Electricity played a central role in imagining and crafting Mexico's path to modernity from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Since the late 19th century, Mexican officials pursued the goals of order and progress, enrolling science and technology to help rationalize and modernize the nation, its economy, and society. The electrification of the country's capital was seen as a crucial step in bringing it to the level of modern European and American cities. Electricity as a primary engine of modern society permeated all aspects of life traversing histories of the city, transportation, labor, business, engineering, women, agriculture, medicine, death, public celebrations, nightlife, advertising, literature, architecture, to name a few. Taking technology as an extension of human lives, I argue that in their everyday life, in public and private spaces, government officials, technocrats, lawyers, doctors, business owners, housewives and ordinary citizens both sold and consumed electricity. They did so by crafting a discourse for an electrified future; and by shaping how the new technology was to be used. I examine newspapers, cookbooks, novels, women's magazines, traveler's accounts, memoirs, poems, songs, court, government and company records to show how by debating, embracing, rejecting, appropriating and transforming this technology, Mexicans actively shaped their country's quest for modernity.

This thesis draws on oral histories to explore the lives of the Carolina Piedmont's farm to factory families from the 1880s through 1930s. Utilizing gender and race as analytical tools, it examines how women lived everyday life on the farm and in the mill, how the blurring of the sexual division of labor by women challenged southern farming masculinity that was protected by gendered language and public silence, and how social and economic changes in the mill undermined the language and silence of the farm. In so doing, this thesis provides an understanding of the farm to factory adjustment within the context of an examination of masculinity as an historical, ideological process. As cultural conceptions of masculinity changed with economic shifts from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture to millwork, women's cash-producing work, which had been hidden on the farm, was made visible by a daily wage in the mill.

The history of the New Jersey chapter of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) uses a combination of oral history and archival research to outline the events, figures, and main achievements of the chapter from 1975 to 2005. The chapter was founded through the efforts of a number of individuals who were interested in having a local chapter and a regional presence for information science community of New Jersey. The history was originally published as a hand-numbered limited edition of 100 copies distributed at the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the chapter in February 2006.

Related Work: Dalbello, M. 2002. Franz Josef's Time Machine: Images of Modernity in the Era of Mechanical Photoreproduction. Book History 5: 67-103. Dalbello, M., and A. Spoerri. 2006. Statistical Representations from Popular Texts for the Ordinary Citizen, 1889-1914. Library & Information Science Research 28 (1:2006): 83-109. Podcast of the talk available at: http://www.sir.arizona.edu/resources/podcasts/dalbello_20061011.mp3 / This handout accompanies a podcast of invited presentation given at the University of Arizona, School of Information Resources and Library Service Brown Bag History & Philosophy of Information Research Series (Tucson, AZ, October 11, 2006). The talk focused on visual statistics from the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. These popular forms of quantitative argumentation are examined from the point of view of the involvement of print industry in the shaping of and dissemination of public policy and the discourse of rational management and the modern state in the Habsburg empire on the eve of its dissolution. EXTENDED ABSTRACT: Statistical representations in the popular almanacs published at the end of the nineteenth century in the Habsburg Empire are an early prototype of visualizing statistical data for popular consumption and informing the public of an ethnically and linguistically differentiated society. These naturalistic and culturally rich visualizations enabled ordinary citizens to acquire knowledge â using simple visual reasoning skills, reliance on mental models and narrative conventions. The visualization of statistics is accompanied by verbalization, which presents a parallel mode of quantitative reasoning. These verbalizations exemplify the language of practical mathematics: the problem is generated in relation to the setting and located in everyday activities of the lived-in world of the implied viewers. The presentation will focus on these verbalizations of visual statistics, combining cognitive approach with historical and cultural interpretation to examine how rhetorical forms attached to practical mathematical reasoning can be related to cognition as socially situated activity. The connection of verbalizations to visual sense-making in these early statistical representations for popular consumption exemplify the construction of the concept of â informationâ in modernity and explore the effects on the visual regime represented by statistical information of older verbal forms of quantitative reasoning.

Classification is ubiquitous. It is present in almost every aspect of your life. There is the classification of your race on your birth certificate and, ultimately, the classification of the cause on your death certificate. In between you may be paid according to your job classification and the American Time Use Survey Activity Lexicon will classify how you spend your unpaid time. We also have classifications for mental disorders, for planets, for hurricanes, even for snowflakes. Of course we are most familiar with bibliographic classifications, the Dewey Decimal Classification, the Library of Congress Classification, and the Universal Decimal Classification paramount among them. What does this ubiquity mean for us and where did it come from? This paper will trace a brief history of the common structure of these classifications and their manifestations and ramifications in our world.

This is an introduction for the thematic issue, "Print Culture in Croatia," at: http://www.hkdrustvo.hr/datoteke/162 / This theoretical paper explores the theme of periphery and the borderlands and outlines the program for a new and transnational approach to the study of book culture in Croatia. Starting with a problem of fragmentation of Central European book histories, the essay argues how this could be turned into an opportunity to apply comprehensive and comparative approaches, using cultural area and comparing isomorphism of documentary practices rather than following the commonly used linguistic criteria (the national vernacular). European identity has been central to the Croatian construction of identity, and this can provide a broader framework for resolving the problem of how to construct a national history that acknowledges its status as boundary culture. If the European periphery is to claim its own cultural discourse, this will have to be through the controversial, ideological, and difficult task of cultural revision in which it will have to ex-territorialize itself and abandon a dream in which the national vernacular assumes a major function in language and society. This will not be possible without understanding the borderlands and an acceptance of its unique role in which dualities need to be accepted as an epistemology for boundary histories to assume significance within the dominant discourses of culture. In the dualities and multiplicities of the borderlands there arise counter-hegemonic interpretations, and the periphery can be validated by revealing the patterns of the center, connection to other traditions, and its own uniqueness at the same time. The thematic program for the study of Croatian print culture as boundary cultures is outlined as well.

