This study seeks to explore longitudinally the changing behaviors and meanings of the symbols bound to family creation, size and unity in order to understand why and how they changed. The research method fuses historical facts collected from historical literature, the data from the participant’s interviews, and the ethnology of the American family made by David Schneider (1980), using symbolic anthropology as the guiding theoretical framework. The imposed gender differentiation, religious precepts, the shifting economic models, economic recessions, World War I and World War II, intellectual and technological developments, and the ideologies accompanying these events caused changes of human behavior and the redefinition of main cultural meanings of the symbols bound to family creation, size and unity. These resulted over time in a systematic shrinking of family creation and size and caused the re-conceptualizing of family unit. Yet, numbers of American family creation and size did not reach negative extremes, as they did in other developed nations. The resisting behavior emerges from the rich ethnic diversity in the nation that offers behavioral alternatives, the people’s trust their government and the American identity rooted on the founding ideals of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

submitted by Suen Bing. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-90). / Abstract also in Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter One: --- Republicanism and Progressive Historical Interpretations / What is Republicanism? --- p.7 / Republicanism as a Guiding Philosophy in Progressive Historical Scholarship --- p.16 / Chapter Chapter Two: --- Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Democracy: A Republican Way of Thinking / How Turner's thesis related frontier conditions with democracy? --- p.20 / In what way is Turner's thesis affected by republicanism? --- p.24 / A trace of republican idealism in Turner's later articles --- p.26 / The safety valve hypothesis: A supplement to Turner's free land ´ؤ democracy relationship --- p.31 / Free land - democracy vs. Education - democracy --- p.35 / Chapter Chapter Three: --- Industrial Democracy and American Civilization: The Two Sides of Charles A. Beard's Republican Thinking / The Industrial Society (1901) --- p.42 / An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) --- p.46 / "Contemporary American History, 1877-1913 (1914)" --- p.51 / The Rise of American Civilization (1927) --- p.54 / The American Spirit (1942) --- p.58 / Chapter Chapter Four: --- William Appleman Williams' Inheritance of Progressive Historians' Republican Tradition / American Russian Relations: 1871 ´ؤ1947 and The Tragedy of American Diplomacy --- p.64 / The Contours of American History --- p.72 / Great Evasion and Empire as a Way of Life --- p.77 / Conclusion --- p.83 / Bibliography --- p.87

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

This thesis explores the ways in which modern history-writing practices reiterate race-based categories of citizenship. To investigate these practices across time, I have examined discourses produced by the United Farm Women of Alberta (UFWA) in 1925, and discourses produced by the contemporary magazine American Renaissance (AR). The UFWA were concerned with the promotion and definition of citizenship, and in so doing laid race as a foundation of Canadian identity. AR is a magazine that concerns itself with white nationalism in the contemporary United States. Drawing upon Avery Gordon and Wendy Brown’s theories of history and haunting, I have situated these discourses in imaginative relation to one another, illuminating the “past” in the present. I have also critically examined how I am complicit in reproducing the historical practices under study; as an architecture of history, haunting helps to imagine alternatives for the study of history and social life, particularly our own. / vii, 160 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm