Neither indigenous nor exclusive to Florida, the orange has nevertheless become an international symbol for the state. This connection between product and place appears in cultural materials regarding Florida. In fact and fiction the orange has operated as metaphor and synecdoche for an Edenic Florida. This thesis analyzes how the orange came to represent a "natural" Florida through the conflation of the commercial product with the state's history by way of political and marketing puffery. A litany of citrus advertisements, tourist ephemera, and historical associations regarding the state acknowledged and expanded the connections between the orange, improved health, and Florida. A critical thirty-year period between 1930 and 1960 solidified these connections through major shifts in the Florida citrus industry and American culture. These shifts caused the state history and the oranges' history to become irrevocably entwined.

Cette thèse se concentre sur les développements de la société juive belge dans la période avant 1940. La communauté juive belge, telle qu'elle s'est développée au cours des XIXe et XXe siècles, est le résultat d'une succession de "vagues migratoires juives". Contrairement aux autres communautés juives d'Europe occidentale comme celles de France, d'Allemagne, de Grande-Bretagne ou des Pays-Bas, la population juive belge n'avait pas de racines historiques fortes ni de tradition historique établie. Un premier " mouvement de migration juif " (1815-1880) a créé les bases du Judaïsme Consistorial belge. Ces migrants juifs de France, des Pays-Bas et d'Allemagne se sont installés en Belgique et ont créés les fondations institutionnelles du Judaïsme belge. Les élites du Consistoire, partisanes de l'acculturation du rite et de la culture juifs à la société européenne non juive, ont préconisé une intégration profonde de la population juive et ont refusé toute forme de particularisme juif en dehors de la sphère religieuse. Cette idéologie patriotique restera la pierre angulaire d'une petite population juive bien intégrée, estimée à environ 4 000 personnes en 1880. Jusqu'à une bonne partie du XXe siècle, ce petit groupe de "juifs belges" restera le "gardien" de la communauté religieuse juive officielle de la capitale, la Communauté Israélite de Bruxelles.Une nouvelle vague d'immigrants juifs à la fin XIXe siècle pousse la trajectoire historique de la communauté juive belge dans de nouvelles directions et va entraîner une énorme diversification de la société juive belge. A partir des années 1880 et surtout après 1906, des milliers d'immigrants juifs d'Europe de l'Est s'installent en Belgique, attirés par les opportunités économiques ou comme " escale temporaire " sur leur chemin vers l'Amérique. Ce processus s'est répété après la Première Guerre mondiale, lorsque le mouvement d'émigration des Juifs d'Europe de l'Est a repris après la fin de la guerre. Le "premier" (1982-1914) et le "second" (1914-1930) mouvement migratoire juif d'Europe de l'Est a entraîné une croissance énorme de la population juive belge. En 1930, la population juive en Belgique était estimée à environ 50.000 personnes.L'arrivée de migrants juifs d'Europe de l'Est a entraîné une transformation radicale de la société juive belge. De nouvelles formes de religiosité juive, de nouvelles visions culturelles et politiques ont émergé. Une " classe ouvrière " juive urbaine s'est installée dans des métiers artisanaux semi-industriels tels que l'industrie du diamant, ou a trouvé du travail dans des emplois flexibles et mal payés dans l'industrie de l'habillement et dans diverses branches de l'industrie du cuir, souvent dans de petites entreprises dirigées par leurs coreligionnaires déjà établis. Des partis ouvriers juifs et un "mouvement syndical" juif ont tenté d'organiser ces "masses juives", de défendre leurs intérêts, de les intégrer dans le mouvement ouvrier belge et de promouvoir de nouvelles formes d'identité juive laïque. Un fort mouvement national juif a tenté d'élever le sionisme et le projet national juif en Palestine au rang de point d'ancrage d'une nouvelle identité juive, mais il s'est heurté à la résistance à la fois du "Judaïsme belge" établi, de la forte section juive du parti communiste belge et d'une grande partie de l'orthodoxie religieuse juive. Néanmoins, au cours des quatre décennies qui ont précédé le déclenchement de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, le sionisme a gagné en importance. Toutes ces différentes tendances au sein de la société juive belge ont tenté de gagner de l'influence et de l'autorité dans la rue juive ou dans les institutions officielles du Judaïsme belge. Avec l'installation des immigrants juifs d'Europe de l'Est, le difficile processus d'intégration dans la société belge a également commencé. Leur bagage idéologique, transplanté du monde juif d'Europe de l'Est, a été progressivement adapté et configuré pour apporter des réponses aux circonstances et défis spécifiques rencontrés par la communauté juive en Belgique. La crise économique des années 1930, la montée du national-socialisme en Allemagne et l'émergence concomitante d'un antisémitisme local organisé dans la société belge dans la seconde moitié des années 1930 ont secoué la société juive. L'appauvrissement croissant de larges pans de la population juive, combiné à l'afflux de milliers de réfugiés juifs d'Allemagne et d'Autriche, a fait exploser les contradictions au sein de la communauté juive.Ce sont ces processus de formation de l'identité juive "belge" et la manière dont les différents acteurs de la communauté juive ont réagi à des événements historiques spécifiques de la première moitié du vingtième siècle que cette thèse explore. / Doctorat en Histoire, art et archéologie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

