Friedrich Armand Strubberg’s semi-autobiographical novel Friedrichsburg, published in Germany in 1867, is a fountain of information about the German settlements in the Hill Country of Texas established in the years 1844-1848 by a corporation of German noblemen. The noblemen safely ensconced in their comfortable estates in Germany attempted to live up to their responsibilities and supply the settlers with basic needs, but their efforts fell woefully short. In consequence, the immigrants often were thrown upon their own devices and compelled to live from what they could learn to grow or hunt in a new land with unfamiliar climate, plants, and animals. Many hundreds perished from disease, exposure, and malnutrition. But after a painful period, the German settlements took root and began to prosper; lending a Germanic stamp to the Hill Country area of Texas that persists to the present day. In Friedrichsburg, the reader encounters many dramatic stories attendant to the foundation years of Fredericksburg, Texas, 1846/1847 when Friedrich Armand Strubberg, under the assumed name Dr. Schubbert, served as the first colonial director of the town. The situations are presented vividly and entertainingly, and although the book offers a romanticized and, in this sense, a sanitized version of the immigrants’ travails, I maintain that it contains historically accurate depictions of people and events that have been largely overlooked in other accounts of the period. The dissertation offers the first complete translation of the novel. An introduction provides an overview of German immigration in Texas, a short biography of Friedrich Armand Strubberg, and a discussion of his place in literature about Texas published in Germany in the nineteenth century. Extensive endnotes document names and episodes as they appear in the text and distinguish between what is fact and what is fiction in the novel. A bibliography of works published about Texas in the nineteenth century is supplied as an appendix. / text

"Undercurrents of Urban Modernism: Water, Architecture, and Landscape in California and the American West" conducts an art-historical analysis of historic waterworks buildings in order to examine cultural values pertinent to aesthetiteics in relationships between water, architecture and landscape in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Visual study of architectural style, ornamental iconography, and landscape features reveals cultural values related to water, water systems, landscape/land use, and urban development. Part 1 introduces a historiography of ideas of "West" and "landscape" to provide a context for defining ways in which water and landscape were conceived in the United States during turn-of-the-century urban development in the American West. Part 2 provides a historical context for California waterworks with a discussion of major U.S. city waterworks from 1799 to 1893 in Philadelphia, Louisville, New York, and New Orleans. Primary architectural styles discussed are Greek Revival, Egyptian Revival, and Roman Revival. Part 3 presents the dissertation's central object of study: waterworks and hydropower architecture for the greater San Francisco Bay Area between 1860 and 1939. From substations to dams, architects who designed waterworks structures drew from historical revival, academic eclecticism, and structural design traditions. The specific waterworks structures anchoring inquiry in this chapter are two round, peripteral, neoclassical water temples built for San Francisco's water supply to mark key underground aqueduct features. I analyze these two temples--the Sunol Water Temple from 1910 and the Pulgas Water Temple from 1939--in formal terms as well as from within broader urban and historical contexts. Part 4 culminates the dissertation with a case study of two dams whose aesthetic features were obscured by unneeded buttresssing when concerns for dam safety arose after a Southern California dam failure had killed several hundred people in 1928. I inquire into a cultural ambivalence stemming that seems to stem from historical conflicts determining the relative aesthetics of "use" and "beauty" in utilitarian waterworks structures. The overall questions in this dissertation inquire into ways in which aesthetic aspects of architectural design of waterworks structures expressed cultural values regarding water, architecture, and landscape in California between 1860 and 1939. / text

THESIS ABSTRACT This thesis deals with the problematics and the role of American frontier and American West in Cormac McCarthy's border trilogy consisting of All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1999). The reading proper focuses mainly on the second novel of the trilogy, making frequent references to both the other two volumes of the trilogy and to Blood Meridian (1985), a novel directly preceding the trilogy itself. The main goal of the thesis is to demonstrate that the trilogy not only critically engages with the American nationalist ideology represented by a nostalgically conceptualized myths of the American frontier, but that it also offers its own alternative vision of the concept of the frontier and of American national identity. The thesis further claims that McCarthy's critical approach to the mythical representations of the American history bears strong resemblance to the philosophy of American pragmatism as defined by a French philosopher Giles Deleuze in his works dedicated to American thinking and culture. In his pragmatic view of American identity the frontier ceases to function in its traditional, nationalistic sense as a line of separation that divides the social and political space into binary categories, and instead it is understood as an open and...

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