Browsing by Subject "Historiography"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    African American history and radical historiography: essays in honor of Herbert Aptheker
    (MEP Publications, 1998) Shapiro, Herbert
    Fifty-five years ago a young historian published American Negro Slave Revolts, a book that initially met fierce resistance from established historians but came to change the way African American history is understood and to have a wide impact on the writing of history in general. Herbert Aptheker went on to edit the massive 7-volume Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States. A close friend and colleague of W. E. B. Du Bois, Aptheker for years served as custodian of the Du Bois papers, arranged for their deposit at the University of Massachusetts, and meticulously edited for publication a multivolume set of the Du Bois writings and a three-volume collection of his correspondence. --Publisher's summary.
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    Beyond the closet: LGBT and queer archiving in the United States
    (2014-12) Colleary, Eric Joseph
    This dissertation explores the ways sexual identity and culture are produced, imagined, performed, shaped, re-shaped, and deconstructed in LGBT archives in the United States. While a great deal of research has been conducted within the past two decades on LGBT historiography, there has been a dearth of studies examining the archival sites from which histories of LGBT identity are being written. This dissertation reveals that the construction of non-heterosexual sexual identities has been a conscious, careful process - borrowing from established historiographic, feminist, and colonial and postcolonial theories to establish archives of LGBT history and culture counter and in relation to dominant heteronormative narratives. There are times, however, when every archive fails to capture the complexity and diversity of LGBT experience. Rather than see these moments as failures, I "read" them as queer opportunities to rethink and reposition identities which may have become politically and socially stagnant. In each chapter, I focus on a particular archive and a specific individual (an archivist or a collector) who helped make it. The first chapter explores W. Dorr Legg's efforts in the 1950s to establish the discipline of homophile studies through the ONE Institute in Los Angeles as a way of creating a historical and archivable past for a collective homosexual minority that was just beginning to take shape. Chapter Two focuses on the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn and Joan Nestle's radical reimagining of what an archive could be through the lens of 1970s lesbian separatist feminism. Chapter Three looks at the acquisition and organization methods of Jean Tretter of the Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota as a way of describing the queer possibilities of encountering the unexpected in an archive. The fourth and final chapter theorizes what a queer archive might look like, grounding this theorization in the collection of 1960s performance artist Jack Smith, which has recently been acquired by the Gladstone Gallery in New York.
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    Clashing Legacies: Narratives of Continuity and Rupture in Restoration Britain's Ideological Constructions of the Past
    (2014-11) Paltzer, Daniel
    This dissertation analyzes the textual and argumentative strategies used to debate the meaning of the past in an attempt to influence the present and future in seventeenth-century British polemic. I focus on two pamphlet wars occurring between 1678 and 1685. The first concerned whether bishops had the right to participate in the trial of one of Charles II's most important ministers. The second arose between a Scottish lawyer and two English clerics when one of the Englishmen tried to debunk the traditional Scottish narrative that their kingdom and royal dynasty had been founded in 330 B.C. I draw upon the well-developed scholarly literature on political and religious ideology for this time period to help explain the conceptual vocabulary used in the arguments and the political theory underlying those ideas. I expand the analysis through a more explicit attention to how writers used histories of certain important institutions to define ideological positions. The role of historical narratives about institutions is an important element of ideological argument, which allows me to develop insights about the role of the past in how a society defined itself and tried to solve its problems. Specific examples were in how discourses appealed to national myths, defended entrenched institutional interests in a tightly woven social fabric, or defined the interaction between religion and politics.
