Browsing by Subject "History"

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50 Years at the Cloquet Forest Research Center
(1960) Schantz-Hansen, Thorvald
This is the story of the first fifty years (1909-1959) of the Cloquet Forest Research Center (now the Cloquet Forestry Center), as recorded by T. Schantz-Hansen circa 1960 in 31 typed pages. It summarizes the events and personnel involved with establishing the Center, early research and management activities on the forest, the nursery program, and personnel involved over the years, including lists of superintendents, foremen, student workers. The narrative includes many mentions of forest fire, the causes of fire, which was most often railroads, berry pickers, or picnickers, and the work that was done to create fire-lines for suppression and prevention efforts. The October 12, 1918 Cloquet fire is specifically mentioned as having not impacted the lands. It also summarizes the work conducted at the Center by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The origins of this document and if it was ever published are not totally clear. Even so, it provides the most succinct narrative of the history of the first 50 years. The author started work at the Center in 1919 and served as the lead administrator from 1923-1960. Two paper copies of this text have existed in the Forest Manager's file cabinets over the years. This is intended to be a digital archive of the paper copy that is thought to be the most complete version. It was scanned on July 17, 2020.
AAP Interview: Teena Apeles
(Voices from the Gaps, 2004) Worra, Bryan Thao
Actuarial age: insurance and the emergence of neoliberalism in the postwar United States.
(2011-08) Horan, Caley Dawn
This dissertation charts a history of the social and cultural life of private insurance in the United States after 1945. Drawing on analyses of insurance marketing, consumption, investment, and regulation, I argue that insurance institutions and actuarial practices played a crucial role in introducing neoliberal rationalities and governance to American life in the years following World War II. Through postwar marketing, public service campaigns, and a host of instructional and lobbying efforts, private insurers sought to train and produce a new kind of responsibilized insurance consumer and entrepreneurial subject-citizen - one who could think in actuarial, risk-based ways about family, finance, and the future, and who eschewed the public provision of social welfare in favor of private security. The emergence of a postwar neoliberal order entailed a spatial transformation as well as a social one. In the three decades following World War II, insurance institutions invested billions of dollars in shopping centers, urban housing developments, suburban subdivisions, and infrastructure projects like natural gas pipelines. These investments helped restructure the American landscape by producing securitized spaces geared towards ensuring the circulation of people, goods, and private capital. The political impacts of actuarial practices were also profound. In debates with insurers over the classification categories used to price and determine availability of insurance coverage, civil rights and women's activists attempted to curtail discrimination by changing the regulatory frameworks that governed the private insurance industry. The failure of activists to secure legislation and their demands for more precise statistical measurements in the field of insurance underwriting reflected the diminishing utility of rights-based frameworks in combating discrimination in insurance and signaled the triumph of a new, actuarial, understanding of political community as structured around the notion of risk. The growing presence of actuarial systems and the emerging neoliberal social order did not go unnoticed, or uncontested, by postwar observers. In the years immediately following World War II, opposition to actuarial thinking arose in American popular culture in the critique of private insurance and its ability to provide security in postwar drama, in the dark meditations on fate and fragmentation offered by film noir, and the dystopian and turbulent future worlds depicted by science fiction. Resistance to actuarialism, however, diminished in the final decades of the twentieth century as Americans increasingly began to identify insurance classifications and contracts as natural and inevitable, and to see private security as a right of citizenship. This dissertation offers a genealogy of this transformation, revealing the roots of neoliberalism in risk-based calculative rationalities and the vital role of insurance institutions in shaping America's actuarial age.
African American women working in the Twin Cities during the mid-twentieth century: discovering their vocational identity.
(2010-03) Kelly, Sharon F
Existing scholarship has no examination of attributing the discourse on vocational identity to African American women, which in this study, has been defined as what a woman ought to be and do. African American women have been a subject of scholarly inquiry on having the longest history of paid work. This qualitative dissertation contains their narrative excerpts on working in the Twin Cities during the mid-twentieth century (1945-1985) from interviews with seventeen women aged 65 to 87. Analyzed topics were the concept of vocation, the ideology of vocation within the intersections of race, gender, and class related to paid and unpaid work. Hermeneutic philosophy advanced by Gadamer (1960/1975) formed the methodological approach to elicit themes of their perceived vocational identity.
