Showing 21 - 30 of 41 Items
Constructing a scientist: Expert authority and public images of Rachel Carson
Date: 2011-06-01
Creator: David K. Hecht
Access: Open access
- This article uses the voluminous public discourse around Rachel Carson and her controversial bestseller Silent Spring to explore Americans' views on science and scientists. Carson provides a particularly interesting case study because of intense and public debates over whether she was a scientist at all, and therefore whether her book should be granted legitimacy as science. Her career defied easy classification, as she acted variously as writer, activist, and environmentalist in addition to scientist. Defending her work as legitimate science, which many though not all commentators did, therefore became an act of defining what both science and scientists could and should be. This article traces the variety of nonscientific images and narratives readers and writers assigned to Carson, such as "reluctant crusader" and "scientist-poet." It argues that nonscientific attributes were central to legitimating her as both admirable person and admirable scientist. It explores how debates over Silent Spring can be usefully read as debates over the desirability of putatively nonscientific attributes in the professional work of a scientist. And it examines the nature of Carson's very democratized image for changing notions of science and scientists in 1960s United States politics and culture. © 2011 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Traders and Troublemakers: Sovereignty in Southern Morocco at the End of the 19th Century
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Joseph Campbell Hilleary
Access: Open access
- This thesis explores changes in and challenges to Moroccan political authority in the region of the Sous during the late nineteenth century. It attempts to show how the phenomenon of British informal empire created a crisis over Moroccan sovereignty that caused the sultan to both materially and discursively change the way he wielded power in southern Morocco. It further connects these changes and the narrative contestation that accompanied them to the construction of the Bilad al-Siba/Bilad al-Makhzan dichotomy found in Western academic literature on Morocco starting in the colonial period. It begins with an examination of letters between Sultan Hassan I and local leaders in the Sous that show a shift toward a more bureaucratic form of governance in response to repeated openings of black-market ports by British trading companies. It then investigates the textual debate over the framing of Hassan I’s military expeditions to southern Morocco in the 1880s and 90s by drawing on a collection of European travel accounts, American consular reports, and a royal Moroccan history. Finally, it ties the illegal trade in the Sous to the broader theory of informal empire through a close examination of the Tourmaline Incident of 1897, using documents from the British Foreign Office as well as published accounts by crew members aboard the Tourmaline, itself.
The Jewish “Other” in Argentina: Antisemitism, Exclusion, and the Formation of Argentine Nationalism and Identity in the 20th Century and during Military Rule (1976-1983)
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Marcus Helble
Access: Open access
- Throughout the 20th century, Argentine leaders and social actors attempted to shape distinct national identities and a sense of nationalism that corresponded to their respective political ideologies. Beginning in the first couple decades of the 20th century, the formation of a Jewish “other” would be central to the construction of both Argentine national identity and nationalism. This thesis argues that the military dictatorship that led the country from 1976 to 1983 built on this othering of the Jewish community as military leaders sought to forge a national identity linked to Catholicism. It focuses first on three separate periods of the early and mid-20th centuries and how governments in that period built, maintained, and altered the view of the Jewish community as a not fully Argentine “other” living in the country. Using several editions of a far-right antisemitic periodical, declassified State Department documents, and testimonies of Jewish political prisoners and soldiers, the thesis transitions to focus on the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. It examines two separate periods of the dictatorship, highlighting first the role antisemitic beliefs, and opposing such views, had in an internal power struggle within the military government. In the second period of the dictatorship, during the Malvinas (Falklands) War, the thesis examines how antisemitism became a central part of the military’s efforts to consolidate a sense of national unity during the conflict, even as Jews participated largely for the first time within Argentine nationalism and the military.
From “This Revolution is Neither Communist nor Capitalist!” to “Long Live the Socialist Revolution:” The Deterioration of U.S.-Cuban Relations from 1958-1961
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Julia Lyne
Access: Open access
- This thesis studies the deterioration of U.S.-Cuban relations from 1958-1961. Mainly drawing from primary sources from the National Archives, it seeks to answer and understand how and why relations deteriorated so rapidly. It pushes against the common belief that U.S.-Cuban relations were doomed from the start, instead highlighting in Chapter One Fidel Castro’s rise to power (and Fulgencio Batista’s fall from power) and revealing that the U.S. government was not entirely against Castro’s seizure of power. Chapter Two explores Castro’s first year in power and the (futile) attempts made by both governments to keep relations alive. Finally, it closes with the destruction of official and unofficial relations, suggesting that President Eisenhower’s covert approval of the invasion of the Bay of Pigs marked the covert ending to political relations as well as rising economic and political tensions due to an incompatibility of demand and interest in the sugar and oil industries. Ultimately, this thesis suggests that it was not just a matter of communism that led to the destruction of U.S.-Cuban relations at the time; instead, it was because of compounding effects of other various other economic and political factors and incompatibilities, such as the sugar and oil industries, public and political slandering and attacks from both sides, and an increasing acceptance of the Soviet Union and its supporters. This analysis does not seek to argue against the influence of communism in its entirety; rather, it aims to highlight and nuance the contributing factors to this deterioration.
