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This thesis is an examination of organized labor in the United States during the 1930s. Activities of the American Federation of Labor, Industrial Workers of the World, and Congress of Industrial Workers during the decade are compared and contrasted throughout.

This project analyzes the sexual and gender politics of flight attendants, especially the men who did this work, since the 1930s. It traces how and why the flight attendant corps became the nearly exclusive domain of white women by the 1950s, then considers the various legal battles under the 1964 Civil Rights Act to re-integrate men into the workforce, open up greater opportunities for African-Americans, and liberate women from onerous age and marriage restrictions that cut short their careers. While other scholars have emphasized flight attendants' contributions in battling sexism in the courts, this project is unique in expanding such consideration to homosexuality. Male flight attendants' status as gender pariahs in the workforce (as men performing "women's work")--combined with the fact that many of them were gay--made them objects of "homosexual panic" in the 1950s, both in legal proceedings and in various forms of extra-legal intimidation. A decade later, aspirant flight attendants were participants in some of the first cases brought by men under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Their victories in the courts greatly benefited the gay community, among others, which thereby enjoyed greater freedom to enter a highly visible, public-relationsoriented corporate career. As such, my project helps to recast the legal legacy of the civil rights movement as a three-pronged reform, confronting homophobia as well as racism and sexism. Beyond legal considerations, Manhood Up in the Air also examines how both labor unions and the airlines negotiated a legal environment and public sentiment that largely condoned firing homosexuals, while nonetheless accommodating gay employees. This form of accommodation existed in the 1950s, though much more precariously than in the post-Stonewall decade of the 1970s. Thus, the project records the pre-history to the current reality, in which both corporations (with airlines at the forefront) and labor unions have become core supporters of the contemporary gay rights movement. / text

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This thesis examines the rise of image culture in the 1920’s and its impact on American national identity. I demonstrate that, perhaps surprisingly, the central figure in these debates was not a past or present prominent American but instead an indeterminate Other which is read in ambivalent ways and for varied purposes. It is the central claim of this project that in order to trace the modern American subject that emerges from the 1920s national rift, one must attend to the ways in which a felt need to view and position oneself in relation to “the Other” was essential to defining the nature and future of the nation. More specifically, I argue that the film Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925) offers a solution to this national divide by providing viewers a popular culture form of “evidence” of the Westerner’s capacity to exhibit both premodern and modern qualities. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Throughout America’s history the call for laborers has been filled by influxes of immigrants. Coinciding with the arrival of the first non-Anglo Saxon immigrants were negative attitudes about them, as they were deemed inferior and classified as lowerranking “others” by the dominant culture that needed them. Thus, the cycle of need and resentment was born to be repeated throughout the Nation’s history. In the first half of the twentieth century a shift occurred in American public perception of, and attitudes towards, immigrant groups including eastern European Jews, Italians and the Irish among others. This shift was marked primarily in terms of race: Some immigrants went from being considered black to white -- from illegitimate to legitimate by the dominant culture. One reason for the increased acceptance of these ethnic groups was a concerted campaign sponsored by the United States Government to promote an extended identity to groups that had previously been excluded from the mainstream. In particular, the goal was to create a sense of nationalism, or “Americanism,” among diasporic immigrant groups, thus encouraging their participation in the war effort. The result of such campaigns was a re-imaging of ethnic groups previously classified as non-white and a path to perceived whiteness, and thus inclusion, for them. These campaigns, formulated by the Office of War Information and executed largely by the War Advertising Council, led to a marked increase in acceptance for immigrant groups by the dominant culture. By examining social messages through visual cultural artifacts this study explores notions about race, ethnicity, whiteness and the role of communication theory and practices in constructing (imaging) an identity of otherness.” This study delineates the historical formation and subsequent partial de-construction (re-imaging) of negative depictions and some stereotypes of ethnic Americans. This research explores the sources of these attitudes and behaviors and how misconceptions, misrepresentations and centuries-old stereotypes of non-Anglo ethnic Americans have been fluid through changing social perceptions fueled, in part, by government interventions. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This thesis builds from press accounts of Bruce Springsteen’s South by Southwest keynote address, taken by many to be a renewed call to arms of the classic mantras of the rock ethos in the age of a declining recording industry. In tracing the ways the speech circulated I argue that its discourse was rearticulated toward quite different (and concerning) ends. Throughout, I aim to show the apparatuses of power that sustains the rock liberation fantasy. I read the coverage of Springsteen’s address as a therapeutic discourse meant to soothe the anxiety over the closure of agency in the age of neoliberalism. The general problematic for the thesis, then, addresses an anxiety over the collapse of freedom and as such works to offer broad reflections on the nature of radical agency in our increasingly neoliberal present. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

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