This thesis' case studies examine the critical roles played by personal power and private armies in the late Roman empire. Chapter 1 examines alleged military corruption in fourth-century C.E. north Africa, arguing that the imperial government's power under the Dominate was diffused among competing interest groups within Roman society, whose interests were not always conducive to the security of the empire as a whole. Chapter 2 argues that bandit-ridden Isauria in Asia Minor was apparently successfully integrated into the imperial system, yet relied heavily on local personal power to control its violence-prone population. Chapter 3 argues that Roman pursuit of private or factional power sealed Rome's loss of the Gallic provinces in the fifth century. Together, these three case studies argue that the later Roman empire was significantly influenced by internal divisions and private power, which were just as important as foreign, 'barbarian' influences in determining the empire's fate.

This dissertation examines the lives and wartime resistance of a group of forty-one Nisei men (Americans of Japanese ancestry) who resisted the draft as a means of protesting their incarceration during World War II. While serving time in the same federal prison for violating Selective Service laws, they became acquainted for the first time and remained life-long friends after the war's end. They supported each other for more than sixty years amidst pressure to hide their identities as resisters, because the majority of Nisei preferred to forget this chapter in American history. This group called themselves the "Tucsonians," and this dissertation begins to tell their story. This study is based on oral histories and archival research and examines citizenship as a contested relationship between individuals and the state.

The dissertation complicates the familiar narrative about the coming of the Civil War in American national history by exploring how several Native American groups participated in the conflicts of Kansas Territory.The creation of Kansas in the lands reserved for removed tribes brought fervent local negotiation over land and treaty rights between Indians and whites. Most Indians were forced to select new options and allegiances by the impositions of white settlers' agendas and federal initiatives. Rather than hapless victims of settler manipulation, members of several reservation communities on the Kansas-Missouri border, among a total of twenty-six tribes, vied for political and legal control in ways that shaped and salvaged the legal survival and identities of these tribal nations.The dissertation examines how two members of the Wyandot community negotiated their identities around divergent American discourses of race and ethnicity, how the Christian Moravian Indian community contested the terms of their own future collective place and identity, how the New York Indians vied for treaty rights in competition with settlers' claims groups, and how the Delaware Indians responded to legal violations by whites. The multi-faceted conflicts left many Indians to choose sides between competing white political partisans and between a future of U.S. citizenship or separate tribal collectivity. Over these chapters, Indians negotiate their own individual or group identities by the maintenance or expansion of particular discourses of difference. The choices and discourses related to Indian collectivity were, in part, colonial legacies that informed tribal nationalism and identity later in time.The importance of territorial Kansas is not simply a battle between white partisans over the fate of slavery and democratic government, but also a critical struggle between Indians and whites that re-defined racial and ethnic identities and collective rights of Native peoples during the Civil War era. Manifestations of difference developed among and between Indians in the wake of Kansas. This process illustrates how `paths of disunion' shaped the collective histories and the survival of several American Indian tribes, in ways reflective of the conditions, choices, and logics that many more Indian peoples faced after the Civil War.

In the wake of the Mexican Revolution, the new State sought to reinvigorate and civilize Mexico City through a series of urban reforms and public works. This dissertation focuses on the intersection of revolutionary reform and the formation of urban space by asking how revolutionary leaders -concerned about acceptable roles for women--envisioned a new city, and how women of different social classes contested these ideas. Through a study of performance and visual culture, I analyze the depiction and concern over "public women," to understand larger debates about gender and urbanization in Mexico City during the 1920s and 1930s.After World War I, a global ideal of the New Woman emerged through which women claimed both political and social mobility. This ideology was articulated through a radically different aesthetic of femininity that postulated a new way of discerning physical beauty. The Deco body, as I call this phenomenon, marked a shift from the ideal of full-figured female bodies to the sleek, elongated lines that dominated nascent fashion and beauty industries, populated the pages of the city's popular magazines, and structured the imagined metropolis, a city where modernity literally was seen and debated in terms of acceptable forms of femininity. By looking at what and who constituted spectacle, I examine how the visibility and invisibility of women in public space influenced urban reform.The Revolution created some new spaces in which women could exercise agency, yet by the mid 1930s, this window of opportunity gradually closed. Despite large cross-class alliances, mobilization, and activism, women did not achieve either gender parity or the right to vote. Modern ideas of femininity ran up against the "cult of masculinity" that glorified war heroes as the quintessential Revolutionary Family. Gender issues occupied an ambiguous place in context of the reformist agenda of the new leadership that sought to return women to traditional roles of wife and mother. In contrast, the Deco bodies of the stage served to symbolize Mexico City's claim to modernity, bridged the gap between Indigenismo and Mestizaje, and paved the way for a mestizo modernity.