The French Official Mistress: Fashioning Female Political Power in the Ancien Régime
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Samantha Brown
Access: Open access
- This thesis focuses on the French official mistress as a position of unofficial female political power under the French monarchy from the 16th to the 18th century. Centering on three case studies – Diane de Poitiers, Madame de Maintenon, and Madame de Pompadour – this thesis argues that the role of the official mistress extended beyond sexual companion to advisor, negotiator, diplomat, artistic patron, and cultural trendsetter. By taking a deep look at the epistolary and artistic record of these three official mistresses from across France’s modern history, the extent of their autonomy and political maneuvering becomes clear in the tactics they used to project and solidify their power. Diane de Poitiers, Madame de Maintenon, and Madame de Pompadour all existed in unique contexts of the French court and constructed their own methods of fulfilling the role of the official mistress, revealing both changes in the monarchy and their impacts upon it. Notably, the ways in which they projected identity through self-fashioning resulted in a reflection of this image back onto the monarch, expanding the extent of their impact on the monarchy. In striving to understand the political reality of women in France under Salic law and today, the position of maîtresse-en-titre is a crucial framework to recognize the significance of female power structures at court and in the monarchy, and the degree to which women were able to shape these structures themselves.
A Fatal Mistake or a Paradigm Shift? Noguchi Hideyo and the Global Reimagining of Yellow Fever
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Seth Gorelik
Access: Open access
Reconsidering Operation Condor: Cross-border Military Cooperation and the Defeat of the Transnational Left in Chile and Argentina during the 1970s
Date: 2014-05-01
Creator: Georgia C Whitaker
Access: Open access
- In this study of the roots of Operation Condor, I track the development of this unusual military alliance forged by six Southern Cone governments (Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay) during the 1970s, as well as the push-and-pull relationship between the transnational migration of political militants and the military’s impetus for collaboration. While most accounts of Condor focus on the United States as the operation’s primary orchestrator, I contend that initial motivation for the type of cooperation that Condor would later formalize was driven not by the U.S., but by the Southern Cone militaries’ perception that Marxism had to be excised from the entire region. In addition, while Condor scholars have either ignored or minimized the role of the left as political actors and placed the blame for violence exclusively on the militaries and the United States, I draw from unpublished Argentine police records, Argentine Embassy documents, and Chilean-Argentine solidarity group publications to argue that it is essential to broaden our understanding of what both sides in this ideological confrontation were attempting to accomplish. The transnational left, never a homogenous group, evolved to meet a variety of objectives. Many militants continued to be politically active while they were in exile, and many acted in solidarity with like-minded leftists in their midst.
Why we write (nuclear) history
Date: 2017-09-01
Creator: David K. Hecht
Access: Open access
- Nuclear history always compels. Scholars (and readers) can immerse themselves in the existential threat posed by the atomic bomb and its successor weapons, the tantalizing prospect of carbon-free energy, or the study of a natural phenomenon deeply at odds with our everyday experience of the world. There is thus always something profound at stake when we write nuclear historyÂ-Â be it physical, economic or intellectual. And while it may seem that the end of the Cold War should have diminished the academic attention accorded to the subject, it actually just allowed the historiography to evolve. To the wealth of technical and political studies that once dominated nuclear history, we can now add a host of excellent cultural, environmental, literary and transnational studies. Those of us who entered the field shortly after the break-up of the Soviet Union have been able to follow these developments first-hand, from the initial uncertainty of where nuclear history would go without its original raison d'être to seeing the possibilities opened up in a post-Cold War world. The books under review here provide important and timely additions to this historiography. Luis A. Campos's Radium and the Secret Life provides a rigorous and compelling account of the uses of radium in early twentieth-century biology; Timothy J. Jorgensen's Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation offers an accessible and illuminating analysis of the benefits and risks of radiation. The books also make for a fascinating juxtaposition. They complement each other well, but also contain some intriguing differences that allow us to reflect on the nature of nuclear history in the early twenty-first century.
A nuclear narrative: Robert Oppenheimer, autobiography, and public authority
Date: 2010-12-01
Creator: David K. Hecht
Access: Open access
Duty and Distinction: Scientists as Intellectuals in Modern China
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Helen Wang
Access: Open access
- As critical players in the Chinese state’s pursuit of modernization and political legitimacy, Chinese scientists have been the recipients of state attention and scrutiny throughout modern history. This paper will analyze how Qian Xuesen (1911-2009) became a national hero as the Chinese Communist Party’s model scientist. Qian developed his scientific expertise in the United States, before Cold War political tensions forced his extradition. Upon his return to China, Qian became a key missile scientist in the state’s emerging nuclear weapons program. By analyzing Qian’s public persona as portrayed in official state media, this paper will argue that the CCP conferred distinct political duties to scientists, defining a new socio-political role for scientist-intellectuals. Beginning from the Mao era and continuing through to the present day, the CCP’s portrayal and promotion of Qian’s legacy gives insight into the state’s strategy to use science to bolster authority and legitimize policy.