to the Mexican health department and penal reports examined in this dissertation, the Mexican state responded to the rise in drug use by pushing legislation to further criminalize marijuana. Yet the inner workings of that legislation tell a different story. Police records and Juvenile Court cases expose a rise in the detention and arrest of children who consumed toxic inhalants, a legal substance. The Mexican state found it more difficult to punish the children of middle-class government employees and professionals than the poor. In criminalizing poor, young drug users, the government could demonstrate its active efforts to address rising drug use. Consequently, the state created a new criminal class out of lower-class children who inhaled toxic legal substances in Mexico City. From a criminal and health perspective, this dissertation emphasizes the need to consider the impact of Mexican drug use trends on drug policy from the 1960s to the 1980s.

This dissertation examines contemporary American novelists whose depictions of how humans relate to the natural world challenge dominant Western cultural assumptions about human autonomy. My analysis centers on Marilynne Robinson, Louise Erdrich, and Richard Powers. Scholarship has largely understood these writers to be undertaking human-centered, social projects related to gender, ethnicity, and technology. However, in my reading, their works demonstrate how the formal elements of fiction—character and plot development, narrative voice and perspective, and recurring imagery—can be used to develop what I call a coextensive vision of the environment, one which shifts emphasis from the autonomous human self to a perception of how embodied individuals are embedded in larger networks and interchanges. In developing this claim, I suggest the environmental potential of the novel, a genre that has received short shrift in ecocriticism. Chapter One considers the novels of Marilynne Robinson, focusing on Housekeeping. Robinson’s nature imagery is highly metaphorical, but I argue that her writing also works on what we might call a material register: it persistently gestures toward an external world that resists enclosure through language, a natural world with which the human body is entangled. Accordingly, I argue, Robinson’s work develops an ecological vision wherein humans are coextensive with the environment. Chapter Two centers on Louise Erdrich’s boundary imagery. I first explore the recurrence of imagery of harmful divisions across Erdrich’s whole body of work. This is, I contend, a pattern that Erdrich uses to critique radical individualism. I further argue that Erdrich draws on the traditional trickster of Anishinaabe storytelling to reinvigorate coextensive connections through pleasure and humor, generating a tribal kincentric ecology emphasizing reciprocity between interrelated beings. Chapter Three closes the project by reading Richard Powers, whose work offers a more frightening vision of what it means to be inseparable from nature compared with Robinson and Erdrich: in Gain, the primary link between humans and environment involves shared toxicity. I explore how Powers’s preferred two-stranded narrative structure develops the reader’s ecological awareness. However, I propose, Gain ultimately problematizes the ethical promise of interconnection, suggesting that knowledge of coextension spurs negative affect and disengagement. / 2020-02-14T00:00:00Z

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Single women living in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America faced ever-changing, but constant, analyses of their lives. It seemed privacy was revoked when a woman chose to remain single in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, leaving them to be hyperaware and conscious of all other choices that they made in their lives. Not only was their business not theirs alone, but single women were often also defined by their lack of spouse, regardless of their accomplishments or fulfilled lives. Despite the full life that she led and ways in which her singleness allowed her to contribute to her family, friendships, and community, Julia Graydon Sharpe, a white, elite woman from Indianapolis, Indiana, was one of the many women whose legacy has been defined by her marital status. Sharpe was many things in her life: an artist and clubwoman being two of the most visible. However, it was her role as a sister, aunt, daughter, and friend that were the most fulfilling and important to her in her life as a single woman. An examination of what Sharpe saw as her defining roles within her immediate family and close friendships, as well as what coming from elite family afforded her, helps reveal the life she was able to lead and how she chose to present herself. The exploration of her many intimate roles also put into context how indispensable Sharpe’s commitment and contributions, albeit not monetary, were to her family and friends. Understanding these roles challenges the way we view the “spinsters” of the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century.

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This dissertation explores the use of new mass-media forms and technologies in early twentieth-century China to preserve and disseminate Chinese cultural heritage. It focuses on the contributions of Di Baoxian (狄葆賢 1873–1941), a publisher of art and Buddhist texts who established one of the earliest photography studios in Shanghai and a publishing house for art, the Youzheng Press (有正書局). Di pioneered the use of collotype reproduction to publish traditional Chinese art and founded the major newspaper Shibao, through which he preserved traditional literary genres in the form of newspaper columns. He was also interested in the practice of ghost photography to investigate supernatural elements associated with Buddhism and provide scientific evidence for these phenomena. This study situates Di’s work within the context of other art and Buddhist publishers and examines the emerging public art arena and political press as key sites for legitimizing Chinese Buddhism and creating new images of China’s past at a pivotal moment in the country’s history. The turn of the nineteenth century saw China’s territory partitioned among imperial powers, leading to the plundering of artistic treasures by rampaging armies and art collectors. Meanwhile, political reformers advocated art education to combat what they saw as superstitious Chinese religions obstructing China’s emergence as a powerful modern state. Despite these challenges, Buddhist literati like Di saw the miraculous aspects of Chinese religions as fully compatible with art education, modern science, and technology. Engaging with Victorian science and spiritualism, they used new technologies like photography to investigate supernatural phenomena associated with Buddhism, seeking to explain and substantiate them with evidence. Visualizing the seemingly invisible through practices like ghost photography became central to their efforts to preserve China’s cultural heritage amid the fall of the Qing empire (1644–1911). This dissertation argues that visual media became the preferred mode of authenticating the past and establishing a common Chinese culture in the early Republic, marking a shift away from a text-based literati culture. It brings Buddhist studies into dialogue with histories of art, print culture, and science and technology to explain how mass media and public art culture emerged in early twentieth-century China, how the preservation of art and literature became linked to Buddhist culture, and how Buddhist literati engaged with global trends of spiritualism, science, and media technologies.

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The aim of the text is a description of the causes of creation, functioning and especially activities, of "Moravian" hidden Church. For these purposes 16 interviews were collected using oral history method. These interviews were analyzed through Grounded theory method. As the basic factors affecting the activity of "Moravian" hidden Church the analysis indicated: the degree of openness of activities and measure of their own individual initiative. The thesis consists of five chapters. The introduction presents state of research, described the sources from which it was drawn, it also presented the methodology and definitions based on the methodology. The second chapter introducesthe basic terms fundamental for conceptual point of view. The third chapter describes the context changes and trends within the Catholic Church in the twentieth century, chronologically, of course, it also describes the situation of the Catholic Church in communist Czechoslovakia. The fourth chapter in the first part deals with hidden Church phenomenon in Czech landsand then brings the history, specifics and characteristics of "Moravian" branches, including the integration process. Then it analyzes the hidden church activities of "Moravian" branches, including theoretical model. The conclusion summarizes the findings arising from...