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Yes / This is an article examining the impact of Baltic Germans on foreign policy during the 1920s and 1930s.

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This thesis will examine possible determinants of Federal Reserve behavior during the Great Depression. It starts with the assumption that economic variables alone are unsatisfactory in determining Federal Reserve policy choices. Various explanations are then offered and examined. The role of elections, partisanship, and regional variation are examined. After these possibilities are tested, the conclusions will be analyzed and suggestions for further research will be considered. / Master of Arts

This research looks at the ethnographies Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938) by Zora Neale Hurston focusing on representations of Time and the anthropologist’s body. Hurston was an African-American anthropologist, folklorist, and novelist who conducted research particularly between the end of the 1920s and the mid-1930s. At first, her fieldwork and writings dealt with African-American communities in Florida and Hoodoo practice in Louisiana, but she consequently expanded her field of anthropological interests to Jamaica and Haiti, which she visited between 1936 and 1937. The temporal and bodily factors in Hurston’s works are taken into consideration as coordinates of differentiation between the ethnographer and the objects of her research. In her ethnographies, the representation of the anthropologist’s body is analysed as an attempt at reducing temporal distance in ethnographical writings paralleled by the performative experience of fieldwork exemplified by Hurston’s storytelling: body, voice, and the dialogic representation of fieldwork relationships do not guarantee a portrayal of the anthropological subject on more egalitarian terms, but cast light on the influence of the anthropologist both in the practice and writing of ethnography. These elements are analysed in reference to the visualistic tradition of American anthropology as ways of organising difference and ascribing the anthropological ‘Others’ to a temporal frame characterised by bodily and cultural features perceived as ‘primitive’ and, therefore, distant from modernity. Representations and definitions of ‘primitiveness’ and ‘modernity’ not only shaped both twentieth-century American anthropology and the modernist arts (Harlem Renaissance), but also were pivotal for the creation of a modern African-American identity in its relation to African history and other black people involved in the African diaspora. In the same years in which Hurston visited Jamaica and Haiti, another African-American woman anthropologist and dancer, Katherine Dunham, conducted fieldwork in the Caribbean and started to look at it as a source of inspiration for the emerging African-American dance as recorded in her ethnographical and autobiographical account Island Possessed (1969). Therefore, Hurston’s and Dunham’s representations of Haiti are examined as points of intersection for the different discourses which both widened and complicated their understanding of what being ‘African’ and ‘American’ could mean.

This thesis explores the development of Virginia Woolf’s late cultural criticism. While contemporary scholars commonly observe that Woolf shifted her intellectual focus from modernist fiction to cultural criticism in the 1930s, there has been little sustained examination of why and how Woolf’s late cultural criticism evolved during 1930-1941. This thesis aims to contribute just such an investigation to field. My approach here fuses a feminist-historicist approach with the methodology of genetic criticism (critique génétique), a French school of textual studies that traces the evolution of literary works through their compositional histories. Reading across published and unpublished texts in Woolf’s oeuvre, my genetic, feminist-historicist analysis of Woolf emphasises that her late cultural criticism developed from her early feminist politics and dissident aesthetic stance as well as in response to the tempestuous historical circumstances of 1930-1941. As a prelude to my investigation of Woolf’s late output, Chapter 1 traces the genesis of Woolf’s cultural criticism in her early biographical writings. Chapter 2 then scrutinises Woolf’s late turn to cultural criticism through six essays she produced for Good Housekeeping in 1931. Chapter 3 surveys the evolution of Woolf’s critique of patriarchy in Three Guineas (1938) through the voluminous pre-publication documents that link this innovative feminist-pacifist pamphlet to The Years (1937). Finally, Chapter 4 outlines how Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts (1941), fuses fiction with cultural criticism to debate art’s social role in times of national crisis. The close relationship between formal and political radicalism in Woolf’s late cultural criticism, I conclude, undermines the integrity of viewing Woolf’s oeuvre in two distinct phases –the modernist 1920s and the socially-engaged 1930s – and suggests the danger of using such labels in wider narratives of interwar literature. Woolf’s late cultural criticism, this thesis argues, developed from rather than rejected her earlier experimentalism.

The Works Progress Administration came to New Orleans in 1935, a time of economic uncertainty and even fear. The implementation of the relief embodied in the WPA was influenced by local factors that reinforced the existing social order at first but that left a framework through which that order could be challenged. The business of providing WPA relief also was attended by scandal and criticism. In spite of these inherent weaknesses and certain incident, the WPA left behind an enviable physical legacy that is used and enjoyed today by the citizens of New Orleans. This paper explores the roots of that legacy, some of the obstacles faced by the WPA, and how a local government, and its citizens, related and adjusted to an increasingly powerful and intrusive federal government.

Quotation, the placing of found material into a new context, always involves transforming that material. The modernist poets who first incorporated extensive quotation into poetry prioritized hierarchy, aesthetic excellence, and formal license, values that encourage us to measure a poet’s genius by the audacity with which he transforms found material. This conception of poetry as masterful arrangement proved inadequate, however, in the wake of the Great Depression, as Marxist politics, a trend toward collectivism, and a vogue for documentary forms inflected the words of others with ethical status and social significance. In Others’ Words traces the effect of the Great Depression on the quoting practice of six poets, each of whom seeks to quote in a way that sufficiently honors other voices and other experiences, selecting material for its authenticity of experience as much as for its linguistic aptness. Ezra Pound imagines a “common sepulcher” of evidence and alternates between lyric and documentary expressions of the same ideas to represent the growing conflict between his early theorizations of his quotation method and his changing sense of his quotations’ purpose. In Marianne Moore’s poems, collective, error-prone speech and a plural speaking voice denote a transition, in her career, from a poetics based on exceptional discernment to a poetics based on participation and social connection. William Carlos Williams’s most important work with quotation, not published until the 1940s, developed out of his struggle throughout the 1930s to reconcile his commitment to rendering the “American idiom” with his growing doubts about his own ability to fully comprehend others’ experience. Finally, Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, and Louis Zukofsky each embarks, during the 1930s, on a documentary project that emphasizes the limitations of a poet’s power to shape the meaning of his or her poem.