This thesis investigates the geography in and of Victorian scientific practice by examining the Zambesi Expedition (1858-1864), which was led by the Scottish explorer David Livingstone. A team of assistants accompanied Livingstone: Dr. John Kirk, Dr. Charles Meller, Thomas Baines, Richard Thornton and Charles Livingstone. The official purposes of this expedition, funded by the British Foreign Office, were to catalogue the natural resources of the regions adjacent to the Zambezi River in order to identify new sources of raw materials for British industry and to introduce commercial markets to supplant the slave trade. The scientific results of the Zambesi Expedition have never been catalogued. Only limited attention has been paid to the ways in which science was made in the field and how it returned to Britain In order to address these issues, a survey was made of relevant scientific literature to identify published analyses of the data and specimen collections produced by the Expedition’s staff. Extant specimen collections were located and examined along with archival records and correspondence. The combined manuscript and material evidence reveals that scientific concerns were an important justification for the Expedition. Fieldwork practices are examined in depth and an ideology of technology, expressed in different ways, is shown to have structured the encounters between the British and the locals. The Expedition’s members based their assumed superiority upon technological skill, especially their abilities to understand the environment and to command power—in terms of steam navigation, instrumental authority and the naming of natural productions. Power differentials were apparent in the field when the information possessed by local informants was required for the success of the scientific goals of the expedition. Credibility in the field became a tenuous quality negotiated between local informants, explorers and the metropolitan scientific community. The expedition’s members, as interpreters, were required to navigate the social and physical spaces of the field and the metropolis in order to produce and present credible knowledge. The thesis examines for the first time elements of the reception of the expedition by considering the publication of its scientific results. Critics’ voices are used to uncover those attitudes of the time that judged explorers—and this expedition—according to their prior experiences, social connections and field skills. The work of the Expedition, then, was performed in different spaces and at different scales; operating within and between the field and metropolis and actively linking local practices to global networks. These multivalent practices enabled and circumscribed a British construction of African nature.

I will analyze the transcript from the 2000 BPAC meeting on the reevaluation of the MSM deferral policy and will elucidate the role that scientific data, specifically the data associated with NAT, plays in the 2000 deliberations surrounding the MSM deferral. This examination reveals that while scientific data did play a significant role in the decision making process of the BPAC there were also a number of other factors that influenced their deliberations as well. Ultimately what I will argue is that there were two different platforms present in the meeting and that each platform performs and enacts the body and blood of the donor differently. One platform is all about the inclusionary principles of blood donation and is most concerned by the potential for discrimination toward the body of the donor. The other platform is all about risk regulation and economics and is most concerned about how the body and blood of the donor will affect the safety and integrity of the blood supply. These platforms are not perspectival or dependent on view; this is not an epistemological argument but rather, an ontological one that concerns the reality and materiality of the situation, not the perspective. Thinking about these two platforms gives a handle to the nature of this controversy and contextualizes the committee’s decision to continue with the MSM deferral.

