Showing 1 - 41 of 41 Items

Date: 2018-01-01

Creator: Dallas G. Denery

Access: Open access

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Ian Ward

Access: Open access

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s myriad contributions to the continental philosophical tradition have been well documented, but his influence on North American intellectual life has gone largely gone unrecognized. This paper attempts to fill that gap, using primary and secondary source material to document Gadamer’s scholarly activities in the United States and Canada between 1968 and 1986. The paper also evaluates Gadamer’s influence using detailed accounts of “hermeneutic encounters” that occurred between Gadamer and four notable North American philosophers: Richard Palmer, Paul de Man, Charles Taylor, and Richard Rorty. Through these accounts, this paper argues that Gadamer made lasting contributions to ongoing debates in the humanities about the nature of literary interpretation, the social sciences, and analytic philosophy. Finally, the paper explores the philosophical and historiological possibilities that Gadamer’s hermeneutics opens up for intellectual history more broadly, especially in the field of reception history. Building on Gadamer’s own hermeneutics and Hans-Robert Jauss’s reception aesthetics, it develops the concept of the “encounter” as the starting point of a more hermeneutically-sensitive approach to intellectual history.

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Micah Benjamin Wilson

Access: Open access

This thesis investigates three predominantly Jewish housing cooperatives that emerged in the Bronx in the late 1920s. The Amalgamated Housing Cooperative, the United Workers Cooperative Colony (the “Coops”), and the Sholem Aleichem Houses offered garment workers utopian retreats from the drudgery of Lower East Side tenements where Jewish immigrants arrived in droves between 1890-1920. With each cooperative housing a distinct faction of the Jewish Left––from socialists to communists to Yiddish nationalists––the Bronx housing cooperatives, more than experiments in communal living, were the site of a highly contested battle over competing Jewish cultural and political worldviews across the 1930s and 1940s. Transcending the era that is typically considered the movement’s “peak” in the 1910s, this thesis demonstrates that the era of the Bronx cooperatives must be central to any study of the Jewish labor movement by revealing the ways radical Jews attempted to maintain and negotiate their various worldviews against the backdrop of the threats posed by the capitalist housing market, assimilation, and sectarian struggles. I reconsider the disproportionate attention the “success story” of the Amalgamated Cooperative has received, situating its politics as but one of many responses to the contradictions embedded in the housing cooperative model. Finally, I analyze the role of nostalgia present across resident recollections of the cooperatives and situate it in the contexts of 1970s neoliberal urban reform and suburbanization, while considering the discursive power of this emotion to obscure the persistent legacy of anti-black racism entangled in the cooperative housing movement despite its progressive reputation.

Date: 2019-05-01

Creator: Anna Louisa Roosevelt Lennon

Access: Open access

Date: 2018-05-01

Creator: Ethan Barkalow

Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

• Embargo End Date: 2025-05-14

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Grace Ann Fenwick

Access: Embargoed

Date: 2025-01-01

Creator: Talia Traskos-Hart

Access: Open access

The Revolutionary Body traces three Marxist feminist groups which emerged in the late 1960s and organized through the 1970s: Wages for Housework, the Third World Women’s Alliance, and WITCH. These three groups have yet to be combined in secondary historical scholarship, and their grouping here evidences similarities in anti-capitalist organizing across demographic differences. This project delves into the groups’ conceptions of the home and the body as dual sites of oppression and sources of liberation. Through studying such issues as imprisonment, housework, and forced sterilization, this project uncovers the intensity of capitalist violence unto the body and the ensuing mysticism revolutionary women’s bodies were seen to hold.

