Browsing by Subject "World War II"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Health on the Line: The Politics of Citizenship and the Railroad Bracero Program of World War II
    (2013-07) Rodríguez, Chantel Renee
    During World War II the railroad bracero program generated a series of transnational legal debates centered on the regulation of guest worker health rights. Between 1943 and 1945, an estimated 135,000 Mexican men were recruited to participate in the railroad bracero program, a guest worker program co-sponsored by the U.S. and Mexican governments, as temporary track maintenance workers to assuage the labor shortage and support war transportation. These Mexican guest workers, known as braceros, moved back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border and labored on an expansive network of tracks across the United States. When railroad braceros experienced injury, illness or unsafe working conditions, they engaged in a process of claim-making in which they requested railroad employers cover medical costs and/or rectify workplace safety and health issues. This study examines how four sets of historical actors--the U.S. state, the Mexican state, U.S. railroad employers, and railroad braceros--relied on the relationship between work, health and citizenship to define, negotiate and contest guest worker health. In doing so, it seeks to understand the forces that culminated in the railroad bracero program to cause workplace health discrimination against guest workers. I argue that the legal framework regulating bracero health preserved the functionality of the program as a cost-effective labor recruitment program by simultaneously guaranteeing health rights and creating a loophole to deny them. The U.S. state's capacity to extend health rights to guest workers allowed the program to fulfill in its primary goal--to secure Mexican guest workers through diplomatic agreements with Mexico. While the U.S. state had the capacity to extend health rights, it was the railroad employer that retained the power to distribute guest worker health benefits. The railroad industry's well-developed legal system for minimizing costs paid in injury compensation (injury culture) and protecting corporate autonomy made it difficult for guest workers and the Mexican state to navigate the bracero contracts and succeed in the process of claiming health rights. Railroad braceros were vulnerable in the American workplace not only because of their deportability, but also because they were unfamiliar with railroad injury culture.
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    Material Culture Analysis of the Post-WWII Women's Corselet
    (2019-05) Gibson, Laureen
    Dress through body modification is a primary way we construct our appearance, and convey our identity and gender. Modifying the body occurs through various means of compressing, lifting, combining and separating. Foundation garments are influential in creating one’s appearance and have been used by men and women for generations to construct their appearances and convey their identities. Previous research from various fields has focused heavily on the corset - one of the most controversial aspects of women’s dress - but has recently expanded to other periods and other products. Many view foundation garments as literal and symbolic forms of feminine oppression. However, some dress historians argue they can signify various levels of freedom within cultural constraints. In particular, Steele’s (2001) and Farrell-Beck and Gau’s (2002) research on the corset and brassiere, respectively, offer more diverse perspectives on the use of foundations to construct appearances. Post-World War II (WWII) foundation garments like the corselet, a descendent of the corset and bra, are generally interpreted as a material means of forcing women back into the domestic sphere after the war and containing them within traditional feminine ideals. This reflects some researchers’ second-wave feminist viewpoints and general assumptions that femininity has largely negative connotations. This fails to acknowledge the period’s feminine fashions were very quickly adopted and, thus, likely had positive connotations. Previous research often interrogates the same sources and rarely examines extant artifacts. This study focused on the corselet, a foundation garment popularized during the post-WWII era, and examined the design using material culture methods. Given the basic premise of material culture - objects are shaped by and reflect their culture - this research also considered the culture through these designed-objects. This research built on the exemplary work of the dress historians cited and was influenced by their approaches, which involved carefully examining extant artifacts in relation to other sources of data. A variety of sources were used, including the Minnesota Historical Society’s large Munsingwear Archive and collection of Hollywood Vassarette foundation garments. This research sought to explore and better articulate the functions and meanings of the corselet within the context of the post-World War II era. It provides a “history of [the corselet]” in order to “re-think wider narratives” from the post-WWII era (Riello, 2009, p. 36). Careful observation and analysis of the objects and external sources was used to establish the typical corselet design and its functions in relation to the wearer’s body: modifying and supporting the breasts while exposing the upper body, molding the torso while allowing it to move, creating a smooth line from breasts to hips, holding up stockings, and sexualizing the wearer’s body. Analysis of the objects and external sources also revealed the ways the corselet was intended to be used within postwar culture. I examined who wore the corselet, as well as how and why it was worn. By analyzing the corselet’s design, functions and use, I was able to interpret its meanings within the culture. Some have focused on singular interpretations of foundation garments, arguing the designs reflect literal and abstract instances of either freedom or control. However, I found that both binaries were simultaneously embodied by the corselet. Through my analysis and then interpretation, I identified several dualities: freedom and control, modesty and sexuality, natural and unnatural, seen and unseen. By considering how the corselet reflected each of these seemingly-opposing qualities I was able to position it within its postwar cultural context, as well as within the larger, ongoing practice of body modification.
