This dissertation examines the 1916 US occupation of the Dominican Republic to analyze how US and Dominican stakeholders used public schools to disseminate their notions of Dominican citizenship. Drawing on correspondence and memos from the Department of Public Instruction in the Dominican Republic and US military government, as well as periodicals and newspapers from both countries, this dissertation examines how US officials, education administrators, and guardians engaged in these efforts. Although the US military government used schools to exert state control, Dominicans individually and collectively redirected these state institutions to serve their needs and to negotiate their relationship to the state. Schools were central to how both Americans and Dominicans of all classes articulated, circulated, and practiced ideas about membership to and within the Dominican nation. From plans to create US allies in an expanding US empire to the formation of an economically productive “mulatto” rural peasantry and a cultured and informed citizenry, US officers in the military government as well as Dominican education administrators and guardians, used public schools to realize their imaginings for the Dominican nation.

This dissertation explores the path of Tibet’s economic integration with China in the first half of the twentieth century. It particularly examines the borderland region of Kham that encompasses parts of present-day Sichuan, Qinghai, and Yunnan. Drawing on borderland histories and bringing together Tibetan and Chinese archival sources, it focuses on indigenous institutions and local economic practices in order to demonstrate that the twentieth-century Sino-Tibetan integration was mediated primarily by Tibetan economic institutions and actors. While previous scholarship has examined the history of Kham in relation to Chinese state-building practices, this dissertation acknowledges the equally important place of Tibetan state-building practices and their impact on the region. As a borderland, Kham was caught between two modernizing states with conflicting agendas. Understanding its economic history, I argue, requires a direct engagement with the Tibetan financial and monetary structures, taxation practices, and labor regimes that not only dominated life Kham but also conditioned the development of the Chinese state itself in the frontiers. Chinese officials frequently collided, clashed, and collaborated with local Tibetan leaders, while Chinese merchants and companies engaged in trade and partnered with and worked alongside Tibetan merchant companies, whose economic reach extended from Shanghai to Calcutta. This dissertation focuses on four main institutions to rethink this history on the Chinese borderlands by focusing on the indigenous Tibetan institutions and structures: ulak conscript labor, currency, monasteries, and merchant companies. All four of these institutions were rooted in Tibetan socio-economic practices and were critical in the transformation of Tibetan society in the Sino-Tibetan borderland. The economic interconnectedness of the twentieth century and the increased links between Tibet and China brought a simultaneous and seemingly contradictory economic trajectory to Tibet. As the Chinese presence on the plateau increased, so did the power of Tibetan economic institutions, for the Chinese government, military, and merchants had to rely on them to exist. In a politically and economically fragmented environment, Tibetan institutions challenged state building efforts and thrived by asserting their own political, religious, and economic power across the Tibetan Plateau and beyond. A history of Tibetan economy as seen and written through the eyes of the Tibetans offers a new perspective to not only rethink modern Chinese history, but also the present day in which the Tibetan institutions still continue to mediate social and economic life on the fringes of the People’s Republic of China.

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The purpose of this dissertation is to document the evolution of Moldavian violin performance practice from the middle ages through the twentieth century and examine the major influences and significant musicians that shaped its development over time. My primary sources include excerpts from anthologies, textbooks, and periodicals, as well as audio and video clips; in most cases, the original language is Romanian or Russian and I will provide a translation if none is given in the original source.I will begin by investigating the emerging role of the violin in medieval musical ensembles and exploring the origins of Moldovan musical folklore in art, literature and culture. A discussion of lăutari (a class of musicians) is fundamental to understanding the cultural and societal roots of the taraf (a group of lăutari) and the muzica lăutărească (music of the lăutari) to help differentiate this style of music and the musicians who played it from Romanian peasant music and other folk music traditions in the region. I will show how the movement of the lăutari into cities helped familiarize people with the muzica lăutărească, normalizing and establishing it in popular culture and bringing notoriety to exceptionally talented lăutari. Next, I will examine the professionalization of violin education beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the ways in which the establishment of musical societies expanded exposure to professional performers and opportunities for education through the founding of public and private music schools. This process created a hierarchy of skilled foreign performers and teachers who raised up a generation of local musicians who became performers and teachers in Moldova and whose students became performers and teachers all around the world, some of them attaining international acclaim. I will highlight the societies, schools, teachers and performers who were most influential in helping to grow this performance practice architecture. Nineteenth and twentieth century geopolitics – changing national borders and colonial influences in the region – shaped the development of violin performance practice in Moldova which came to favor Eastern European technique and style. The characteristics of muzica lăutărească, and the centuries in which the lăutari refined their skills and abilities primed them to prefer Eastern European music. I will share examples that illustrate this preference in both audiences and performers of the time. Finally, I will focus on contemporary Moldavian violinists whose careers demonstrate the culmination of these factors that have shaped the evolution of Moldavian violin performance practice. These award-winning, internationally famous violinists are actively exporting a centuries-in-the-making home-grown performance practice that is both diverse and unique, taking its place among the best performance practice traditions in the world. / Music Performance