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Faria A Nasruddin

Access: Open access

After the abolition of slavery, the Colonial Office instituted an indentured labor scheme that lasted from 1838 to 1917, in which they brought East Indians to the plantation colonies as laborers under five year contracts. Due to the planter class’ desire for permanent sources of labor in British Guiana, the Colonial Government incentivized East Indians to permanently settle. East Indians thus dominated the British Guiana’s agricultural landscape and became the single largest ethnicity in the Colony by 1920. This thesis explores the early negotiations of the meaning of diaspora and diasporic citizenship for East Indians in British Guiana. They comprised a diverse conglomerate of different socio-economic positions: agricultural estate laborers, village residents, and middle-class business professionals. Each socioeconomic group had a different lived experience in the colony and different outlook on what it meant to be a creole-born East Indian. This thesis traces the multiple and contingent ideas of citizenship and nationality that were circulating at the time. Against a backdrop of changing imperial politics that promoted modernity and the discourse of the nation, East Indian visions centered around how to construct permanence, and negotiate belonging. By drawing on colonial documentation–local reports, commission transcripts, personal correspondence–and documentation produced by East Indians–memorandums, speeches, and books–this thesis ultimately argues that East Indians came to view culture as integral to their self-worth and definitions of place within the imperial system. Culture thus became the primary lens to negotiate the various meaning of citizenship and place in the imperial-national moment.

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Song Eraou

Access: Open access

In the literature on student activism in Malaysia, the years from 1967 to 1974 are emphasized as vibrant years—students organized large-scale demonstrations, regularly asserted their opinions in the political arena, and even participated in electoral politics. This period was followed, however, with the imposition of strict laws in 1975 limiting freedom of speech and expression. Such laws were part of the broader containment policy pursued by the state after the May 13, 1969, racial riots, which allowed the state to stifle any form of political dissidence to ensure peace between different ethnic groups. One particularly active organization in this period was the Malay Language Society (PBMUM) of the University of Malaya. While PBMUM began with a dream of using language as a mode to foster national unity, after the riots it would be remembered as a race-based organization oriented toward Malays. This thesis offers a historical analysis and reinterpretation of the PBMUM, characterizing it as a platform for students at the University of Malaya to meet, discuss, and mobilize around the most important issues concerning Malaysian society. Importantly, members exhibited a continued devotion towards changing the fate of the rakyat (the people). In revising the history of PBMUM, this thesis also offers a deeper understanding of the Malaysian political landscape in the ‘60s and ‘70s, focusing on political discussions around nation-building in the lead up to the May 13 riots and its aftermath.

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Justis Dixon

Access: Open access

The 1850s were a tumultuous period in American politics, with a complete partisan realignment fundamentally shifting the balance of power away from the status quo and toward possibilities for change. This paper focuses on the collapse of the Second Party System in Maine, and understanding how we can explain this stunning and rapid shift. The varying factors can be placed into two broad categories First, ethnocultural issues were primarily responsible for much of the growing turmoil within and between the major parties throughout the 1840s, and accelerating greatly in the early 1850s with rising levels of immigration and the increasing draw of the temperance movement, which was then followed by the passage of highly controversial legislation concerning these issues. Second, national-level issues such as the Fugitive Slave Act and detailed reports of the violence out West in local newspapers brought the consequences of the unfettered expansion of slavery closer to home for many Mainers. Scholars of this period have expressed varying opinions as to the relative importance of local and national level issues in generating a change to the political system. Using Maine as a case study due to its position as a leader in the temperance movement and its geographical distance from the battlegrounds of national politics at the time, I conduct an in-depth examination of the political history of the state and conclude that rising tensions on both local and national levels were necessary to cause such transformational change.