Against Putschism: Paul Levi's Politics, the Comintern, and the Problems of a European Revolution 1918-1923
(2016) Berduc, Manuel;
In this paper I analyze the politics of Paul Levi, who became the leader of the German Communist Party after the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Levi has for the most part been neglected in the historiography of the period, but Pierre Broué’s and David Fernbach’s recent publications in 2006 and 2009 respectively have brought his ideas back into the spotlight in English. I seek to see how his understanding of politics between 1918-1923 make him unique in what I argue is his model which laid the groundwork for a “mass party” of Communism for Europe early on. This model followed Luxemburg’s dream for a Communist party able to relate to millions of workers, a careful understanding of the role of insurrection in revolutions, and which would work through a more democratic framework than the one set up by the Bolsheviks under their specific circumstances. In particular, the early role played by the Comintern and its relationship to early European Parties was decisive in their failure to lead and grow early on. By understanding the context of European Socialism at the time and by looking closely at the period during 1919-1921, I will argue that Paul Levi set the foundation for a mass- Party in Germany, and that his political theory helps us understand why a revolution did not take place in Europe after World War I.
Babylonian and Assyrian Elements in the Civilization and Cult of the Hebrew Nation
(1920-06) Sjolinder, Reverend Laurent Erick
'Bad' news travels fast: the telegraph, syndicated libel, and conceptualizing freedom of the Press, 1890-1910
(2013-08) File, Patrick C.
This dissertation explores the historical implications of an unprecedented series of libel cases that arose out of false news reports spread by news wire services at the turn of the twentieth century. The industrialized speed and scale of the news industry, along with growing concern about sensationalism and the value of reputation had created tension in the press' relationship with society at the time the cases arose. The scale of the cases, in which single plaintiffs sued hundreds of newspapers for publishing the same libelous story, raised new challenges for the press and for libel law doctrine. This study argues that through the serial libel cases the press articulated a new legal conception of press freedom that called on courts to tip the analytical balance to be more protective of its social role in using the telegraph to deliver timely news to the public. Moreover, because the cases involved plaintiffs of varying social prominence, from virtually anonymous to world-famous, the cases also offer new insights into how libel plaintiffs' status and identity could influence the legal analysis of protecting reputational rights at a time before libel law prompted constitutional consideration. The study uses an interdisciplinary conceptual framework of the cultural history of journalism and critical legal history to illuminate the role of law and legal consciousness in the social process of regulating the role of journalism in a democratic society. The study examines legal discourse surrounding the cases both inside and outside of courtrooms and newsrooms, drawing on appellate opinions and legal treatises as well as newspaper and trade press coverage of the cases.
Beauty and a Broken City: women and their publicity in Tianjin, 1898-1911.
(2011-04) Qin, Fang
My dissertation is an attempt to explore the ways in which the global-local network impacted diverse women's lives and experiences at the turn of the twentieth century Tianjin, a coastal city in north China. I will especially emphasize two aspects of their experiences in cities: the ways in which women emerged as a public presence in the urban landscape, and the ways in which women's issues became a social phenomenon under the public observation and discussion. To be specific, I focus on three most-debated issues in Tianjin: women's physical body (footbinding), women's education, and women's performance. The three themes had for a long time been rooted in Chinese society and culture and symbolized the normative womanhood or its opposite side. When it came to the modern era, the themes of publicizing women's deformed feet, the transition from private inner chambers to public women's schools, and the extreme publicity of actresses on and off the stage became social issues in Tianjin, with which the city had never dealt before, or at least not to this extent. All the discussions, debates, arguments, and reforms of these issues affected groups of women such as missionary women, educated women, and actresses and dramatically changed their life styles and their identities in the city. New definitions of social and gender norms were forming to discipline women's behaviors and spheres. It is the negotiation between women and the forming norms that a space was created between layers for these women to actually lived with flexibility and agency. Meanwhile, it was also through the discussion, translation, and adaptation of these issues in Tianjin that people were able to articulate and consolidate their own identity as Tianjin natives.