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    Entertaining Education: Teaching National History in Mexican State-Sponsored Comic Books and Telenovelas, 1963 to 1996
    (2013-09) Huska, Melanie
    Abstract This dissertation examines the political nature of history and popular culture in late-twentieth-century Mexico. The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)'s maintained a monopoly on political power for seven decades (1929-2000). It bolstered its political legitimacy by revising the history of the Revolution of 1910 into a unified national pantheon of heroes who formed part of the party's origin myth and by forging a unified post-Revolutionary identity. Cultural historians of Mexico have demonstrated the fundamental role that the PRI's cultural projects played in its political success and its ability to maintain authority for so long; however these studies examine the period before 1968. My dissertation draws on this field's concern with popular culture and political power and extends it by recognizing the centrality of history to Mexican identity and by asking how the PRI employed history and popular culture as a way to mitigate the political consequences of the changes underway in the 1980s and 1990s, a period of neoliberal reforms that alienated large numbers of voters. Furthermore, it asks, did neoliberalism alter the political nature of history, and if so, how? To answer this question I examine the narratives conveyed by two series of historically themed comic books, produced by the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP) and nine historical telenovelas, produced by Televisa in cooperation with various state ministries, particularly Mexican Institute for Social Security (IMSS). The dissertation focuses on three themes in order to illuminate vital features of cultural politics in Mexico at the end of the twentieth century. First, it examines the interplay between historiography and the politics of historically themed entertainment. In other words, it asks how rival interpretations of the past were incorporated into the entertainment-education (edutainment) projects, if at all, and how politics influenced these historical interpretations. Second, the dissertation charts Televisa's and the PRI's progress in learning how to narrate Mexican history in a way that satisfied multiple interests: generating support for the ruling party and profits for Televisa, capturing the interest of audiences, and withstanding the scrutiny of professional scholars. In this endeavor they sought a careful balance between fact and fiction. The dissertation demonstrates not only the continuing political nature of historical narratives in Mexico, but also argues that their impact could not always be anticipated. Consumed in different political contexts, the didactic repetition of appeals to the past highlighted the PRI's departure from revolutionary ideals instead of linking their legitimacy to it. Finally, the dissertation examines the relationship between the public and private cultural sectors, through an analysis of state ministries - SEP, IMSS, National Defense, National Lottery - and the private sector, particularly Televisa. Together IMSS and Televisa produced four telenovelas, but economic changes in the 1990s created conditions that made further projects untenable. For Televisa, these economic changes were the result of increased industry competition, internal concerns, and depleted financial government sponsorship. For the PRI, the expenditure no longer generated legitimacy as a link to the nation's past, but symbolized the waste of a party that had maintained its power through corporatism. Though the PRI and Televisa attempted to use the past to generate political legitimacy, ultimately it was unable to mitigate the fracturing that occurred in the late twentieth century as a result of their transition from corporatism to neoliberalism.
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    Marketplaces of remembering: violence, colonialism, and American innocence in the making of the Modoc War.
    (2012-02) Cothran, Boyd D.
    Marketplaces of Remembering: Violence, Colonialism, and American Innocence in the Making of the Modoc War explores the intersection of cultural history and critical indigenous studies with special focus on historical memory, historiography, and popular representations of American Indians. It focuses on the historiography of the Modoc War (1872-1873), California’s so-called last Indian war to explore the complex and oftenoverlooked relationship between how Natives and non-Natives alike have remembered incidents of U.S.-Indian violence and the marketplaces – the systems, institutions, procedures, social relations, and arenas of trade – within which those remembrances have circulated. It argues that individuals have shaped their historical remembrances of the conflict, transforming an episode of Reconstruction Era violence and ethnic cleansing into a redemptive narrative of American innocence as they sought to negotiate these marketplaces. My aim in looking at these cultural and commercial associations is to delve into the question of how, since the nineteenth century, they have been directly related to the widespread belief that the Modoc War and other incidents of U.S.-Indian violence were ultimately justified and the tendency to view the westward expansion of the United States within the framework of inevitability. The dissertation locates American capitalism and colonialism at the center of our understanding of both violence in the American West and popular representations of the American Indian experience. Moreover, it breaks new methodological ground by reading traditional memory studies sources (e.g. novels, plays, commemorations, reenactments, memorials, and speeches) along side less orthodox memory studies sources (e.g. pension files, local histories, and promotional literature) to produce a materialist interpretation of historical knowledge production. Above all, it seeks to show how the Indian wars of the nineteenth century did not end with the cession of hostilities in 1873, 1890, or 1898, but have been reproduced through the marketplaces of remembering U.S.-Indian violence.
