History Department Masters Theses Collection

Si Se Puede: The United Farm Workers, Civil Rights, and the Struggle for Justice in the Fields

Keel, Roneva C. — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 05:54:22 PDT

Since the system of industrial agriculture first emerged in mid-nineteenth century California, farm workers have been among the lowest-paid and ill treated workers in America’s labor force. Racism, nativism, and the entrenched political power of large-scale growers have combined to ensure that the predominantly non-white, largely foreign-born farm labor force has had little voice in the workplace. The United Farm Worker movement of the 1960s and the 1970s was the largest and most successful effort to alter the dynamics of farm worker power in the United States, giving farm workers greater autonomy in the workplace and resulting in concrete gains in terms of wages and working conditions. The UFW’s efforts culminated in the 1975 passage of California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA), the nation’s first ever law to guarantee farm workers the right to collectively bargain and form unions.

But with the passage of the ALRA, the dynamics of power in farm labor relations changed once again; the future of the union would depend upon its ability to adapt to these new realities.

The Praxis of Horst Hoheisel: the Countermonument in an Expanded Field

Hernandez, Juan Felipe — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 05:54:16 PDT

This paper examines the work of German artist Horst Hoheisel in Latin-America. I open the conversation by including Hoheisel’s provocative participation in the 2005 memory debates in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Here, I introduce the nature of Hoheisel’s reasoning and the dialectical self-reflectiveness that is at work in his artifacts. In each project, I look for the way in which Hoheisel lays down the “memorialistic substance” of a specific site together with the self-critical rationality that characterizes his creation. The second part of this essay attempts to construct the theoretical parameters for the expansion of the definition of the countermonument. This expanded definition attempts to unlock the countermonument and the memorial from the therapeutic mechanics of repetition -at the level of the subject- and release its possibilities vis-à-vis the potentiality of the event of language. Using the insights of Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, I discuss the work of two contemporary artists (Jochen Gerz and Krzysztof Wodiczko) who experiment with the use of space and language as a way to invent a new type of countermonument, one that is based on the notion of an active memory rather than a cathartic one.

Good News

Williams, Eesha — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 05:25:53 PDT

A movement to reform the media has grown explosively in the U.S. in the past decade. Using dramatic, real-world case studies of journalism that made a difference, Good News shows why media reform is worth fighting for. A vast, old growth redwood forest was spared the chainsaw. Thousands of Latina janitors in Houston united to boost their poverty level wages. In these and other victories for justice and nature, non-corporate journalists played a crucial role.

Citizens and Criminals: Mass Incarceration, "Prison Neighbors," and Fear-Based Organizing in 1980s Rural Pennsylvania

Arthur, Erika — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 05:25:50 PDT

Throughout the 1980s, the Citizens’ Advisory Committee (CAC), a grassroots group of “prison neighbors,” organized for tighter security at the State Correctional Institution at Dallas (SCID), a medium security prison in northeast Pennsylvania. Motivated primarily by their fear of prisoner escapes, the CAC used the local media to raise awareness about security concerns and cooperated with the SCID administration to acquire state funding for projects at the prison that they believed would improve security. Their work coincided with the widespread proliferation of “tough on crime” rhetoric and policies, and the inauguration of the most intensive buildup of prisons ever witnessed in the United States. This phenomenon, now known as mass incarceration, has disproportionately impacted urban communities of color, due principally to the highly racialized nature of the War on Drugs, while the majority of prisons have been located in white rural communities. By imagining themselves as a population under threat, conceptualizing prisoners as potentially dangerous regardless of the nature of the crimes of which they had been convicted, and positioning the prison administration as a potential ally that needed constant supervision, the CAC contributed in complex ways to the solidification of a racially- and economically-skewed, intensely punitive criminal justice system. The CAC’s organizing helps expose an aspect of mass incarceration that has remained relatively unexplored thus far: the role rural communities that surround prisons played in the historical processes that moved the practice of punishment from the relative periphery of U.S. society to its present position as a central apparatus for political, economic, and social organization.

Eugenothenics: The Literary Connection Between Domesticity and Eugenics

True, Caleb J. — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 09:40:06 PST

This is an analysis of the connection between the domestic science and eugenics. While it is made clear by historians such as Megan Elias and Kathy Cooke that there is ample connection between eugenics and euthenics, there has not been as comprehensive an analysis of the direct connections between domestic science and eugenics. Close examination of literature from the domestic science movement reveals the shared goals of domestic science and eugenics. The domestic science movement was also a necessary precursor to the euthenics movement, not simply a “re-envisioning” of home economics by Ellen Richards. When Richards died, her euthenic ideals would continue to be a part of domestic science in the early decades of the twentieth century. This analysis will contribute in part to the understanding of how, through rhetoric, nations can progress towards more unsightly policies of social engineering from seemingly benign beginnings. Eugenics may not have origins in domestic science, a field of homemaking, cookery, etiquette, and child-rearing, but eugenics certainly shares goals, purposes, and a vision with domestic science.