Beyond Commitment: intellectual engagement in politics in Postwar France, 1944-1962.
(2010-05) Richtmyer, Eric William
This dissertation is a study of the way that French intellectuals engaged in major political debates in the years immediately after World War II. It examines three moments in particular: the purge of writers and intellectuals who collaborated during World War II, the Algerian war of independence, and the emergence of structuralism in the early 1960s. Initially, the mode of engagement developed by the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, called commitment, dominated the political debate over the postwar purge between 1945 and 1948. At the same time, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Jean Paulhan critiqued Sartrean commitment for its philosophical inadequacy, its political inefficacy, and its moral ambiguity. As a result, they developed their own mode of engagement, based on the articulation of political arguments through unlikely means, such as literature and philosophy, which achieved prominence by the end of the war in Algeria in 1962. This dissertation concludes with an examination of the mode of discursive, or textual analysis developed in an exchange between Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault at the beginning of the 1960s. This exchange reveals that their version of textual analysis itself served as a mode of engagement in politics, and was rooted in the critique of Sartrean commitment articulated during the postwar purge, and the war in Algeria. This dissertation has the additional significance of redefining how the body of thought known in the United States as French theory is conceived. Ultimately, the move away from existentialism and its mode of political commitment was one of the main factors that contributed to French theory's growth in the 1960s. By historicizing French theory within the culture and politics of postwar France, this dissertation shows that French theory must be understood as a large and synthetic intellectual community, rather than as a description of a particular kind of philosophical or literary thought. The relations which obtained within this community affected, and sometimes even determined the generation of theoretical ideas and texts. This dissertation shows that French theory has continued utility for contemporary scholarship when it is taken to indicate the relations of this intellectual community.
Big is modern: the making of Wuhan as a Mega-City in early twentieth century China, 1889-1957
(2010-07) Ye, Zhiguo
My dissertation examines the city making process of Wuhan out of three different towns. The three towns, Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang, located at the confluence of the Yangzi River and its largest tributary, the Han River, were divided by water and the imperial administration. In less than fifty years, the three towns disappeared, and in their place emerged Wuhan, the largest Chinese city in terms of its urban area. The urban integration was so successful that their separate pasts have been left out of current public memory. The goal of my study is to understand why and how Wuhan was made, and what the obsession with the city's big size can tell us about Chinese imagination and experience of modernity in the twentieth century. In answering these questions, the project is designed to cover three periods from late Qing, the republic, to the early PRC, and to trace modernizing efforts made by successive regimes to create "Great Wuhan." It focuses on five key historical periods--the late Qing reform, the urban self recovery after the 1911 revolution, the modernist planning from 1927-1936, Wuhan as a wartime capital in the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945), and the socialist urban reconstruction from 1949 to 1957. The study shows the 1911 revolution as a turning moment when a modern city was designed to depart from its imperial antecedent. It was Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of Republican China, who first proposed the idea of "Great Wuhan." Such a gigantic urban project shows that Sun was thinking "big." I argued that his way of thinking prevailed with the emergence of a strong scientific faith, which primarily placed upon young technologically trained officials and engineers later. Like Sun Yat-sen, they envisioned a total transformation of modern China through re-engineering urban society and infrastructure construction. This "big" vision of modernity--gigantic and centralized--was promoted by both Chinese Nationalists and Communists and ran across time and ideology in shaping contemporary urban landscape. I also argue that the creation of Wuhan had been closely tied to the nation-state building in the early twentieth century. Sun's idea of "Great Wuhan" didn't gain currency until the late 1920s when the Nationalist party that inherited Sun's mantle came to power. From then on, efforts to make "Great Wuhan" always intensified at moments of national crisis and political change, through which the state consolidated its power and gained control over local society. The rise of nationalism along the time also contributed the obsession with bigness that fueled the ambitious project of "Great Wuhan." It is under the CCP regime that the city of Wuhan was finally made. The socialist system and its strong nationalist movements established in the early years of PRC proved to be more effective in carrying out the mega city project.