I study certain passages of music for which I struggle to perceive a clear rhythm. I attribute this difficulty to an inability to infer or impose a beat. I show how, by listening to these “vague” rhythms repeatedly, I have been able to use movement to impose my own beat onto the auditory surface, and, by doing so, hear the rhythm with more clarity. What’s more, I show how I have been able to impose different beats on different listening occasions, and, as a result, hear different rhythms. I share my experience by presenting videos in which I move to the same music in different ways, priming the listener to have different rhythmic experiences depending on which video is being viewed. I discuss the techniques used to create these effects, as well as the features of the acoustic signal which make this kind of manipulation possible. In light of these discussions, and in dialogue with the work of other theorists, I examine certain issues of music cognition and music aesthetics, including the issue of musical “complexity”. I finish by considering whether the experience of rhythm could be manipulated to an even greater degree, and, to that end, present the “even-note illusion”, which uses a click-track to remove the lilt from a non-periodic stimulus.

Origin of the survey: During the latter half of the year 1921, Professor Paul Monroe, of Teachers College, Columbia University, working under the auspices of the Chinese National Association for the Advancement of Education made an extensive tour in China for the purpose of lecturing on educational administration, and making a critical investigation of the schools and higher institutions. Professor Monroe discovered many serious defects in the system of education, and pointed out with particular emphasis the weakness and inadequacy of the science instruction, and the urgent need for improving it.

This dissertation explores the ethical and aesthetic stakes of readers’ judgments by analyzing mock trials of literary characters that were performed in Soviet Russia and abroad in the 1920s and 1930s. Literary trials were part of a larger craze for public mock trials in the decades after the Russian Revolution. Mock trials functioned as a participatory and educational form of entertainment. Fictional defendants included Lenin, invented characters accused of drunkenness and hooliganism, and the Bible. At the same time as increasingly propagandistic mock trials were being performed, intellectuals staged trials of characters from nineteenth-century and contemporary Russian literature. In émigré communities such as Berlin, Paris, and Prague, literary trials were popular as entertainment and fundraisers through the 1920s and 1930s. My analysis focuses on mock trials of characters from works by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, whose novels proved especially popular for mock trial adaptations in the 1920 and 1930s. I also consider Nabokov’s participation in a mock trial based on The Kreutzer Sonata as a bridge between Tolstoy’s novella and Nabokov’s later novel Lolita. I read back and forth between the literary works and their mock trial adaptations in order to explore both how trial participants interpreted the texts and how the texts respond to the kinds of judgment at work in the trials. The challenges that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy’s fiction pose to readers became the central questions of mock trial adaptations: What is the relationship between interpretation and truth? Do we have the right to judge others? Does narrative have the power to redeem? I argue that while Soviet and émigré literary trials offer selective, politically motivated readings of the original works, they also enter into dialogue with the works’ major ethical questions and offer new ways of thinking about how truth, judgment, and redemption operate in them. As a result, the mock trials bring together two approaches to literature: a reader-centric approach that interprets the text in order to reveal something about the reader’s current reality, and a text-centric approach that aims to uncover the original meaning. While some of the literary trial interpretations and judgments appear to be misreadings, or bad readings, of the original works, I argue that this kind of reading, which closely attends to textual details while asking the text to speak to the readers’ present, offers a model for an ethically engaged approach to literature.

The question of the relationship between modernity and poetic classicism has typically been investigated through the lens of classical-style poetry, which is to say, by examining poetry written in the modern period which adheres to existing poetic forms and eschews the European influences and free-verse style of New Poetry (xin shi). But as premodern poetry existed within a classical media ecology alongside calligraphy and painting, to understand the ways conventional poetry confronted modernity, this dissertation argues, we must also understand the way this media ecology was transformed, as well as how this constellation of modes shifted from a literati practice during imperial China to a modern, even revolutionary practice in the twentieth century. I argue that changing conceptions of the zi, or character, were central to this transformation, and to the production of poetic classicism in the modern period. I understand the zi as a material, visual, and theoretical site at which the temporal, political, and aesthetic properties of poetry are articulated, a site which transgresses the boundaries between calligraphic inscription, pictorial representation, and poetic utterance. Covering a wide variety of media, including underground literary journals, political cartoons, paintings, typography, and theatre, this study investigates the ways changing conceptions of the zi allowed writers, artists, poets, and politicians to adapt classical poetics to contemporary political concerns. At stake is more than an expanded--or even revisionist--history of twentieth-century Chinese poetry. Rather, by tracing processes of canon formation, dissolution, and rearticulation in a way that reveals the role of literature in crafting political sentiment, this project shows how so-called traditional culture has been leveraged in support—and critique—of Chinese nationalism today.