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    “Oh what a world”: Queer Masculinities, the musical construction of a reparative cultural historiography, and the music of Rufus Wainwright.
    (2010-11) Schwandt, Kevin C.
    Throughout his ascendancy in fame and cultural visibility, singer/songwriter and gay pop icon Rufus Wainwright's output has been consistently related, by scholars and critics alike, to camp aesthetics, modes of artistic expression typically understood as emerging from queer communities, particularly certain gay male populations, but ones whose political potential is highly contested. Traditional conceptions of camp, as most famously articulated by Susan Sontag in the 1960s, emphasize style over content, necessarily rendering it politically-disengaged. However, scholars have vehemently challenged conceptions like Sontag's, in order to reclaim camp as a potent means to facilitate queer world-making and a powerful resistance to heteronormativity. I examine Wainwright's image and music in order to theorize a new queer interpretive listening position. Specifically, I draw upon the literary perspective of "reparative reading," articulated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in opposition to what she describes as "paranoid reading," to propose a uniquely queer approach to musical and cultural historiography, exemplified by Wainwright's music. Much of the current queer musicology focuses on lost histories, systematic marginalization, and the commoditization of queer identities. While such approaches have produced important insights, thorough examination of the relationships between queer cultural products and their queer reception has proven elusive. This project suggests a unique approach to understanding the musical construction of a specific kind of queer masculinity, one which combines authorial creation with reparative conceptions of reception, in order to theorize a uniquely gay male interpretive position. When viewed through a theoretical lens combining politically-potent conceptions of camp performativity with a reparative reading position, Wainwright's music strikingly enacts Philip Brett's call to claim, not historical evidence, but the right of interpretation, emerging as an act of resistance via the reclamation and consolidation of a queer interpretive authority. In this way, Wainwright articulates both a rupture in the history of queer masculinity and a powerful means of resistance to the often-exclusionary relationships between literary, musical, and artistic objects and the heteronormative cultural systems in which they are created.
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    The Spectre Of Institutionalization: Disability, Law, Performance, And Policy At The Pennhurst State School & Hospital And Pennhurst Asylum
    (2023-08) Stenberg, Nathan
    This dissertation combines archival and ethnographic research to investigate the Pennhurst State School & Hospital (PSSH), a custodial institution for dis/abled people turned haunted attraction, primarily staffed by dis/abled performers. I ask how Pennhurst became a performance venue which commodifies violence for entertainment, while paradoxically fostering community for the very people the former institution sought to eliminate. In doing so, this dissertation uncovers how institutionalization constructs and enforces legal, medical, political, and social notions of disability, producing identities which simultaneously dehumanize and sustain dis/abled people. I theorize institutionalization as an ongoing social process and show how one dis/abled community uses performance to reinterpret and reclaim it. Chapters examine the commitment process to the PSSH through the lens of disability, law, and performance (Act I), and compare official “accounts” of care at the PSSH with the experiences of those forced to exist at the institution (Act II). The first half of the dissertation ends by examining the lawsuits that closed the PSSH, and Pennhurst’s influence on current disability policies (Intermezzo). The second half of the dissertation offers an ethnographic analysis of the contemporary Pennhurst Asylum haunted attraction (PA). The PA’s immersive performances of horror elide fact with fantasy and conceal ongoing violence against dis/abled people (Act III). The dissertation ends by showing how (in Act IV) the community of dis/abled and nondisabled people who work for PA perform vernacular dis/ability heritage work through their collective inhabitation of and care for this former institution. In doing so, they reclaim the space once intended for their segregation from society to create a space for dis/abled people made by dis/abled people.