Bitcoin: The Future of Digital Payments?
(2018-05) Vachher, Prateek
In just a meager ten years, Bitcoin has gone from being a relatively obscure piece of code to an internationally recognized form of payment. Yet, opinions about Bitcoin’s future are mixed. After considering the major factors affecting Bitcoin’s future use, the research paper offers some trend and attribute analysis which acts as modest predictions. Both systems are currently co-existing alongside each other. Both look like they are here to stay for the foreseeable future, although the rise of Bitcoin is causing banks to rethink certain areas like transaction fees and how they link between countries, among other things.
The Black Prince at War: the anatomy of a Chevauchée
(2014-12) Madden, Mollie M.
The chevauchée, a fast-moving raid, was a common feature of English campaigns during the Hundred Years War and late medieval warfare more generally. These were highly complex, organized, and focused operations rather than unfocused raids with no other purpose but pillage and ravishment. The model of the army "living off the land" is untenable; some system of supply was necessary, even for an army pursuing a raiding strategy like that of the Prince of Wales' 1355 campaign in southern France. The logistics of supply and the realities of geography and human topography helped determine the route the army followed and what it could accomplish. The success of the chevauchée depended on the pre-existing system of purveyance and recruitment in England, rested upon an efficient supply train that accompanied the army, and relied on resupply from England. The Prince employed this raiding strategy to accomplish his aims, namely the punishment of the duke of Armagnac for his encroachments on English Gascony and disruption of the enemy's ability to provision a military force. Moreover, the actions of the Anglo-Gascon army effectively demonstrated to the inhabitants of Languedoc that the French king and his lieutenants could not protect them from the English. Thus, the Prince also achieved Edward III's larger strategic goal: the re-enforcement and projection of English royal authority and power in Gascony and France.
Brand journalism: a cultural history of consumers, citizens, and community in Ford Times.
(2012-04) Swenson, Rebecca Dean
Advertising and public relations professionals have recently applied the term `brand journalism' to their work and praised it as a new model for strategic communication. This dissertation develops the concept by illustrating that brand journalism is not brand new; journalism has long served as a model for corporate communicators, especially for editors of the company press. To illustrate historical and theoretical tension inherent in brand journalism, this research tells the story of Ford Times, a company magazine created by the Ford Motor Company from 1908 to 1917 and from 1943 to 1993 for consumers and dealers. Ford Times mission was to present a "view of America through the windshield." As the chapters ahead illustrate, the magazine detailed more than new models for sale; it combined narratives about automobile use, travel, nationhood, history, land conservation, regionalism, food and family with the Ford brand in order to build a reader community that inspired interest and loyalty for most of the twentieth century. By analyzing historical archival material, including Ford Times content, editorial memos, and letters from readers, this study examines the role of a particular company magazine in constructing social space and building brand tenets, and in turn, examines the Ford Times contribution to conversations about community, patriotism, consumption, and the history of public relations. In doing so, this dissertation offers a unique, focused look at the corporate press, a longstanding public relations tactic often overlooked by strategic communication historians.