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    Privileged moves: migration, race and veteran status in post-World War II America.
    (2009-03) Hall, Patricia Kelly
    Internal migration--the redistribution of a country's people--is the spatial response of a population to demographic, economic, and social change. Sometimes change is so swift and intense in all these areas that it reshapes the national landscape. World War II was one of these galvanizing periods. During this major restructuring of the U.S. economy, black migration reached a historic high, white migration increased substantially following a half-century of decline, and second generation immigrants moved beyond the industrial core. By examining differences in these migration patterns, this study adds to our understanding of the social dynamics of the post-war period and fills the gap between two bodies of scholarly literature that could--but have not yet--been in conversation. One body of research locates origins of contemporary economic behavior and social inclusion in the World War II era. Some authors focus on the G.I. Bill and civic inclusion, others on the post-war clash of racial and ethnic groups in specific communities. This research largely ignores migration, analyzing populations where they are found after the war. Similarly, despite renewed scholarly interest in the migration of racial and ethnic groups in the United States, virtually no attention has been paid to the post-World War II period or to veteran status as a selective factor. To draw these scholarly threads together, I traced the evolution of veteran status as a predictor of internal migration prior to World War II. I then explored the influence of veteran status on post-war migration of three populations: whites with native-born parents, whites with foreign-born parents, and blacks. Using census microdata from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), I tracked migration levels and destinations to evaluate the extent to which each group was incorporated into the post-war economic and social order. Higher rates of internal migration were found for veterans but veteran status did not trump existing social hierarchies. Veteran gain to migration varied relative to the group's place in the pre-war social order. Thus social distance between whites with native-born and foreign-born parents was reduced in the post-war years, while that between whites and blacks increased.
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    Review of To Swim Across the World by Frances and Ginger Park
    (Voices from the Gaps, 2005) Peterson, Abbey
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    The River Calls Me Home: Cold War Diplomacy, US Militarization and Environmental Justice within the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe
    (2023-08) Annis, Amber
    AbstractMy dissertation project is an examination of the militarization of reservation land, the appropriation of water, and the exploitation of tribal sovereignty of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. I argue that acquisition of the tribe’s resources for a military gunnery range and for a national damming project was fundamental to U.S. nation-building between the end of WWII and through the Cold War. My dissertation is an inherently American Studies and American Indian Studies project in regards to the various methodologies and sources I am employing. However, I also draw heavily from the fields of ethnohistory, history, and autoethnography. I have framed my project around four chapters that will move chronological in order. Beginning with a historical overview of the tribe, I shift to examining the air-to-air gunnery range and from there I move to telling the story of the damming of the Missouri River and the effects this damming project had on the land and on the people. From there I turn my attention to the community and focus on an environmental tribal program that spent years and millions of dollars in pursuit of mitigation of the gunnery range and the damming project. I end with an examination of concepts of nationhood, expressions of sovereignty and memory among the Lakota people of Cheyenne River. By placing Indian people at the center of my conversation I am investigating the manner in which American Indian people and resources were fundamental to America’s national identity. By highlighting these moments of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe our understandings of American Indian sovereignty, World War II and Cold War engagement, militarization, identity, mobility and nation to nation race-relations are greatly enhanced. The continued use of Lakota peoples resources, specifically land, on Cheyenne River have greatly influenced the development of the United States as a major player in the larger world and the sustained erasure of these histories of exploitation and disregard for sovereignty in dominant scholarship regarding public and foreign diplomacy perpetuates the misconception that Indigenous Studies is not central to postwar studies.