A devotion to an open and progressive interpretation of human rights and the law secured Judge Ronald N. Davies’ legacy as an unintended, yet influential activist for advancing civil rights and of the twentieth century. His views helped change the definition and meaning of judicial activism in the modern vernacular and transform it into a new notion of judicial progressivism. A biography of Davies crystallizes the meaning of the racial and civil relations across an evolving American landscape. A study of his life alters the way in which scholars and the public perceive and understand the role of the Northern Plain in shaping lasting changes in America’s progressive movements through an interdisciplinary approach of history and law. When Davies of Fargo, North Dakota, rose to the bench of the United States District Court, he ceased any formal political party affiliation and became a Constitutionalist. With an egalitarian approach to the law, he oversaw numerous court proceedings and handed down rulings with measured consideration for any case that appeared on his docket. As his federal appointment came to include cases involving the desegregation of public schools, civil lawsuits against large-scale corporations, and the Alcatraz Indian Occupation, Davies’ sphere of influence exceeded regional and Civil Rights Era boundaries and characterized him as national figure in new facets of legal precedent. His rulings challenged traditional ethics as dictated by society’s majority-consent in the law and cast him as a seminal figure that embodied the meaning and influence of the northern plains within the law and advancing civil rights and social justice in the United States. His efforts to uphold a more inclusive and equal legal standard set into motion renewed consideration of the ways in which an individual’s actions within a broader institution can stimulate a modern national consensus despite entrenched historical precedent. Therefore, Davies’ life and career reflect a historical sensibility of the role, application, and influence of law-based code of ethics. His decisions, though not intended as overt civil activism, instilled lasting social, cultural, and political change in twentieth-century civil rights.

This dissertation deploys queer theory and temporality to investigate the ways in which American authors were writing about identity at the turn of the twentieth century. I provide a more expansive use of queer theory, and argue that queerness moves beyond sexual and gender identity to have intersectional implications. This is articulated in the phrase "queer textual libido" which connects queer theory with affect and temporal theories. Queerness reveals itself on both narrative and rhetorical levels, and can be used productively to show the complex navigation between individual and national identity formation.

This dissertation explores the relationship between foreign oil capital, transnational infrastructures, and power in the Middle East through an examination of the history of the trans-border pipeline system that exported Iraq’s oil to Europe via the Mediterranean. Built in 1935 by the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), an international oil consortium jointly owned by a group of Western oil companies, the Iraq-Mediterranean pipelines ran from northern Iraq to two points on the Mediterranean coast, crossing the borders of five states. The Iraq-Mediterranean pipelines were the product of large capital investment and were constructed during a period of European imperial rule. They could not be easily moved or diverted once built. This dissertation asks, in what ways did trans-border flows of oil shape and were shaped by processes of decolonization and the emergence of independent nation states? Existing studies of Middle East oil development rarely consider the fact that oil infrastructures extended beyond the territorial boundaries of the nation-state, focusing instead on the effects of oil revenues on the political economy of oil-producing states. Rather than reading oil as a stand-in for something else, such as revenues, geopolitics, or modernity, this dissertation examines the material structures and technical organization of the oil industry itself. Drawing on extensive research in oil company archives, government archives and published materials in English, Arabic, and French, this dissertation argues that the Iraq-Mediterranean pipelines shaped temporally and spatially uneven and overlapping forms of corporate and state power during successive phases of planning, construction, and operation from the late 1920s to the early 1970s.

This project analyzes drug use in Mexico City between 1960 and 1980, the decades when the Mexican state began criminalizing common drugs like marijuana, and prosecuting the consumers of legal drugs such as toxic inhalants. In order to explain this contradiction, this dissertation assesses more than 3,000 Juvenile Court records, police files, health department and hospital documents, journal articles, drug legislation, and personal anecdotes. It argues that consumption and prosecution trends largely corresponded to socioeconomic class. Furthermore, these class-based consumption trends affected Mexican drug policies. According to the Mexican health department and penal reports examined in this dissertation, the Mexican state responded to the rise in drug use by pushing legislation to further criminalize marijuana. Yet the inner workings of that legislation tell a different story. Police records and Juvenile Court cases expose a rise in the detention and arrest of children who consumed toxic inhalants, a legal substance. The Mexican state found it more difficult to punish the children of middle-class government employees and professionals than the poor. In criminalizing poor, young drug users, the government could demonstrate its active efforts to address rising drug use. Consequently, the state created a new criminal class out of lower-class children who inhaled toxic legal substances in Mexico City. From a criminal and health perspective, this dissertation emphasizes the need to consider the impact of Mexican drug use trends on drug policy from the 1960s to the 1980s.