Date: 2019-05-01

Creator: Albert William Wetter

Access: Open access

During the Great War, the Military Service Act was introduced on January 27, 1916 and redefined British citizenship. Moreover, some men objected to the state’s military service mandate, adamant that compliance violated their conscience. This thesis investigates how the introduction of conscription reshaped British society, dismantled the “sacred principle” of volunteerism, and replaced it with conscription, resulting in political and popular debates, which altered the individual’s relationship with the state. British society transformed from a polity defined by the tenets of Liberalism and a free-will social contract to a society where citizenship was correlated to duty to the state. Building off Lois Bibbings’ research on conscientious objectors, this thesis nuances the analysis with the case studies of David Blelloch and Norman Gaudie. Framed by two theories—Benedict Anderson’s imagined community and Barbara Rosenwein’s emotional community—these case studies demonstrate how conscientious objectors exposed the incongruence of the British imagined and emotional community, and the redefinition of citizenship. By weaving these theories into the British Great War tapestry, this thesis contends that the British nation was imagined differently before the war than it was after the war because of the introduction of conscription. Drawing from parliamentary debate transcripts, newspaper articles, and archival material from the Imperial War Museum in London, and the Liddle Personal Collection at the University of Leeds, Blelloch’s and Gaudie’s respective case studies ultimately bait the question: “What does it mean to be British?”

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Nina Nayiri McKay

Access: Open access

Even though Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregation in public schools in 1954, many American children still attend schools that are racially and, increasingly, socioeconomically segregated. Philadelphia, a northern city that did not have an explicit policy of segregating children on the basis of race when Brown was decided, nevertheless still has entrenched residential segregation that replicates in public schools. The metropolitan area became a segregated space in the years around World War II, when housing discrimination, employment discrimination, lending discrimination, suburbanization, and urban renewal started the years-long trajectory of growing white suburbs surrounding an increasingly non-white and under-resourced urban core. These patterns had profound implications for school segregation, which city organizers began trying to fight shortly after Brown v. Board. However, the first court case to take on segregation in Philadelphia schools—Chisholm v. The Board of Education—was largely unsuccessful, with overburdened NAACP and ally lawyers struggling to meet the judge’s expectations of concrete proof of an intent to segregate on the School District of Philadelphia’s part. In the early 1960s, though, the state’s Human Relations Commission obtained a legislative mandate to take on school desegregation. It won its first integration victory in the Pennsylvania port city of Chester before moving to Philadelphia, where it pushed for school integration from 1968 to 2009. The city’s political and ideological battles over those decades reflect national trends around the rise of conservatism and neoliberalism in suburban politics and school reform, limiting the possibilities for change.

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Rahul Prabhu

Access: Open access

Sexuality was at the fulcrum of various issues facing late-colonial India from social reform projects such as child marriage, women’s rights and birth control to concerns of socioeconomic, physical and sexual weakening. The question of sexual modernity became implicated in imaginations of the modern post-colonial nation, setting the stage for a period of energized, linguistically plural projects of sexual knowledge production. While science was used to authorize such projects in the West, where could authority be located in a context where science held plural meaning and authority itself was highly contested? This paper asks how scientific authority was understood, deployed and shaped by the eugenics project of Narayan Sitaram Phadke (1894-1978) and the sexology project of A.P. Pillay (1890-1956). This thesis argues that the mechanics of each figures’ utilization of science captures how the interaction between scientific authority and society was understood by Phadke and Pillay in different ways. While both figures subscribed to the idea that science was universally authoritative in the making of sexual modernity, Phadke’s and Pillay’s projects show the plurality in how science was understood by social reformers. Furthermore, the thesis presents the differences between Phadke’s and Pillay’s projects as a product of the larger movements – British-era birth control advocacy, Hindu nationalism, upper-caste marriage reform and global sexology – that Phadke and Pillay were distinctly invested in or separated from. Scientific authority and the mechanics of its use is proposed as a vivid lens into the complex dynamics of modernization in late-colonial India.

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Livia Kunins-Berkowitz

Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

Date: 2025-01-01

Creator: Vaughn Vial

Access: Open access

In the 1950s and 1960s, Arab nationalism swept across the Arabian Peninsula from Egypt and the Levant, carried by migrants, refugees, and in magazines and newspapers that circulated across national borders. In the Gulf countries this wave of Arab nationalism collided with a flow more material in nature: the movement of enormous amounts of carbon energy in the form of oil. In Arab nationalism, oil workers at Aramco in Saudi Arabia and Bapco in Bahrain found not only a direction for political change but a means of overcoming religious and national divides with their fellow workers. Strikes and labor actions soon ensued at a scale that was unprecedented in these countries. This project explores how the confluence of oil flows and anticolonial nationalism both imbued this moment with the potential to effect egalitarian political change and, simultaneously, limited that potential.