The Politics of Labor Militancy in Minneapolis, 1934-1938

Smemo, Kristoffer — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 09:36:21 PST

The militancy that helped prompt federal labor reform and the electoral incorporation of industrial workers exposed serious political fault lines within the so-called New Deal coalition. In particular, militancy and factionalism in the labor movement compromised the early electoral victories of the ruling Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota and New Deal Democrats nationally. Yet the landslide victory of Republican candidates in 1938 in Minnesota, as well as across the industrial North, was not a repudiation of the New Deal or the labor movement. These Republicans refashioned their party platform to accommodate key parts of the New Deal, including recognizing the legitimacy of collective bargaining. Liberal Republicans harnessed popular support New Deal social policy, but unlike Democrats they were free to criticize the supposed “excesses” of the New Deal- namely a militant and politicized labor movement. Minneapolis provides one case study to reconsider the impact of labor militancy on the development of New Deal liberalism.

"Super Successful People": Robert Schuller, Suburban Exclusion, and the Demise of the New Deal Political Order

Anderson, Richard — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 09:20:32 PST

Between 1955 and 1984, the Reverend Robert Schuller’s Garden Grove Community Church in Orange County, California, blossomed into a ten-thousand-member congregation of regional and national prominence. Straddling the line between evangelical and mainline Protestantism, the church was emblematic of conservative American Christianity in the second half of the 20^th century. Likewise, Orange County was the quintessential sprawling, decentralized, postindustrial suburban region. Garden Grove Community Church and Orange County grew together at an exponential rate in the postwar era. Through participation in the devotional, social, and organizational activities of the church, Schuller’s congregation actively constructed their personal and collective identities. They made meaning out of their suburban lives in ways that had long-term political and economic implications for the county, the region, and the country.

The church offered cultural, spiritual, and ideological coherence to a community of corporate, white-collar transplants with few social roots. The substance of that coherence was a theology conflating Christianity with meritocracy and entrepreneurial individualism. The message resonated with “Sun Belt” suburbanites who benefited from systemic class- and race-based metropolitan inequality. Schuller’s message of self-reliance and personal achievement dovetailed with a national conservative repudiation of the public sector and collective responsibility that originated in the suburbs. This drive to eviscerate the American New Deal political order state was nearly unstoppable by the early 1980s, and it received theological aid from institutions like Garden Grove Community Church.

Intellectuals and Local Reforms in Late Qing Wuxi: 1897-1904

Duan, Lei — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 09:54:59 PDT

This research examines the intellectuals’ reform activities in local society at the turn of twentieth century. Focusing on Wuxi, a city in south China, this study seeks to shed light on two major issues. First, it studies the reform activities in the areas of education and print media in such a transformative era. I come to argue that differences existed between reforms at a national level and the circumstances in local society. These reformers in Wuxi provided the common people more choices besides Chinese learning, rather than following the ti-yong formula. They connected their reform proposals with the common people. Second, this study scrutinizes the complexity of their local endeavors. The most profound challenge these reformers encountered, I argue, was whether they could compete in the urban space, which had become a site of conflict and contestation.

An End to the “Vichy/Algeria Syndrome”?: Negotiating Traumatic Pasts in the French Republic

Silvestri, Justin W. — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 19:09:37 PDT

Within the past few years, France has exhibited a changing relationship in regards to its memory of its collaborationist and colonial past. The controversies of the loi du 23 février 2005 and the 2007 Guy Môquet Commemoration displayed a new openness to discuss and evaluate traumatic pasts. Public debate during the two controversies focused on the difficult process of how to incorporate these traumatic events into the national narrative. Furthermore, this process of negotiation has opened up a vibrant discussion over what parties in France possess the authority and the right to construct the nation’s history. Medical metaphors of neurosis no longer appear to fit French practices of commemoration and remembrance.

The Fifth Republic’s legislative effort to dictate the content and character of France’s past encountered significant resistance from a number of historians and educators. While they stood opposed to the State’s methods, French historians and scholars came to frame their resistance to legislated history as evidence of their loyalty to republican ideals, namely those of scientific inquiry and laïcité. They too desired the creation of a shared national history, yet insisted that this history could only be formed by respecting the presence of multiple narratives. Other scholars voiced their reservations that the restoration of traumatic narratives might further social breakdown. Interestingly, these historians expressed little concern for the role of the general public in the writing of history and, at times, revealed a distinct mistrust of the public’s capacity to think historically.

SCAR'd Times: Maine's Prisoners' Rights Movement, 1971-1976

Chard, Daniel S. — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 19:08:59 PDT

In late 1972, prisoners and ex-convicts in Maine formed Statewide Correctional Alliance for Reform (SCAR), a radical prisoners' rights organization that provoked a thoroughgoing public discussion on the function of prisons in Maine and in American society that lasted for about two years. Working for prison reform through legislation, litigation, and community organizing, SCAR influenced a Maine public unusually receptive to new approaches to criminal justice due to the impact of nationwide prison rebellions and the widely publicized massacre of forty-three prisoners and guards in New York’s Attica State Prison on September 13, 1971. As SCAR members, frustrated by the slow pace of change, came to increasingly view crime and prisons as products of an unjust socio-economic system that could be changed only through revolutionary means, a conservative backlash against prison reform also developed in the state, led by police officers, prison guards, and others who felt that Maine’s criminal justice system did not effectively safeguard its citizens from violent crime. When SCAR disbanded in 1976 as a result of internal political divisions and intense police repression, Maine no longer had an organized constituency to push for prison reform, leaving conservatives and the forces of political inertia and public indifference to guide state correctional policy in the years since.