“Women’s Celebrity in Canada: Contexts and Memoirs, 1908-2011” is equal parts cultural history and literary analysis. It examines the cultural contexts and conditions that shaped the emergence and development of modern celebrity in English Canada, focusing in particular on the role of mass media and bureaucratic policy in the production, dissemination, and consumption of celebrity by Canadians across the twentieth century. Reading celebrity as a function or mode of being and moving in the public sphere, this project historicizes women’s access to that sphere: it examines how ideological constructions of gender and fame have shaped how women in Canada have been able to access and use the tools and technologies of celebrity, and it argues that these conditions have had an impact on how women represent themselves in public life-writing texts. These celebrity autobiographies, this project demonstrates, not only narrate gendered experiences of celebrity but, in their rhetorical strategies and publication conditions, reveal the cultural climate of being and speaking as a famous woman at different historical junctures. In tracing the trends, tactics, and experiments in self-representation over the century, this project is able to uncover and examine the ideological and cultural pressures exerted on public women to perform particular identities and how these women attempted to manage, contest, and negotiate these conditions. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / "Women's Celebrity in Canada: Contexts and Memoirs, 1908-2011" examines the autobiographies produced by famous Canadian women across the twentieth century. It contextualizes the production of these texts by documenting the conditions under which women cultivated fame in Canada. The autobiographies of these women are read as tools for managing celebrity and their form and content is examined for what they can tell us about the condition of being and speaking as a famous woman at different historical junctures.

This dissertation traces the history of punk rock and the birth and progression of the “punk ethos,” the principles and stylistic choices that characterized punk as a subculture and lifestyle of which music was a part. It argues that the punk ethos emerged as a result of two interrelated tensions within punk – the first between an inclusive vision of punk that welcomed new people and an exclusive vision that aimed, for various reasons, to limit the genre’s appeal to a select few. The second tension that defined the punk ethos related to the question of whether punk would be an ironic, satire-laden artistic movement or a sincere social movement with genuine goals. The early New York punk ethos expressed a mostly apolitical commitment to artistic freedom. It reveled in humor and sarcasm, and some punks dabbled in ironic usage of bigoted and fascistic language and symbolism. In the eighties, influential magazine editor Tim Yohannan hoped to convert punk into a left-wing political mass movement. He used his platform and resources to promote bands that adhered to his preferred message and aesthetic. His tactics produced a backlash in the nineties, as punk artists – many of whom had been friends of Yohannan’s – saw mainstream success. Fearing such exposure would dilute the genre’s political power, Yohannan turned against some of his friends. Yohannan’s influence waned, and punk’s nineties success drew new battle lines between supporters of an inclusive punk ethos seeking to expand punk’s audience and supporters of an exclusionary punk ethos that hoped to narrow punk’s appeal by alienating potential fans with racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Representative of the latter was Vice magazine, whose cofounder, Gavin McInnes, maintained for years that his bigoted statements were ironic, before revealing the sincerity of his views by founding the neo-fascist organization the Proud Boys in 2016. The trajectory of punk over the past five decades reveals much about irony and its risks in American society at large.

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