Date: 2014-01-01

Creator: Allen Wells, Natalia Sanz González, (translator)

Access: Open access

Setecientos cincuenta refugiados judíos dejaron la Alemania nazi y fundaron la colonia agrícola de Sosúa en la República Dominicana, que en ese momento estaba bajo el régimen de uno de los dictadores más represivos de Latinoamérica, el general Rafael Trujillo. En este libro, Allen Wells, hijo de uno de los colonos de Sosúa, cuenta la historia del general Trujillo, Franklin Delano Roosevelt y los afortunados pioneros que fundaron, en la costa norte de la isla, una exitosa cooperativa de productos lácteos de propiedad de los mismos empleados. ¿Por qué el dictador admitió a esos desesperados refugiados cuando muy pocas naciones aceptaron a los que escapaban del nazismo? Ansioso de mitigar las críticas internacionales después de que su Ejército masacrara varios miles de haitianos desarmados, Trujillo mandó a sus representantes a una conferencia sobre los refugiados del nazismo realizada en Évian, Francia, en 1938. Propuesta por Roosevelt para desviar las críticas a las políticas restrictivas de inmigración de su Gobierno, la Conferencia de Évian resultó un completo fracaso. La República Dominicana fue la única nación que aceptó abrir sus puertas; el oportunista Trujillo buscaba “blanquear” la población dominicana, recibiendo refugiados judíos, quienes en Europa eran ellos mismos sujeto de desprecio racista. Debido a que los Estados Unidos no admitieron números significativos de refugiados judíos, alentaron a Latinoamérica a aceptarlos. Esta propuesta, sumada a la preocupación mayor de Roosevelt de luchar contra el nazismo, fortaleció las relaciones estadounidenses con las dictaduras latinoamericanas en las décadas que vendrían.

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Sebastian de Lasa

Access: Open access

The rise of Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) in the early 1970s coincided with the rise of national liberation movements across Europe, which largely were inspired by notable examples of resistance throughout the Global South in the decades prior. ETA’s growth over this period, and in the years prior, was heavily dependent on the image created of the organziation in the local, domestic, and international press, including through documents distributed by the group itself. By comparing ETA’s external presence to the group’s internal strife, it becomes clear that ETA made efforts to align itself with the popular revolutionary language of the period. The group took advantage of, and aimed to create press spectacles, in attempts to manipulate its public image. However, the discrepancy between the group’s public image and internal dissolution became apparent as the group pursued more violent acts in the goal of Basque liberation.

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Archer Thomas

Access: Open access

The switch from late modernism to postmodernism in Western aesthetic theory and criticism took place in the mid-to-late 20th century, radically changing the face of cultural criticism. Much has been written on how postmodernism broke from modernism, but what factors paved its way in the decades following the Second World War? This paper argues that postmodernism represents both a reaction to and a necessary evolution of late modernism, specifically as it manifests in architecture, politics, and the politics of architecture. It focuses on the crisis of confidence among Western left-wing circles following the upheaval of the Second World War and posits that, because of this upheaval, primitivism came to dominate the epistemology of a renewed modernism led by figures such as Clement Greenberg, Reyner Banham, and the practitioners of “the New Brutalism.” The paper then explores how the Western left-wing reaction to developments like decolonization and postwar modernization challenged primitivity’s newfound importance, resulting in a shift towards a “postmodern populism” in aesthetics and politics by the 1960s as described by Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Robert Venturi, and Reyner Banham.

