Rod Serlings Twilight Zone (1959-1964) emerged during a period of American history which has since become something of myth, legend, and lore. Popularly portrayed as a kind of golden age when middle class aspirations were within reach, suburban housing affordable, and the nuclear family perfectly contented, postwar America was more accurately characterized by profound cognitive dissonances. At a time when the Cold War was understood to be first and foremost a battle of ideas, psychological marketing promoted many different facets of the American Dream. While market researchers plumbed the depths of American minds and explored their subconscious desires and insecurities to better promote goods, homes, and jobs, American consumers were generally not as well-acquainted with understanding how psychological manipulations were impacting their rapidly changing world. Consequently, a fast-growing knowledge gap began to emerge between marketers and politicians on the one hand, and the consuming public on the other. The Twilight Zone, by focusing on the dimension of mind, worked to raise viewers awareness of how their minds represented fiercely contested ground for marketers and postwar policymakers alike. Knowing that explicitly depicting socially marginalized minorities was sure to alert increasingly paranoid sponsors and networks, Serling instead focused his creative energies on white American society and its collective preservation of bigotry, prejudice, and white supremacy. By turning a critical eye toward issues permeating suburbia, space exploration, white collar work, consumerism, war, and technology, Serlings Twilight Zone appraised the priorities of white mainstream society - priorities which frequently necessitated greed, corruption, indifference, and violence. In this way, he followed the dominant television trend in making the aspirational, and seemingly wholesome, American Dream the centerpiece of his new series with one major qualification the American Dream would be contained within a nightmare. By placing the American Dream inside a nightmare, Serling attempted to raise critical thought as it related to manufactured desires, public policies, advertised products, and white utopian visions that incessantly predominated postwar life in the United States.

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This dissertation explores the African slave trade in the early South Atlantic. It considers Spainâs colonization of the Río de la Plata and Upper Peruvian hinterland and Portugalâs colonization of Angola and Brazil as mutually reinforcing initiatives. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Iberian soldiers, colonial officials, sailors, merchants, and commoners circulated between Angola, Brazil, and the Río de la Plata, forming commercial networks that directed thousands of enslaved Africans to American shores. From Buenos Aires, thousands of captives were trafficked not only to the Andean silver mining city of Potosí, but also to Santiago de Chile, Córdoba, Mendoza, and a host of spaces in the South American interior. I demonstrate how slave ownershipâand slaveryâwere more widespread than previously believed. Free and enslaved Africans were essential to the production of foodstuffs; defense; animal husbandry; and local and long-distance trades. Beyond upwardly revising estimates of the early slave trade to Brazil and the Río de la Plata, this study broadens our understanding of African experiences in the Atlantic world beyond sugar plantations and silver mines.

This project seeks to understand the transformative period in Anglo-Saxon England between the ninth to eleventh centuries. During these centuries, Anglo-Saxon kings extended their royal power through the manipulation of Scandinavian ethnicity by using the mechanisms of accommodation, integration and appeasement as well as the incorporation of female royal power. Anglo-Saxon kings such as Alfred the Great, Æthelræd the Unræd, and Cnut were challenged by various hindrances from expressing their full royal authority, including the rise of an independent nobility, economic difficulties and invasions. Despite intrinsic limitations on their rule, kings such as Alfred, Æthelræd and Cnut sought to expand their royal authority through carefully crafted political, religious and economic accommodations with Scandinavians as well as the incorporation of female royal power. Through the legal manipulation of identity constructed in law codes such as the Alfred-Guthrum Treaty and the Wantage Code, Anglo-Saxon kings integrated Scandinavian elites into the political structure of England, thereby increasing their own royal authority.

This dissertation examines theater in nineteenth-century Mexico City, using it as a lens to better understand the cityâs history, its culture, and the development of public life. Through an analysis of municipal records, account ledgers, notariesâ books, correspondence, playbills, newspapers, and civil court proceedings, it shows how theater formed a pillar of early republican statecraft, provided subsistence and investment opportunities in a flagging economy, and offered a language and a place for individuals to engage in politics and public life. Between 1830 and 1901, it argues that an age of theater emerged in Mexico Cityâa seventy-year period of unprecedented activity and energy around the performing arts. Elites supported a theatergoing culture, wealthy investors and middling entrepreneurs financed new playhouses, journalists re-imagined stage characters and content, and city residents flocked to playhouses. The study conceives of theater broadly as a cultural production, physical space, political practice, and business. In so doing, it illuminates theaterâs ties to the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the city. Theatergoing was not simply an elite leisure activity tangential to what really mattered, as the literature has treated it. Rather, theater sat at the heart of city life, and theatergoing became a regular aspect of life for a broad cross-section of urban dwellers, especially during the second half of the century. Its production and consumption inside and outside playhouses offered city residents opportunities to participate in public life. By moving theater center stage, where contemporaries understood it to be, the dissertation sheds new light on the cityâs development, its emergence as a hub in global performance networks, and its deepening integration into circum-Atlantic circulations of goods, people, and culture. It also recasts Mexicoâs nineteenth-century history, often characterized as an age of caudillos and chaos. Theater endured amidst political turmoil and economic uncertainty. More importantly, as this study shows, theater became a central referent and metaphor for the ways city residents experienced and reacted to that centuryâs challenges. Put differently, it offered the script and stage directions for the performance of nineteenth-century urban life.

This study makes use of the manorial court rolls of Dyffryn Clwyd, a cantref in Northern Wales, and the certificates of debt from London to examine the lives of two medieval usurers, Ieuan Kery and Sir William Capell, between the years 1340 to 1352 , and 1478 to 1509 . By examining the life of these two individuals who both operated one of the rarest, most socially complex occupations of his place and time, this study begins to expose the ways in which usury helped to shape the fabric of late Medieval culture in the British Isles. The singular focus of this study and the use of manorial court rolls and debt records, which make such a close focus possible, have been criticized by scholars of the period. Although this study is by nature preliminary, it serves to demonstrate the immense value of approaching old sources in new and innovative ways

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Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost approximately 1,800 square miles of land due to the subsidence of the states coastal wetlands. By the early 1970s, public officials and private citizens were starting to become aware of the crisis on the coast, and a broad agreement developed among state and federal representatives that action was needed to address the problem. Over the course of nearly forty years, policymakers in Louisiana and Washington, D.C., implemented a series of laws and regulations meant to protect vulnerable ecosystems like the states wetlands. In the 1980s, officials also started crafting policies to help restore Louisianas shrinking coastline. While considerable progress has been made to slow the subsidence, stopping or reversing coastal erosion has proven to be nearly impossible. Inefficient bureaucratic management, insufficient funding, and the failure to substantially alter land-use and water-use policies in Louisiana have undermined the states conservation and restoration efforts since the 1970s. The catastrophic consequences of Hurricane Katrina forced officials in Baton Rouge and the federal government to correct some long-standing problems, but the implementation of a fully comprehensive restoration and management plan remains piecemeal even a decade after the devastating 2005 hurricane season. This dissertation examines the broad context of the political and economic climate that contributed to the development of coastal erosion in Louisiana and closely examines the state and federal policy responses to the crisis between 1970 and 2009.

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