British Fur Trade in the Upper Country
(1969-08) Peterson, Jay R
Church of Greece under Axis Occupation (1941-1944)
(2009-08) Anastasakis, Panteleymon E
This dissertation examines the response of the Church of Greece to enemy occupation during the Second World War. Historically, in periods of crisis, especially during Ottoman rule (1453-1821) and the Greek War of Independence (1821-1830), the Greek people looked to the church to help them preserve faith and culture. In some cases, church policy played an important role in the very physical survival of the Greek nation. In the period under consideration, the leadership of Archbishop Damaskinos helped the Greek church rise to the occasion once more. Education, training, ability, perseverance, and political acumen made Damaskinos the ideal prelate to lead the nation. In essence he became an ethnarch, a phenomenon with which Greek society was thoroughly familiar. Drawing upon contemporary official sources from the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the British Foreign Office, the US State Department, and the Archive of the Greek Holy Synod, as well as pertinent published primary and secondary literature, the dissertation explores attempts by the church leadership to maintain a precarious balance between capitalizing on opportunistic moments to gain concessions from the enemy occupiers and opposing the latter's policies deemed detrimental to the wellbeing of state and society. For example, Damaskinos and his colleagues used skillful diplomacy with the Axis and Greek political power groups ranging from the extreme left to the extreme right to wrench important concessions for the benefit of the beleaguered population ravaged by a nationwide famine. Church leadership also utilized more imaginative forms of passive or active resistance against Axis policies on vital issues such as the Holocaust and ethnic policies in the Bulgarian-occupied territories of the country. Despite significant differences between the Greek case and those of other territories in Axis-occupied Europe, the response of Damaskinos and his colleagues is instructive in helping us understand how and why traditional institutions such as the church provide indispensible service, guidance, and protection in moments of social upheaval and distress.
The clarity of the Cold War: truth and literary communism between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. in the era of postmodern globalization.
(2012-07) Gill, Meredith Morgan
This dissertation examines the cultural logic of the Cold War, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, as a symptom of postmodern globalization. Following Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson's 1947 proclamation that Cold War propaganda should be crafted as "clearer than truth," this study investigates the complicated relationships among truth, production, and interpretation that emerged in similar manners between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. during the Cold War period. In particular, I consider literary, visual, and critical texts that contest a logic of truth which seeks to dissociate truth from its conditions of production. In so doing, I assert that a second Cold War took place between a global creative class, which has been termed "the multitude," and the (unwittingly) allied forces of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Accordingly, I argue that the Cold War cannot be understood simply as a battle between East and West, capitalism and communism, two world orders, or disparate modes of production. In chapter one, I explore the transition to postmodernism, as the cultural logic of late capitalism, to detail the changing conditions for aesthetic and political dissent against the neo-liberal management of American capitalism and the socialist management of Soviet state capitalism. I explore diplomatic correspondences between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. as well as a number of examples of aesthetic dissent ranging from popular magazines to Soviet subcultures to Leftist American avant-garde visual art and a ten-year old American schoolgirl's quest to discover the truth about the Cold War. In chapter two, I provide a close reading of E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, a meta-fictional, "autobiographical" novel about political life during the Cold War period. I read this text alongside Louis Althusser's autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever, to examine the complexities of locating truth that have resulted from postmodernity's complication of the distinction between subjects and objects. Chapter three presents a historical case study of how the concept of truth was contested within samizdat, the underground late-Soviet self-publishing movement. In particular, I look at Metropol, a 1979 samizdat literary anthology, which, I argue exemplifies a form of literary communism within the creative block of actually lived "communism." The fourth and final chapter explores the autobiography of Assata Shakur--communist, former Black Panther, and escaped convict who writes from socialist Cuba. I argue that the complex interplay of narrative forms in her text, as well as her use of intuition as a methodology, exposes a logic of truth that is non-representational, points to similarities between late capitalist and prison temporalities, and radically remaps the discursive parameters of the Cold War.
Commerce and coexistence: Muslims in the economy and society of Norman Sicily.
(2009-09) Smit, Timothy James
Sicily in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had a Muslim population under the control of Latin Christian conquerors. This dissertation aims to assess the economic role that these Muslims played in Norman Sicily, and how that economic role tied them into the society of Norman Sicily in general. Muslims in Sicily were allowed considerable autonomy and tolerance by the Christian rulers of the island, and the tolerance shown to them was always tied to their usefulness to the crown. While their role in the administration of the Regno, how Muslims served the crown in that fashion, was important, I would argue that their economic role was just as important, particularly in the early years of Norman control. With Muslims making up the majority of merchants they provided an integral service in creating the vaunted wealth of the island. Beyond the role played by the commercial elite of the cities, the more humble Muslims of the island also played a vital economic role. They were the majority of cultivators, and agriculture was always the primary source of wealth of the island. They were also involved in other kinds of production, in particular in the textile trade. Because of this, they remained important to the counts and kings of Sicily after the Normans became more established in their rule. Their economic role fueled their coexistence with the Christians of the island. With this coexistence, there were possibilities for close interactions between Christians and Muslims based on their economic role. Profit was also a powerful motivator that brought people together, and Christians and Muslims traded, even entering into partnerships and loaning money to one another. These close interactions could continue, even with the backdrop of inter-religious violence. Even the rising level of tension between Muslims and Christians could not end their mutually beneficial cross-cultural interactions. Because of these conditions in Norman Sicily, this dissertation proposes that it can serve as a case study for the role that commerce played in Christian-Muslim coexistence in the medieval Mediterranean.