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Hafsa Hossain

Access: Open access

In 1985, Mohd. Ahmad Khan v. Shah Bano Begum, known commonly as the Shah Bano Case, became a flashpoint for Indian democracy. The Shah Bano case revolved around the maintenance of a divorced woman, not the first of its kind by any means. A case that sparked major social and political upheaval during a broader period of political turmoil, the Shah Bano case has long been interpreted as an expression of the crisis and contradictions between the democratic rights of women as citizens and the democratic rights of Muslims as a religious minority in the Indian nation-state. In the immediate aftermath of the case, critical feminist and post-colonial scholarship grappled with the dilemmas it involved, but to some extent remained caught up in those dilemmas. This thesis builds upon the important work of these and later scholars, but it also draws new attention to the specific role of the English-language public sphere in shaping the terms of debate that surrounded the case in the 1980s. This paper argues against the binary understanding of the landmark Shah Bano Case as either a failure or success of Indian secularism. I argue that the case and its aftermath demonstrate the continual nature of Indian secularism and democratic practice, especially laden in the post-Emergency era.

• Embargo End Date: 2029-05-16

Date: 2024-01-01

Creator: Juliana Keyes Vandermark

Access: Embargoed

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Date: 2025-01-01

Creator: Seth Gorelik

Access: Open access

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.

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.

Date: 2010-12-01

Creator: David K. Hecht

Access: Open access

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.

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Emily Ann Cohen

Access: Open access

Following the Second World War, as German Communists worked to establish a new socialist East German state, Jews who survived persecution and imprisonment by the Nazis worked to reestablish a Jewish community at the same time. Though many scholars dismiss the relationship between Jews and the Socialist Unity Party, the ruling party of the German Democratic Republic, as one characterized only by neglect and occasional political exploitation, it was much more nuanced, shaped in large part by the Cold War. Both the party and the Jewish community relied on the other to accomplish their goals, namely, survival in a new world order: The Socialist Unity Party relied on the Jewish community to maintain the German Democratic Republic's claim to legitimacy, and the Jews, few in number, relied on the party for financial support. Despite mutual benefits, however, the state and party nearly always had the upper hand. The power imbalance led Jews to find creative ways to fulfill their needs and, at several points, even prompted protest of the party’s treatment of its Jewish citizens. This paper follows the course of this relationship by focusing on the German Democratic Republic's management of sites of historical significance—which vacillated between outright destruction and dedicated protection—returning particularly to the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weissensee, one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe. With this particular lens, this project addresses questions about memory, mythology, and agency in a socialist dictatorship and challenges assumptions about Jewish life in East Germany.

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Reuben Mindlin Schafir

Access: Open access

This thesis examines the intersection of race and professionalism in healthcare as they relate specifically to the debate over universal healthcare. It begins with the National Medical Association (NMA), a professional organization for Black physicians founded in 1895. The first two chapters follow the NMA as they attempt to navigate the two allegiances they have: one to be "race men," and work for racial equity in healthcare, and one to be professionals, and work towards affirming their professional sovereignty. The narrative begins in 1945, when President Harry Truman backed the first substantial proposal for a system of nationalized healthcare. Chapter two discusses the 1960s and how the confluence of the Great Society and the civil rights movement provided Black doctors with an opportunity to successfully serve both aspects of their identities. The third chapters explores the 1970s and the events following the passage of Medicare and Medicaid. The NMA began to align itself more closely with the American Medical Association (AMA), which had long-embodied the medical establishment. When this alignment occurred, the Black Panther party offered an alternative method of addressing racial health inequities that rejected not only the notion of healthcare as a commodity, but the entire national identity associated with the free market within which physicians sold care. This thesis considers how the interests of patients and the interests of doctors do and do not align, using race to bring this tension into high relief.

• Embargo End Date: 2027-05-16

Date: 2024-01-01

Creator: Sophia Blaha

Access: Embargoed

Date: 2025-01-01

Creator: Michael Sherman Gordon

Access: Open access

Polemics in the Pale: The Jewish National Question as a Proxy Debate in Revolutionary Russian Politics examines the Bolshevik Party's debates over the Jewish National Question. This thesis tracks the evolution of the arguments surrounding Jewish national status through the Bolsheviks' break with the Jewish Labor Bund at the 1903 RSDLP Congress, the Soviet Union's schemes to create Jewish agricultural colonies in Ukraine, and the Soviet decision to establish the Jewish Autonomous Region in Birobidzhan in Siberia. Ultimately, Polemics in the Pale argues that the Bolshevik main interest in discussing the Jewish national question was not to find a genuine theoretical conception of the nation compatible with Social Democracy but instead was to utilize it as a cipher for more pressing political issues: party organization and state-building.