<p> This dissertation examines the role of the Federal Reserve System in the formation and conduct of American foreign relations between the Second World War and the Korean War. Specifically, it seeks to understand why Fed officials willingly subordinated monetary policy to the priorities of war finance during the former conflict, but actively fought for greater policy autonomy during the latter. Using a constructivist bureaucratic politics approach it examines how American central bankers understood the economic and political implications of both domestic and international policy developments. Drawing upon the perceived lessons of the interwar years, Fed officials believed that economic prosperity was a critical feature of a stable and peaceful international system. At the same time, however, they believed the situation was more complicated than a simplistic causal relationship whereby greater domestic growth resulted in greater international peace and prosperity. Instead, central bankers recognized that events in either the domestic or international political or economic arenas, if improperly handled, threatened to upset the delicate balance between prosperity and peace. The belief in these fundamental interconnections, while often not explicitly expressed, provided a coherent and logical guide to Fed policy, during the era, informing many of its internal debates and positions. This dissertation, therefore, represents the first attempt to understand the role of the American This dissertation examines the role of the Federal Reserve System in the formation and conduct of American foreign relations between the Second World War and the Korean War. Specifically, it seeks to understand why Fed officials willingly subordinated monetary policy to the priorities of war finance during the former conflict, but actively fought for greater policy autonomy during the latter. Using a constructivist bureaucratic politics approach to foreign policy analysis it examines how American central bankers understood the economic and political implications of both domestic and international policy developments. Drawing upon the perceived lessons of the interwar years, Fed officials believed that economic prosperity was a critical feature of a stable and peaceful international system. At the same time, however, they believed the situation was more complicated than a simplistic causal relationship whereby greater domestic growth resulted in greater international peace and prosperity. Instead, central bankers recognized that events in either the domestic or international political or economic arenas, if improperly handled, threatened to upset the delicate balance between prosperity and peace. The belief in these fundamental interconnections, while often not explicitly expressed, provided a coherent and logical guide to Fed policy, during the era, informing many of its internal debates and positions. This dissertation, therefore, represents the first attempt to understand the role of the American Federal Reserve System as an active participant in foreign policy-making, including its involvement in the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, as well as discussions over the 1946 British Loan, and the Marshall Plan. Additionally, this study bridges the gap between domestic and foreign affairs, demonstrating the critical interrelationships between those two areas. </p>

No description available.

<p>In American letters, the Civil War represented a decisive break in literary form, a shift from interiority to exteriority. Sentimentalism harnessed the transformative effects of aesthetic feeling to galvanize political opinion in antebellum America, whereas realist and regionalist writing's empiricist attention to surface and appearance represented a reaction against sentimentalism. Yet postbellum literature is nothing if not a sustained meditation on how the feeling, sensate body negotiates the abstraction of citizenship and political life.</p><p>The paradoxes presented by black emancipation, immigration, and women's suffrage forced what today we consider the period's most canonical authors, from Emily Dickinson to W.E.B. Du Bois, to confront the contradictory feelings provoked by a democratic nation that excluded most of its citizens from their fundamental rights. The taste of Ellis Island, Henry James warned in The American Scene, "will be forever in [the] mouth" of the citizen, who must share "the intimacy of his American patriotism with the inconceivable alien." James's literal distaste for immigrants raises the stakes of what it means to locate the experience of belonging neither inside nor outside the body, but at its sensory orifices, its porous thresholds. The issue of corporeal intimacy manifested in aesthetic forms that made the senses legible across linked areas of nineteenth-century literary production: from the cookbook (Russell's Domestic Cookbook) and local color fiction (Chopin's The Awakening), to utopian novels (Bellamy's Looking Backward), autobiographies (Keller's The Story of My Life) and the apparently tasteless lyric poems about spiritual hunger (Dickinson's poetry). Senses of Belonging seeks to show how postbellum American literature, in all its forms, transformed civic abstraction into a sensate experience.</p><p>Senses of Belonging builds on and seeks to advance work on embodied citizenship in the broad area of cultural studies by showing how taste, touch, smell, sight and sound articulate otherwise intangible feelings of national belonging. To do so, each chapter is devoted to a single sensation, thereby placing literary treatment of each sensation in the context of political, scientific, and philosophical debates about citizenship. This structure helps draw attention to how each sense perception uniquely registered the multi-faceted experience of belonging in the wake of the Civil War, the bloodiest event Americans had yet experienced. The project's focus on literary form and sense experience is also historical, as it traces modes of national affiliation from the problem of black emancipation during the Civil War, to the "Negro Problem" during Reconstruction, to what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called the "problem of the color line" at the turn of the twentieth century. This chronological arrangement both reframes existing periodizations of nineteenth-century American literature and adds dimension to what is often referred to as the "Gilded Age."</p><p>What emerges from this methodology is a literary analysis of how seemingly disparate and unconnected nineteenth-century American writers shared a central preoccupation with sensory experiences of, and the emotional effects on, everyday civic life. This study crosses disciplinary boundaries in order to chart connections among nineteenth-century writers and thinkers: anthropology, philosophy, and physiology among others. The questions that organize this dissertation are fundamentally literary, for Senses of Belonging demonstrates that the senses do not exist prior to or outside of language, but rather are constituted through literature's rich imaginings.</p> / Dissertation