Communities Of Healing: Domestic Medicine And Society In Early Modern Italy
(2018-04) Beck, Emily
Many scholars have employed a variety of means to investigate the interactions between the range of people who practiced medicine in the early modern period, from charlatans and midwives to physicians and surgeons. These non-academic practitioners have been marginalized by previous histories of medicine, which reflect both their absence in contemporary printed works as well as the origins of the history of medicine as a field that prioritized finding the roots of modern medical practice. Recovering lay histories requires looking beyond printed treatises to working texts such as formularies, recipe collections, and other ephemera. This project investigates the form, movements, and activities of lay healers and their practices in the medical marketplace of early modern northern and central Italy. In this project, I propose that the anonymous manuscript medical recipe books of laypeople can be dissected to provide further information about not only interactions between healers, but also the theories, supplies, context, and educational practices of non-professional healers. Influenced by works in microhistory, chapters one, two, and three present focused investigations of small groups of manuscripts in order to contextualize the practice of medicine in northern and central Italy. Chapter one examines three manuscript recipe books written by a Capuchin monk, showing how laypeople drew on the rhetoric of printed medical books and offered medical education to their brethren. Chapter three also draws on these manuscripts, but turns to questions of the patient population that the author anticipated his practice would treat. Although information about specific patients is generally lacking in manuscript recipe books, focusing on recipes for women provides a rich set of information from which to draw conclusions about the medical interactions between clerical men and women in surrounding communities. Chapter two is a comparison of recipe writings in manuscript recipe books and in the first pharmacopoeia in Florence, the Ricettario Fiorentino. This comparison lends itself to enlivening how historians understand the ways knowledge changed, circulated, was adopted, or was ignored by both professional and lay healers from the late fifteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries. In chapter four, I claim that manuscript recipe books provide a rich source of information about the material context in which laypeople created medicines and healed their patients. Rather than allowing incongruent themes like veterinary medicine, beauty aids, and mischief to fall to the side for thematic consistency, this chapter asserts that examining all these manuscript recipe book entries together leads to a more holistic picture of the landscape of lay healing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy.
The Conference of Berlin
(1922) Clark, Alta Keith
Constructing Tiananmen Square as a realm of memory: national salvation, revolutionary tradition, and political modernity in twentieth-century China.
(2011-04) Pan, Tsung-Yi
To study the history of Tiananmen (The Gate of Heavenly Peace) Square is to study the history of Chinese political modernity from the late nineteenth century to the present. While exploring the on-going process through which Tiananmen Square has been constructed as the symbolic center of twentieth-century China, this dissertation offers alternative theoretical discourses on the materiality and spatiality of Chinese modernity and the political uses of memory and history at the place. This dissertation is a study on how Tiananmen Square has been constructed as the symbolic center of national events in twentieth-century China from the perspective of the politics of historical memory. Applying insights from scholarship on the materiality and spatiality of memory, it analyzes the on-going process through which Tiananmen Square has been constructed as a memorial site to store, recall, and manipulate the past in the present and thus became the symbolic center of national events in China's evolving political modernity in the twentieth century. It argues that state-sponsored commemorative architecture and practices at Tiananmen Square after the founding of the PRC have materialized Chinese cultural memory of national salvation and revolutionary tradition. As a consequence, Tiananmen Square has constituted the material and spatial framework by which both state power and grassroots activists used to manipulate that cultural memory to justify their different political agendas of modernity.

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