Date: 2019-07-01

Creator: David K. Hecht

Access: Open access

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is justly remembered as a landmark in the history of modern environmentalism. It is, however, a more complicated text than cultural memory tends to acknowledge. Blending conservative and traditional elements with more progressive and pioneering ones, Silent Spring is marked by a complexity that extends to its reception and legacy. This article argues that-in a seeming paradox-it was the more conservative elements of Silent Spring that allowed it to be considered a revolutionary book. Carson carefully constructed her argument in ways that facilitated its initial acceptance. But those same decisions made it easier for supporters to de-emphasize its more radical implications, even as they granted it revolutionary status.

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Alexander Noah Kogan

Access: Open access

Narratives at Holocaust memorials and museums in the United States connect the Holocaust to present-day identities and weave the Holocaust into American history. Holocaust narratives––whether at the universal, national, or local level––draw moral lessons from the past. These narratives and their moral lessons redefine what constitutes the Holocaust and are determined by the needs and sentiments of the present. The sites of remembrance in this thesis at once show the significance of the Holocaust in American identities at both national and local levels, as well as encourage an active remembrance of the past that restructures these identities. The type of active remembrance and its purpose differs at each site, but each encourages a reconsideration of the past to find potentially applicable lessons for the present.

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Rachel Yang

Access: Open access

While the Enlightenment was once seen as a unique product of Western intellectual heritage, recent scholars have started to challenge this Eurocentric notion with the concept of a “global Enlightenment” by considering how it was shaped by cross-cultural encounters. To contribute to this body of scholarship, I trace the reception history of Confucianism in eighteenth-century France and examine how Chinese philosophy played a part in shaping and stimulating Enlightenment discourse. My research starts with the Jesuit missionaries who served as the intellectual intermediaries between China and Europe. Through a close reading of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, a Latin translation of Confucian classics, I demonstrate how the Jesuits produced a Christianized reading of Confucianism that they could leverage for their spiritual and political ambitions. Then, I examine how some of the most notable figures of the French Enlightenment, such as Pierre Bayle, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau appropriated Confucian ideals to criticize religious orthodoxy and debate about subjects such as universalism, religious tolerance, and civilization. While the French thinkers mostly weaponized Confucianism for their own ends, their appropriation allowed this imported philosophy to become relevant in a new context and tangibly shape Enlightenment conversations. This understanding helps us see the Enlightenment as a junction, or even product, of a cross-cultural fertilization of ideas rather than an isolated European phenomenon.

Date: 2018-05-01

Creator: Shea Cristina Necheles

Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

Date: 2024-01-01

Creator: Liat G. Tesfazgi

Access: Open access

From the perspective of Ethiopian royalists, Pan-Africanists, Marxist internationalists, supports of union, and the broader international community, Eritrean nationalism revealed distressing fissures in many different arguments for preserving Ethiopian territorial unity– arguments not necessarily or explicitly problematic, but nevertheless in opposition to Eritrean demands for the right to national self-determination. For the Ethiopian Student Movement (ESM) specifically, Eritrean sovereignty demanded a reconfiguration of Pan-African unity that conflicted with Ethiopian exceptionalist historiography. Through an analysis of student politics at Haile Selassie University, from 1960-1974, this thesis seeks to complicate existing historiography on the ESM by examining the periodically divergent experiences of Eritrean student activists.

Date: 2025-01-01

Creator: Janet Elizabeth Briggs

Access: Open access

Date: 2025-01-01

Creator: Evan Robert Cote Chapman

Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community