Physiognomy is generally assumed to be, and has been historicized as, the science of judging human character according to the features of the face. However, the type of physiognomy favoured by seventeenth-century English authors was one which adapted the Aristotelian claim that physiognomy be a full-body study. This project explores how physiognomic focus on the entire body – from the forehead, fingers and feet to the breast, belly and back – was shaped by contemporary religious and “scientific” legitimating claims, and how it interacted with the century’s anxieties regarding disorder and the self. The implicit suggestion that few bodies and the souls which helped shape them were perfectly symmetrical and, by extension, virtuous, illustrated human variety and depravity and stressed the need for self subordination. Only through reason and God’s grace, it was argued, could humans moderate the interconnected and essentializing influences of sin, the stars and the humours, and thereby embody the godly values of truth, virtue and harmony. The full-bodied practice of seventeenth-century physiognomy simultaneously emphasized human uniqueness and God’s omnipotence, and was both a part and product of predominant tensions and mentalities.

There is a substantial amount of existing literature that focuses on the revolutionary events of 1989 in East-Central Europe. Yet, there are few comparisons which apply a comparative-historical approach to a small set of cases. A large body of existing literature provides the ideal situation for a comparative-historical study. This thesis will test the utility of applying a comparative-historical methodological approach to the events of 1989 in four countries in East-Central Europe. The four countries are paired into two cases. The case of Poland and Hungary is compared with the case of Bulgaria and Romania. A theoretical frame of reference is developed from previous comparative-historical studies of revolutionary events, criticisms of them, and the general theoretical debates which they generate. This frame of reference incorporates a broad range of variables, and is used to inform the application of the method. Differences (and similarities) between the cases are then investigated, and the utility of the method assessed. Additionally, the application of the method allows some current theoretical and conceptual debates concerning the East- Central European events to be confronted. Part 1 of the thesis applies a comparative-historical method of analysis to the cases up to, and including some aspects of the 1989 events. In Part 2, patterns of difference between the cases are identified in terms of revolutionary forms and outcomes. Following the logic of the method common factors are identified as potential contributing factors to the collapse of communism, while patterns of difference suggest that the political, economic and social 'nature' of the communist systems had an impact on the forms of change and their outcomes. It is recognised that the comparative-historical approach utilised in this thesis has limitations. However, the method is shown to be useful for identifying common factors across cases, and significant variations between cases, which can generate potential explanation, and provide better understanding of such revolutionary phenomena as that which occurred in East-Central Europe in 1989.

Nanomechanics emerged as chemists and physicists began fabricating nanoscale objects. However, there are some materials that have neither been fabricated nor mechanical investigated at the nanoscale, such as rhodium. Rhodium is used in many applications, especially in coatings and catalysis. To contribute to the understanding the nano-properties of this important material, rhodium was fabricated and mechanically investigated at the nanoscale. The nanopillars approach was employed to study size effects on mechanical properties. Nanopillars with different diameters were fabricated using electroplating followed by uniaxial compression tests. SEM was used as a quality control technique by imaging the pillars before and after compression to assure the absence of buckling, barrelling, or any other problems. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and SEM were used as microstructural characterization techniques, and the energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) was used as the chemical characterization technique. Due to substrate induced effects, only the plastic region of the stress-strain curves were investigated, and it was revealed that rhodium softens with decreased nanopillar diameter. This softening/weakening effect was due to the nanocrystallinity of the fabricated pillars. This effect is consistent with the literature that demonstrates the reversed size effect of nanocrystalline metals, i.e., smaller is weaker. Further studies should focus on eliminating the substrate effect that was due to the adhesion layers between Rh and the silicon substrate being softer than Rh, consequently, causing Rh to sink into the adhesion layer when compressed and thus perturbing the stress-strain curve. Moreover, further investigation of other properties of Rh is required to achieve a comprehensive understanding of Rh at the nanoscale, and to render it suitable for specific, multivariable applications.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, San Francisco, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-05, Section: A, page: 1940. Adviser: Gay Becker.

Zugl: Münster (Westfalen), Universität, Diss., 1989. / Includes bibliographical references and index.