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    Un homme, un vrai: martial and alternative masculinities in French War literature and film
    (2014-06) Halat, Rebecca
    The corpus of literature and film in this dissertation offers underground versions of masculinities that exist during the high stakes time of war. The analysis of these works set either in war, or during a time and place close to war, brings out the different interpretations, interactions, acceptances and rejections of martial masculinity. While each novel or film is unique in its way of relating to the code of martial masculinity and in re-thinking the heroic warrior myth, my approach to these works provides a way of seeing the broader evolution and adaptation of individuals and their conception of masculinity through the same creative works that question these myths. Through an analysis of masculinities within the varying contexts of war, we see the ways in which such gender requirements function on an institutional and individual level. In emphasizing negotiations with masculinity, we are able to focus on particular gendered aspects of the former romanticization of war and the subsequent entrance into the violent reality of World War I's destruction and World War II's defeat for the French nation.
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    What Remains: Japanese American World War II Incarceration in Relation to American Indian Dispossession
    (2021-08) Maruyama, Hana
    This dissertation examines how government agencies crafted policies that exploited Japanese American incarceration in service of U.S. settler colonialism by settling the land and disciplining Japanese American, American Indian, and Alaska Native people into distinct roles. These policies were often created by different agencies for different sites with different ends: from the expropriation of Japanese American-owned lands by the settler state, white settlers, and corporations; to the placement of concentration camps on American Indian reservations without the consent of the nations to whom those lands belong; to the exploitation of Japanese American incarcerated labor to convert Indigenous lands into homesteads for predominantly white veteran settlers; to the forced removal and incarceration of mixed Alaska Native and Japanese American families from Alaska. Taken together, these policies reveal deeply held settler colonial imperatives that undergird settler state-making even in purportedly unrelated racial projects. This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary methodology that draws on a combination of state and community-based archives, oral histories, and landscape and material culture analysis to show how communities have theorized and challenged state-based narratives of the incarceration. I argue that these communities have jointly crafted a narrative of relationality that challenges hegemonic understandings of the incarceration, which depict the incarceration as an exceptional moment in U.S. history. The narrative of relationality places Japanese American incarceration in conversation with other examples of racialized and Indigenous forced removal, imprisonment, and other forms of subjugation to show that the U.S. has been constructed on interlocking oppressions.
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    The wound at the heart of vision: fraught masculinities, marked bodies, and the subject of disability
    (2013-06) Kanyusik, William Bradley
    This dissertation examines disability's presence in World War II-era literature and film in the context of broader cultural anxieties regarding masculinity and the place of the American man at midcentury. Because disability disrupts understandings of the body and sexuality in both military settings and society at large even today, this dissertation sheds light on contemporary debates surrounding disabled veterans, connecting these issues to a broad crisis of American masculinity that emerged following the Second World War. While scholars in disability studies have often read disability in literature and film primarily as a problematic signifier for otherness, and psychoanalytic film critics have seen disability more broadly as a representation of lack itself, this dissertation argues that neither of these positions fully accounts for the role disability assumes in literary and cinematic texts produced in the United States following World War II. In particular, this work deals with texts depicting a sudden onset of disability and its impact on the sense of self for person whose identity was, at least in part, predicated on the possession of an `able' body, These texts demonstrate how an unexpected injury transforms a subject's body from `able' to `disabled' and, as such, shifts the individual's subject position from within the gendering matrix to one that exists outside that matrix, making visible the structures enabling our shared notions of heteronormative masculinity. Returning home from war, disabled American GIs learned to live with broken bodies presenting a constant reminder of the lasting impact of wartime violence otherwise absent in America's pristine postwar landscape; these men faced particularly pronounced difficulties reintegrating into postwar American society, due largely to the destabilizing effect of physical disability on traditional, heteronormative notions of masculinity. Film and literary representations of disabled veterans--which stage a sudden loss of masculinity in a subject that once epitomized maleness through his physicality--demonstrate the fragile nature of all masculinities in the postwar era.